Christmas at the Great Barrier island

I hope you all had a lovely festive season and New Years. We escaped the ‘silly season’ madness and sailed over to the Great Barrier Island to spend Christmas there. It was an easy and awesome daysail across and plenty of dolphins to keep us entertained. A great start into the holidays!!!

We stayed on the west coast for the first few days before we headed over to the east coast in search for some surf. Cameron has developed a real love for surfing now as well, so if there’s no wind for kiting he’s off surfing and if there is neither than be assured he is driving us all insane :-) I wonder where he gets it from? Just kidding, the apple definitely didn’t fall too far from the tree there ;-)

Of course the anchorages on the east coast were a bit more roly than on the other side but we found a neat little anchorage all to ourselves at Harotaonga Bay (Overtons Beach). There’s plenty to keep busy with if you are an outdoors lover like us. Some may consider being out of cell phone reception is a downside to the place - we absolutely loved it. Instead of scrolling we played backgammon, chess and rummikub ;-)

We sailed back to Whangarei for New Years as we had some boat projects planned. Besides keeping on top of maintenance, we also want to do some upgrades and little projects we didn’t get around to do before we left NZ last year. So yes, a few jobs on the list!

In other news, if you follow us on social media you may have already seen that I’ve finally uploaded a slideshow of our Fiji photos to the website. I also added a link to the magazine article about us in the Pacific Island Living Magazine. I’ve attached links to both of them below. I’ve included a link to the article on their website as well as a link to the entire magazine in case you’d like to read more from around the Pacific :-)

Fiji 2019

Article

Mag

We are pretty chuffed that we’ve made our debut in our first magazine and we are already working on a few others, including a major yachting magazine. Pretty exciting!!! I will share more once I’m able to. I’m also working on a video of our time in Fiji which I will share once I’ve edited it all.

It has been an awesome 2019 and we already know that 2020 will be an even more exciting year for us. We have quite a few expeditions in the pipeline for the cruising season in the islands. One expedition we are very much looking forward to is a very special trip in July with special guests but we can’t spill the beans just yet....

At this stage we are also looking to include the Regatta Week in Fiji to our itinerary for September. We only have spaces available in September and October, so let us know if you’d like to come aboard to ensure you won’t miss out!

​Here are a few photos of the last few weeks: