Category: Sailing

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House or Travel?

Karumba, QLD, AU

As our time wound down in Australia we found ourselves having a difficult conversation about a choice we could not had foreseen coming when we first started this adventure.

Karumba beach sunset

Like we said last week, we had a good time “living the dream” and we were successful at said dream; we had completed what we originally set out to do.  Much more than what we originally planned actually, as this whole “sailing to Australia by way of Tahiti” kind of came together on the fly.  What we had not anticipated was that the dream would actually be fairly profitable. You see, Australia had been good to us on the job front and their wages for the jobs we worked were, when compared to the United States, 2 – 3 times higher than what we would have been paid in the states.  Alongside that we had watched our money very carefully and saved every chance we got.  Also don’t forget there were 2 of us. What that all boils down to is that when we originally planned our trip, we had not expected to leave Australia with a surplus of cash. As it turns out, we did have quite a reasonable surplus…which led us to a question we weren’t sure how to answer:

House or Travel?

Continue reading “House or Travel?”

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Coconut rice pudding

Enroute Karumba, QLD, AU

Tiffany’s been having a craving for rice pudding lately.  For some weird reason she gets this craving every few months (this and Mexican food.  Nope, not supposed to make sense).  In our previous lives this was easily and promptly solved by a trip to Trader Joe’s…

Unfortunately for her, they have not yet expanded to Australia.  So she took her tastebuds online.  Now, Tiffany prides herself as a rather “uncomplicated” cook.  She can cook, and very well thank you, but generally she looks for what both Greg and her agree are the “3 hallmarks of good food” –

Easy –

if the recipe calls for more than about 3 ingredients, she’s usually just not interested.

Effective –

Fills one up without getting them fat

Good –

We would choose to eat it again

That being said, since we’ve been traveling and eating restaurant food or quick stuff, both of our desires to cook have increased (a little bit anyway).  The great thing about living on a boat is that you learn lots of new recipes that fit our criteria exactly.

What is awesome is that both of us have learned to make lots of new things that only take a few ingredients and we’ve gotten to the point that if it has 5 ingredients we’re willing to put the effort in.

coconut milkEspecially if one of those ingredients is coconut milk.

Continue reading “Coconut rice pudding”

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Life passing us by

Baltimore, Maryland, United States

It is once again time for Greg’s birthday entry-

One can always rely on family to ask the questions everyone else is quietly wondering about:

“Greg, it’s been almost 4 years now.
Aren’t you worried about the world just passing you by?”

The exact words change from member to member but it’s a question family members have asked us more than once over the past 2 years.

And by “world” we know what’s meant:

Career, Paychecks, 401Ks, retirement, medical / optical / dental benefits, long term financial plan, you name it.  A life beyond the next 2 months and a gig that falls into the category of “reliable income.”  Something I can expect to have for an entire taxable year that will pay a wage somewhere near what someone of “our experience” should be getting.  One that would possibly involve trading in the sails for a desk…or at least a consistent cell phone number.

Freaking money people.  Cash.  An income. Jobs.  Mortgages and the like.

Or as some call it “a REAL life.”

When are we going to get off our butts and stop letting REAL LIFE pass us by?

Continue reading “Life passing us by”

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Find a fleet

You want the real secret we used to find ships to travel around the world with?  How we were able to find a ride in Tahiti before we even pulled into port?  Well, here it is:

Find a fleet.  Travel with it.  Make friends.

That’s it.

Wait, find a fleet?  What the heck does that mean?  Are we joining the Spanish Armada here or going for a vacation?

Continue reading “Find a fleet”

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Getting your first crew gig

Ok so after deciding the cruising thing is for you,

Testing it out and finding you like it

And deciding that you, for starters at least, will grab a ride with a costal cruiser

You’re oh so patiently waiting for us to tell you how to find your first freaking boat!

Ah, but if you’ve done everything we suggested so far you already have started looking!

Yeah, how’s that for a little sailor-Yodaism?

Continue reading “Getting your first crew gig”

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Bluewater cruising

Up until now we have been talking about a successive series of experiences to build up your sailing experience before taking “the big leap”.  We talked about how to test out sailing, how to build experience in your local area and how to work your way up to costal cruising.  Now we want to make it clear that there are a lot of people spend their entire sailing lives doing costal cruising and are quite happy, with good reason.  We know sailors who have spent the past 5 years doing nothing more than exploring the Pacific Coast of Mexico and have new experiences each and every day.  Using that as a base, how long you reckon it would take to explore the entire cost of North and South America?  Ok, now after that you can hit up the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and with a flight or two, South East Asia and Australia.  Overall, it’d take a while.  There are plenty of adventures to be had and cultures to be explored in costal cruising because, well, there is a lot of coast out there.

But then, there’s a lot of ocean out there as well…and that’s the rub.  Yes, there are many places you can explore with costal cruising but there also a couple of good sized seas and, of course, two oceans.  Two very big oceans…

 

and way out there in the deep, that’s the domain of the bluewater cruisers

Continue reading “Bluewater cruising”

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Coastal Cruising

Sailing around the world for free on someone else’s luxury yacht sounds like a doable thing for you huh?  You took our advice on how to test the waters with sailing and did a local trial class or joined the local racing team and now you’ve had you can confidently say you know your way around a beer can race? (hey, that’s what it’s actually called!)

You got that first taste of salt in the air and it tasted so good you decided you might just want to follow that breeze to a sunny beach somewhere.  A beach perhaps where the cerveza is cheap and the locals provide a really comprehensive foreign language immersion experience?

You’re ready to go, so what’s next?

Continue reading “Coastal Cruising”

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Married Vagabonds

Saturday was our ninth wedding anniversary.

 

That is, in and of itself a very big deal and worth a moment of reflection.  Nine years is no small thing.

People look at us differently than they did when we said we’d been together, for example, 3 years.  They look at us like we achieved something beyond hanging out with a best friend (who also happens to be really physically attractive) for years at a time.  Evidently at some point we passed a marker.  It’d be nice if they put signs on those things or something.  They don’t look at us like the cute old couple who’d been married for 50 years yet, so we’re led to believe there are additional, similarly unmarked, waypoints out there.  Stay tuned for updates as we stumble over them.

The next point here is (yeah, we’re kinda free thought writing here, just roll with it 😉 that we’re actually upon the cusp of opening a bottle of Italian wine that we have been cellaring for a decade!  A DECADE!  Come on, that’s got be a big deal!  Exactly 354 days from now we’ll be able to intelligently speak of Tuscan Crociani reds and the variances of their tastes when consumed immediately, at 5 years and at 10 years.

We’ve cellared wine.  Kept it even.  Purchased it but not opened it.  For years.  Many of them (years, not wines.  At least yet).  In a sequential order.

That’s a sign of maturity right?

We need to pick out a new wine for our little family tradition but don’t worry, we have a few candidates in mind…all from New Zealand oddly enough…

Finally it occurred to us that, by the numbers, we have spent a full third of our married life on this little adventure.  That, also, is no small thing and it’s given us some insight so we thought we would put on the “couple” hat and answer a question we sometimes get –

What does travel do to a marriage?

  Continue reading “Married Vagabonds”

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Semper Gumby

Opua, New Zealand

So there we were (doesn’t every great story start that way?) in Coff’s Harbour and little did we know that this would be the end of our Australian East Coast Adventure.

[fgallery id=11 w=450 h=385 t=0 title=”Great Australian East Coast Adventure”]

We were doing a bit of work at a hostel in exchange for accommodation, deciding what our next move was going to be and looking at the boats available on FindACrew.net.  Huh.  Imagine that!  There was a boat in New Zealand looking for a couple of crew to help deliver it to Australia!  We got in touch with the owner, who was willing to pay us to fly out to his boat so he could get it delivered to a transport ship in Brisbane and sent back home to the US.

He seemed like a decent guy on the phone and since he paid for the flight, we decided to take a risk and were off back to New Zealand!

Continue reading “Semper Gumby”

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