SAILING THE PACIFIC

MY NEXT ADVENTURE

Well only a couple of days after the last post I had an email from a couple looking for a crew member on their private yacht to sail around the Pacific for a few months.  I have a profile on a couple of websites where boats can look for crew and crew for boats.  I had had a few offers over the previous year but they just weren’t the right fit at the time, this one I believe was the right voyage and the timing was good. 

It would mean cutting my Vietnam adventure short but I wasn’t going to miss out on a trip like this, I will have to return to continue the ride Pete and I had planned, hopefully with Pete also as he visits Vietnam regularly.  I quickly booked a ticket to Thailand for 1 last hurrah and to grab some gear I had left there and spent another 13 days with friends before heading home.

Another mammoth mission home saw me leave Thailand at 10:30am Saturday March 8^th after a rather big night, not arriving in Perth until 5:30am Sunday morning.  This included a 6 hour layover at Kualur Lumpur on the way home before flying out of there at midnight, eerily only 24 hours after flight MH370 left the same airport and hasn’t been seen since.

 It was a bizarre feeling as when I had made my way home last year there was another plane crash very close to me.  I was flying from Jakarta to Denpasar and during our descent, only 10 minutes before landing, we were diverted to Lombok where we waited for over an hour before heading back to Ngurah Rai airport.  

A plane leaving from Bandung, very nearby to Jakarta, had missed the runway, crashed into the ocean and cracked in half, minutes before we were due to land, the wreckage still visible when we returned.  I’m trying to work out whether I’m holding bad or good luck?!

I’m currently in Perth after a very rushed visit back home to pack my gear and see friends, now catching up with all the family before I leave for Auckland, NZ, tomorrow night to rendezvous with the yacht and set sail in the coming days.  Our journey will take us from NZ to Tonga, across to Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and back to NZ sometime in September. 

I have never spent that long at sea so am really looking forward to the challenge and excitement of it all, living in such close quarters with what are currently strangers, but visiting some of the most amazing islands around.  There will be some long open ocean passages that have me a little worried, but knowing that these waters produce some of the best fishing on the planet, I’m sure I’ll be ok!

The captain was naïve enough to allow me to bring ‘as much fishing gear as I want’.  He obviously doesn’t know me well enough yet, but I have taken it easy on him and have packed relatively light by my fishing standards!  So the next couple of days are the start of my new adventure, thanks to everyone who has followed the blog, I will be keeping it going as I sail around paradise, hopefully with some great pictures and adventures to share.