Blog

NZ to Tonga pics

Have discovered it’s much quicker (when the wifi behaves) to put photos up on facebook than WordPress right now so here’s the public link to the album – am working on getting more up soon xxx http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150268571846420.374803.619276419&l=d688d0214a

The stragglers club (Tonga blog part 1)

Over the past week we have watched a ship sink, swum in an underground pool in a cave filled with stalactites, got two flat tires and were offered drugs. The ship was sad. It was one of four fishing boats (Chinese apparently) that were tied up together not far from where we were anchored in Pangimotu harbour. One of the…

1000 miles to windward or ‘why does the weather hate us?’

Hi all, sorry for the delay in blogging – the mighty kingdom of Tonga has one internet server for the entire country, so things are a little hit and miss. I have a heap of photos – including evidence that we actually did catch a fish that was ‘THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS big!'(insert exaggerated arm gesture here) – which I will try to…

We’re he-re!!

Just a quick note to let you all know we have finally arrived in Tonga! The trip took a little longer than anticipated (12 days) because the weather forecasters are lying bastards. We either had wind blowing from the wrong direction (the one we wanted to go in) or no wind at all. We’ve arrived now safe and sound and…

Wellington to Auckland in pictures

  Yay!! It looks like I’m able to upload photos again so I am going to stuff as many as I can into this post. The technical difficulties may have stemmed from the fact that the wifi antenna at the yacht club was left sitting on a rather jaunty angle after some rather gnarly winds swept through here. It appears…

Patience is a virtue…

  Sorry guys! WordPress seems to hate my photos at the moment so this is all you get (will try sticking them up on Facebook) Well my idyllic introduction into the world of cruising has been a little less than idyllic. It has, however, been an amazing learning curve  and certainly hasn’t been boring! We are holed up in Opua with…

Lots of thank yous and a blog-pology

I apologise in advance for what will probably be a sorry excuse for a blog. I have enough material and photographs to write about 10 of the things on our last few weeks of preparation, but  we have pretty much run out of time – so you’re not getting any of them. I do promise a huge blog backlog when we…

One for the stalkers

Just a quick entry because I am in the middle of house packing hell at the moment. This one is for the nervous family members, nosey parkers and stalkers among you (you know who you are! 😉 ) The Island Cruising Association has set up a way for people to see where in the ocean we are as we travel….

12 hacksaw blades and don’t skimp on the buckets

Yesterday I learned that you cannot leave this country in a boat unless you have 12 new hacksaw blades and four buckets on board. This is just a small sample of the demented shopping list we need to check off to get Wildflower up to category one standard so we can legally go offshore.

A shout out to the journos

Just a quick note to all the reporters out there who are busting a gut to get information about the Christchurch quake out to the public – and particularly those in the city itself. You are doing an amazing job – I can’t even begin to imagine what you guys are going through right now.  Before I turned to the…