Kuta, Bali, Indonesia
Here is an important bit of travelers’ etiquette that you should become aware of:
When you join a long-term traveler, you need to be ready to pay the tax.
Continue reading “Traveler’s Tax”
Sailing Around the World: Is It Safe?
Is it safe?
Throughout our journey, many of our friends and family members have been concerned about how dangerous it can be to travel. Obviously we all know that some things are inherently safe like staying at an all inclusive resort and never leaving the property.
You can stay in your shell like this hermit crab in Fakarava.
And some things are inherently unsafe (think standing on a dark street corner in Tijuana) when it comes to traveling.
One can presume that it only gets worse when the sun goes down. petracross
Sailing can be safe, as long as you’re smart.
Choices
Karumba, QLD, AUS
New Years is the closest thing we have to a completely worldwide recognized holiday.
Though some Asian cultures don’t celebrate the changing of the Gregorian calendar (no relation to Greg, but don’t tell him that ;-), the tradition of a time set aside for the passing of the year still exists…even if that year happens to be lunar…and that time happens somewhere in the spring. As humans, we all seem to agree that it’s important we take the time to look back on our past and forward to our future at least once each 12 months or so.
Our Australian New Year found us (probably unsurprisingly) a few hundred miles from, well, basically anywhere.
Working for a bed
Pittwater, NSW, AU
Living for free as volunteer crew on someone else’s yacht sounds all well and good while you’ve got a boat to live on but we are often asked what we do when we’re between yachts.
Our first few months in Australia are a good example. After we left our work with the racing stable there was about a month before we found a job “sailing” in New Zealand and after that about another month before we decided the best way to celebrate the 4th of July was to get trapped in a genuine Australian blizzard. Both of these situations were the same: too short a time to find a temporary position but too long to want to pay for a hotel in a country with a high cost of living. So we had to answer the question –
What does a sailor do for a cheap night’s rest down under?
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”
Related posts:
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”
Related posts:
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
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?
But how much does it cost!?
Enroute Coff’s Harbour, AU
As many of you know the main question we get when it come to how get started as volunteer crew is how to deal with seasickness.
The second most often asked question is similar to the one Mike asked us a few weeks ago:
“All signs in my life point towards the adventure you two have chosen. My top two bucket list items right now are live on a boat and sail around the world. I thought these would be goals for much (much) later in life but as a 27 year old I think the time is now.
Do you have any advice for savings needed for say, 1 year of volunteer sailing?”
Well, yes, yes we do…
Continue reading “But how much does it cost!?”
Related posts:
Passing the Poo
Opua, New Zealand
Those extra 2 weeks we spent in Opua were put to good use. Since we had a paying gig this time, we didn’t just take off and go exploring ashore. Instead, we did boat work. What kind of boat work? The yucky kind. Observe:
But this article wasn’t titled “passing grey water” was it?
No, no it was not and for good reason…