Notes from the captain’s log, December 2023. Day 2 I’m lounging in the cockpit, it’s a warm afternoon and I’m slightly groggy from lack of sleep. We’re a couple of hundred miles west of New Caledonia, empty ocean, nothing out here. The SE breeze died this morning at 2am, we have been motoring across a flat ocean, just a low swell on the port quarter. But at lunchtime a suspicion of wind started to ruffle the oily calm surface.  We hoisted the code zero and as it unfurled and filled we felt the smooth acceleration. The boat and crew sigh with relief as the diesel engine noise is replaced ..read more

02.11.2023 Another new country already!  Not really Escapade style to be moving so fast.  But here are the red hills and pine clad shores of New Caledonia. Our passage planning worked out perfectly and we arrived at the entrance to the Havannah Pass at 6am with the sun rising and the tide flushing us in. We are entering the biggest reef-fringed lagoon in the world! It is impeccably charted and marked.  Lighthouses, well-lit channel markers and cardinals all the way.  A bit of a culture shock arriving from Vanuatu.   The contrasts between the two island nations are ev ..read more

So with the threat from that tropical low we reluctantly left our favourite anchorage off the island of Pele and headed south toward Port Vila. We were joined by a pod of pilot whales who played around our bows like dolphins, rolling onto their sides to look at us and talking to us with loud whistles. Bryan had a tussle with a big swordfish, and this time we all watched as the fish leapt vertically out of the water behind the boat and spat the lure before splash landing. I don’t know what’s going on with the fishing on this trip.  We have all the excitement of the strike, the fight, ev ..read more

Landfall!  Soon after sunrise the volcanic peaks of Tanna island rose above the horizon, our first glimpse of Vanuatu.  The last few miles of a passage always seem to take forever.  The destination slowly reveals itself, more details of the landscape gradually appearing to the impatient crew.  In this case a grey smudge of land eventually resolved into dense jungly mountains shrouded in cloud, or perhaps gas from Mount Yasur, a very live volcano. We had left Fiji 3 days ago.  We sailed out through Wilkes Pass, past Namotu Island and out into the South Pacific.  ..read more

Back on board.  Dawn and I returned to the boat after our summer holiday in Guernsey. We were soon joined by good friends from home, Alex and Arabella. I’ve been hoping to get these guys on board for years, now it’s finally happening. They made the long trip from Guernsey to Fiji and we welcomed them on to Escapade just as we had finished prepping the boat. Time to start having fun again. Alex and I share many board-riding interests, plus he and Arabella are now waiting for their own Outremer catamaran to be built, so this was a great time to go sailing together. We started off with a ..read more

This post got stuck in my drafts folder. Here’s the last part of our Fiji adventure in June. Better late than never! June 2023 We said farewell to Auriane at the tiny airstrip on Tavenui.  She flew away on the first leg of her long trip to Paris. Bryan and I were now short-handed, planning a passage 200nm to the west. Our target was the remote reef break at Frigates Pass, south of the mainland of Viti Levu. We had planned to sail that day, but a nasty band of wind and rain threatened. We had seen quite enough of that on the way from New Zealand so we postponed the trip and found the only ..read more

Sorry about the long silence there. This blog is an account of our sailing adventures and there really haven’t been any to report, until the last couple of weeks. In early January, Dawn and I finally escaped from that rainstorm. It was described as a ‘once in 50 years’ event.  But then the same thing happened, or worse, every couple of weeks for the rest of the NZ summer.  We had heard all the jokes from the Kiwi yachties who were choosing to stay in Fiji, preferring to take their chances with the cyclone season rather than sailing south. “New Zealand summer? Oh it’s great – sometim ..read more

Well the weather is a bit changeable down here. The famous four seasons in one day. Our first couple of weeks here felt a very long way from Fiji.   It was wet and windy and we were just glad not to be at sea.  We left Escapade in the marina at Opua, moved ashore and headed inland in a rented car. Keen for a bit of tourism, we found ourselves basking in natural volcanic hot springs in the pouring rain.  Wonderful. I can’t seem to travel very far in any direction up here without finding myself having lunch at a winery.  Hard to dodge all those tasting rooms and cellar doors ..read more

It’s been a while since we took Escapade for a proper sail out in the ocean swell. That was back in April when we left Polynesia on our way to Fiji. Long enough to forget just how much fun it is to feel this boat eating up the miles.  We finally committed to a promising 5 day forecast at the end of November.  I dragged my surfed-out crew away from the waves and off to port to provision, clear customs, eat one last Fijian curry and finally sail away with our freshly scrubbed bottoms.  (Weed-free hulls required for NZ bio security). A memorable exit through Wilkes Pass as a set p ..read more

18th November 2022 This is a well trodden path. Yachts travel up and down this stretch of the South Pacific every season.  We have met lots of Kiwi boats who sail up to the tropics each year to avoid the New Zealand winter, then back home for their summer.  The classic time to sail south is late October to mid November.  The pilot books, weather routers and Jimmy Cornell are all agreed, at this time of year you can expect a procession of high and low pressure systems which travel eastwards across these waters.  So you just wait for a high pressure system to appear.  T ..read more