We completed our journey from New Zealand to Fiji 2 days ago. Overall, the 1,200 mile trip took us 6 days and 19 hours, which included a 5 hour fish stop. For those of you keeping track, we made 190 miles over our last 24 hour period, including a 9+ knot sail in a brisk easterly on Wednesday morning. We picked up the mooring at Savusavu at 2:06 PM that day.

From a physical perspective, it was remarkable how much warmer is got as we headed north. When we started, it was cold. Here is a shot of Ravi and Alison down south.

When we ended, it was warm.

But as much as we all enjoy photos of our friends on Sophie, I have a good feeling what all of you are looking for.

Here is a photo of the marlin after it was hooked.

As I mentioned earlier, Dan fought bravely for FIVE HOURS. That means he was sitting on the starboard stern steps after he grabbed the rod.

And he kept working it, for a long time.

He got blisters on his fingers from working the reel. I fed him food and gave him water as he worked the fish.

I also ran the boat in reverse with both engines in order to relieve pressure on the fishing line. After the first hour, we turned the motors off and drifted for the rest of the fight.

The marlin spent the last hour within 100 feet of Sophie. When Dan finally got it near the transom, we realized that it was a) tired b) a striped marlin and c) small enough to bring on board. (If it was a 500 pound fish, we would have let it go. As I mentioned earlier, we were able to freeze all of the meat off the fish.)

We spent some time hoisting the fish to get the right trophy shot.

We finally got it.

Once we got the shot, we started harvesting.

Dan at this point was pretty tired, understandably so, so I did most of the work. Fortunately, we had watched some guys on a boat in Tutukaka carve a broadbilled swordfish, so I had a general sense of what to do.

I did one side of the fish cutting it into ~10 pound filet chunks.

Just for the heck of it, I cut the entire other side of the fish as a single filet. You are looking at about 50 pounds of marlin here. If you assume that fresh marlin at a place like Whole Foods in the U.S. can go for $30/pound, well, you can do the math.

This is a shot of me holding a five gallon bucket filled with marlin meat. The fish produced two of these, and we put 100 pounds of marlin steaks into our freezer.

OK, I know I have joked a lot about “catching a marlin”, and the concept has been a core theme of this blog over the last year. Also I know that I am, by nature, an aggressive optimist. But I never thought we would actually catch one. I kind of thought it was an ongoing joke. When we finally got on the internet today, I even had some emails from some of you saying things like “I hope you catch that marlin!”

Well, we did.

What have I learned from all of this? It’s a relatively simple lesson:

If you don’t try, it will never happen. Period. Hopefully some of this learning will rub off on Hazel and Leo.

Beyond the marlin, it was an extremely uneventful trip. We made fast time in light air over a long distance. The kids had some fun time on the trampolines.

We also increasingly enjoyed the warmer weather as we headed north, and even broke out a celebratory bottle of bubbly when we neared our destination.

We loved our stay in New Zealand, but now that we are back up in the tropics we re-learned how much we REALLY like it up here. I don’t think Sophie will be in an area where we require fleece on our bodies and down comforters on our beds for the next few years.

The cool thing is that we are back among coral reefs, with a lot of friends on board, with a freezer-load of fish.

Have I mentioned lately how lucky we are?

We’ve had fluky wind over the last 24 hours. We started the evening with a nice run under full jib and mainsail, and I woke up at midnight to help Alison tuck a reef into the main after we started seeing gusts into the twenties. But during my watch at 4:00 AM, our sailing speed was down to 5 knots.

So I made a decision. I turned on a motor, put on a song, and broke out into a big grin.

“Well I pulled out of Pittsburgh, rolling down that eastern seaboard,
I’ve got my diesel wound up and she’s a running like a never before,
There’s a speed zone ahead, but alright,
I don’t see a cop in sight,
Six days on the road and I’m a gonna make it home tonight”

Yup, after 50 hours of sailing, it’s diesel time. Technically we won’t make it home tonight, but I am grinning because we are in great shape. Our noontime position is 28.51S 176.24E. Only 198 miles separate us from SavuSavu. We’ve covered 957 miles since leaving Tutukaka and 174 miles over the last 24 hours. Most importantly, we still have over half of our fuel left. We are currently making 8.2 knots with both sails up and both engines running at 2500 RPMs. We’ll make the customs dock tomorrow afternoon and hope to catch a peak of Kandavu before sunset.

It’s so hot and humid right now that it has become uncomfortable to sit in the sun. There is a very light cloud cover, there is very little wind, and there is a decent sized swell coming at us from the stern. I am sure the boards are out at Cloud Break. Jenna is running Sophie school, Dan is taking a nap, Alison is cooking lunch, and Ravi is driving. We haven’t caught any fish, but the water looks fishy. Hopefully we’ll get something as we pass by the Great Astrolabe Reef.

Lunch and dinner today will include vegetables, vegetables, vegetables, and maybe some fruit. We brought too much. We also might snag some Internet coverage as we pass by Vitu Levu. If so, I will try to post some marlin photos. Stay tuned.

This is turning into one of our easiest passages ever.

Our current position is 22.52S 177.45E, which means that we covered 193 miles over the last 24 hours using various combinations of jib, reefed main, full main, and code zero. No motor! We were pushing for a 200 mile day, but the wind died on us in the last 2 hours so we have to settle for the consolation prize of achieving an 8+ knot average speed over the last 24 hours. Sophie smells the barn and is heading for home. We are 240 miles from Kandavu in South Fiji and just 372 miles from our destination in Savusavu. We have traveled 784 miles since we left Tutukaka. Given that we still have over half of our fuel remaining, as long as the weather remains the same and that nothing important breaks, we still plan to make customs dock on Wednesday.

We are having a great trip. It’s now 91 degrees in the main salon, the skies are sunny, and the seas are flat. Everyone is in t-shirts and shorts. Except Dan, who went topless for a while this morning. The stereo is on, and the kids held an interpretive trampoline bouncing contest, competing over who did the best bouncing in categories including athletic, artistic, favorite movie character, fish out of water, sleeper, grandparent, Uncle Richy (Leo’s dance involving a pantomime flying fish required an interpretation for our-out-of town judges), sprinkler dance, and vegan. Hazel won most of the competitions, but Leo’s light saber dance jump won overall best in show.

Earlier today Hazel declared that she was now strict vegan, but then later switched to vegetarian when she learned that her veganism would prevent her from eating her chocolate egg trampoline bouncing prize. We’ll see how this continues.

We have 3 meat lines in the water in the hope of landing a yellowfin tuna or mahi mahi. Dinner tonight will be steaks and vegan sausages cooked on the new barbecue. The moon is getting brighter every night, the stars are dazzling, and I am now about to enter the phase of the passage where I regret that it will soon end.

Sophie is currently sailing at ~8.5 knots with a single reefed main and full jib under sunny tropical skies in a 15 knot easterly. We’ve sailed 590 miles since our departure from Tutukaka last Wednesday evening, and we only have 565 miles between us and Savusavu. That means we reached the halfway point in our passage late this morning! Our current position is 26.01S 176.59E, and we covered 174 miles in our last 24 hours. It definitely feels like trade wind sailing right now, and the weather forecast indicates that these winds will remain constant through mid-week. At this pace we should pass within sight of Fiji’s Kandavu Island on Tuesday and then reach the customs dock in Savusavu Wednesday afternoon.

Jenna is celebrating our progress by making applesauce.

We motorsailed yesterday until midnight and then switched over to sail. I had to tie the code zero to the deck at 4:00 AM after it started to flap on its furler after a gust. We still have over half of our fuel remaining, and it is nice to be going at a 200 mile-day pace under sails alone. Despite our speed, we might have a bit of a current running against us because the knotmeter’s speed is running 2 knots faster than the GPS calculation of our speed over ground.

Other than that, everyone is lying around reading or napping. Dan and I have permission to try for a tuna or mahi mahi when we near Fiji. Dinner tonight will be vegan chili, a vegetable stir-fry, and striped marlin ceviche. And applesauce, of course.

Things are good.

Well, things are comparatively uneventful on Sophie today after yesterday’s Marlin-palooza. Our noontime position is 28.51S 176.24E, which means we have covered 142 miles in the last 24 hours. That’s not too bad given that we spent 3 1/2 of those hours floating while we fought the fish. After we got the marlin on board, we went back to motoring on one engine until 3:00 AM, when Ravi and I put the main up. Later this morning we were making over 8 knots with jib and main and then code zero and main, but then the wind died again and we are back to motorsailing with one engine. We are making 7 knots over a glassy sea in bright sunshine. It is also beginning to feel much warmer, with the main salon temperature now at 85 degrees F. We have traveled 416 miles since we left Tutukaka Wednesday night, and have another 739 to get to Savusavu. We also have over half of our fuel remaining. So far, so good.

If any of you have a GPS in your boat or phone and keep track of waypoints, please feel free to create a new one @ 31.09S, 175.44E and label it “Dan’s Marlin.” We have done so, and it will be a permanent waypoint our GPS systems from now on.

One of the reasons it took 5 hours to land such a relatively small marlin is that the hook was lodged in the marlin’s back right behind it’s back fin. When marlins attack they make multiple passes at a fish before they bite. Dan saw the pole go WHAM WHAM WHAM and then pause before the line started to run. We assume the fish made a pass too close to the lure, and for lack of a better word, got “hooked.” It also explains why we were able to land a marlin using a relatively small tuna lure, because he wasn’t able to bite through the leader of a lure lodged in its back. During the fight Jenna took some excellent photos of the fish launching straight up behind us and then arcing through the air as it ran parallel to Sophie during the first minute. Once we had the fish landed, we of course hoisted it up by its tail on a halyard for the classic, frameable trophy shot. The marlin produced enough meat to fill 2 five gallon buckets of steaks, which we then vacuum sealed and froze. We left NZ with our freezer half-full in the hope of filling it with fish, and we had enough room for all of the marlin steaks. Which is awesome, because we seared some for last night’s dinner and it tasted just like swordfish. Finally, I saved the marlin’s tail and will mount it to one of Sophie’s stern wind generator poles later today. Apparently, in the cruising world if you have a billfish tail on your stern it’s a sign that you are on a boat that walks the walk.

One other note from yesterday. Immediately before we hooked the marlin, we passed a series of long-line buoys used for offshore tuna factory fishing. This is increasingly becoming an environmental problem down here, and many of the biggest tuna harvesters in the South Pacific come from Spain. Well, immediately after we got the marlin on board, we were hailed by a guy with a Spanish accent. It was the captain of the tuna boat, and he wanted to know what we were doing and if we were all right. This was all in broad daylight on a windless day, and we have passed near dozens of fishing boats over the last 2 years but have never been hailed by one. We talked for a minute, I told him we had just landed a marlin and were busy. He said they weren’t catching much fish because of the moon and that he would have his long lines up in 30 minutes. A few minutes later Jenna noticed that he was 4 miles away, heading straight for us, and we all kind of wondered what was going on. My initial thought was that he was heading for the spot where we caught the fish. We were also a little concerned that he was coming over to barter for marlin, or something else. He soon stopped, and we never saw him again. Upon reflection, I now guess that he was concerned we were a Greenpeace or UN boat that was monitoring his lines, and he called to get more info.

Yesterday provided enough excitement for an entire passage, so we are looking forward to having uneventful days ahead. Since our freezer is full, we have stopped fishing. Dinner tonight will be falafel, tabouli, and Hungarian goulash. And maybe a chocolate mousse.

On the second day of our passage from New Zealand to Fiji, Dan Rogers caught a ~250 pound striped marlin after a 5 hour fight. He caught it using our trolling rod with 80 pound braided line and the small bullet-headed hoochie that Karl Riebling gave us on the passage from Seattle to San Francisco in 2012. (Yes Karl, it was a mighty fish.) The marlin ran 3 times and at one point was 1,000 feet directly beneath Sophie with less than 100 feet of line left on the reel. But Dan fished heroically, the rest of the crew worked together as a team, and Sophie now has her first marlin.

The fish measured 8 feet, 8 inches from spear to tail and it’s maximum girth was 36 inches. We’re guessing on the weight, but it seems similar in size to 120 kg striped marlins we’ve seen on the docks in NZ. The fish produced over 100 lbs. of steaks for our freezer, and Jenna has photos of the fish jumping in the air.

Needless to say, we’ve had an AWESOME DAY.

The remaining details of our passage, by comparison, are incidental. We did 158 miles over a 24 hour period, and that included stopping at 10:30 AM when the fish hit. We ran under the full spinnaker with no main for 7 hours yesterday, and the rest of the time we continue to motor on one engine @ 2400 RPMs in very light air, flat seas, and leaden skies. Our motoring speed is averaging over 7 knots due to a bit of a favorable current and Sophie’s newly-painted hull. We expect to motor for another 24 hours before a southeasterly wind kicks in. I am hopeful we will still have half of our fuel remaining when that happens.

Last night’s dinner was coq au vin with a vegetable stir fry, and tonight we will have a cauliflower mash, vegan chili, stir fried kale, MARLIN, and a homemade apple crisp.

And in case you missed it earlier in this post, please let me repeat: WE FINALLY CAUGHT A MARLIN. WHOOPEEE!!!!

Have I mentioned lately how lucky we are?

Well, we had a hectic day yesterday but finally left the country and are on our way north to Fiji. Sophie was splashed at 10:AM after the workers did some final adjustments to the new rudder bearings. We then motored down to Marsden Point to clear customs and fuel up. NZ Customs took 10 minutes, but the fuel dock was broken. We were promised it would be fixed in an hour, but after a 4 hour wait we decided to motor 24 miles north to Tutukaka to fuel there. (With the permission of NZ customs, of course).

We cleared the fuel dock in the dark at 7:15 PM. We are heading north through a high pressure system, and there is no wind. We motored/motorsailed 121 miles over our first 16 hours on 1 engine @2400 RPM. Sophie is much faster with a clean bottom, and we are making good time.

Noon (UTC-12) local position is 33.39S 175.05E. Last night’s dinner was vegetarian tacos with prime rib on the side. Our guests Ravi and Alison are vegan, and Dan eats meat. We were able to strike a happy balance. 🙂

Believe it or not, our great New Zealand Adventure comes to an end in just 30 days, when Sophie points north and begins the 1,080 nautical mile return trip to Fiji.

It’s been 5 short months since we arrived in this wonderful country, and we’ve seen and experienced so much here. The last 2 months have been especially busy and have included visits from the Batterberrys and the Dannelly-McKennas, the celebration of Hazel’s 6th birthday on the Auckland waterfront, and our sitting through post-cyclone Lusi and her 50+ knot gusts while securely anchored at Great Barrier Island.

Jenna is sorting through 20,000 high resolution photos she has taken since January to assemble another awesome photo essay for all of you. In the meantime, what is the best way for us to celebrate having just one month left in Aotearoa?

ROAD TRIP! To the South Island and beyond.

The foundation of this trip is the car. One of the reasons why we bought our wonderful Kia Carnival minivan, pictured above, for NZ$5,500 (with a guaranteed “Cars for Cruisers” resale price of $3,500 when we depart the country on May 1st) was to enable us to go on an extended tour of New Zealand’s South Island.

So off we go.

Jenna threw an extraordinary amount of effort into planning our family road trip, and assembled the following itinerary:

Day 1: Matamata (Hobbiton tour, the film location for the Shire in “The Lord of the Rings” movies)
Day 2: Wellington (this country’s capital)
Day 3: Motueka (after taking the ferry to the South Island and exploring the north)
Day 4: Motueka (hiking in the Abel Tasman National Park)
Day 5: Kaikura (amazing coastal driving with spectacular ocean views)
Day 6: Christchurch (we were blown away by the 2011 earthquake devastation …)
Day 7: Christchurch (… and the next day we experienced our own 4.0 earthquake, the first earthquake ever for the kids!)
Day 8: Westport (hiking up abandoned rail lines on the West Coast)
Day 9: Hokitika (site of the big NZ gold rush and greenstone carving)
Day 10: Franz Josef (glacier snow, hiking)
Day 11: Franz Josef (more glacier snow, more hiking – Fox Glacier)
Day 12: Wanaka (Toy Museum, which for the kids means “YAY!, NO HIKES,” alpine drive)
Day 13: Queenstown (Jenna’s 32nd birthday)
Day 14: Queenstown (Luging, Shotover Jetboat)
Day 15: Te Anau Downs (Hiking)
Day 16: Milford Sound (Spectacular Views)
Day 17: Invercargill (Heated Swimming Pool, Albatross, Penguins)
Day 18: The Catlins (New Zealand Stuff, Penguins!)
Day 19: Dunedin (“Roast Meats and Malt Beer!”)
Day 20: Mount Cook (New Zealand’s Mount Rainier)
Day 21: Mount Cook (More Rainier, more hiking)
Day 22: TBD
Day 23: TBD (wineries?)
Day 24: Wellington (after the ferry North)
Day 25: Auckland (where we hold the BIG Goodbye celebration with lots of folks)
Day 26: BACK ON SOPHIE! (Yippee)

We are currently in Franz Josef at the YHA Backpackers and just walked to the glacier, which according to the schedule is the end of Day 10 after driving here from Hokitika.

It’s been a great trip so far, except for the fact that our Kia Carnival totally died on us between Abel Tasman and Kaikura on Day 5. As cheap NZ cars go, the Carnival has been good to us since we bought it in November. It has run every errand, including hauling all of us plus four Batterberrys on a 3 day mini-tour of the North Island in February. It’s done dozens of grocery and airport runs. It has a ton of room. It is a nice silver car.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, I have always wanted to own a minivan, and this Carnival has been doing a decent job at fulfilling all of my minivan dreams and fantasies.

Until the South Island.

Five days into our trip, and after a couple of days of hard driving over South Island mountain passes, the Carnival began to produce occasional engine knocking noises while going up steep grades. Then it started to occasionally stall in parking lots and at stop signs. We assumed (meaning we hoped) it was simply the situation of a car straining to go up the steep mountain slopes. Until the Carnival finally decided to actually, really overheat the next morning on the road back to Nelson on our journey across the island.

This overheat situation happened suddenly, and when it happened we immediately stopped by the side of the road. We popped the hood, I pulled the dipstick, and saw a jet of steam coming out of the dipstick hole, a jet of steam not unlike the jets of steam we saw on our traverse of Mount Doom a month earlier.

Not good. The jets of steam on Mount Doom are produced by magma near the surface of the earth. As far as I know, there is no magma deep inside the internals of a Korean minivan engine block.

Fortunately, we are members of AA, which is New Zealand’s equivalent of AAA but without the “American”, and within 30 minutes of our telephone call a flatbed towtruck with a beater Toyota on the back pulled up right ahead of us. The towtruck operator Paul could legally only carry 2 people in the cab with him, and he really didn’t like the idea of carrying additional passengers in a car attached to the back of his flatbed. So he brought a loaner car with him for us to use to follow him back into Richmond, the town near Nelson where his garage was located.

He rolled the loaner off his bed, he winched the Carnival up in its place, we hopped into the loaner, and followed him into town.

In case you were wondering, Richmond is the home of Sprig and Fern, the best brewery in New Zealand. They produce a helles lager that makes me feel like I am back in the Wiesn, and their ginger lager is forcing me to rethink many things in my life that I thought were already concluded.

Anyway, we get back to Paul’s Boutique garage, where he told us what I already knew and feared: we had blown the Kia Carnival’s head gasket. The repair would be between NZ$1,500 to NZ$4,000, and they couldn’t get it repaired for at least a week.

Among other things, this created a great teaching moment for Leo, because it presented his parents with the opportunity to demonstrate to him a practical application for ALL of the arithematic he was learning in school. The factors in our real-life math equation included:

• The potential cost of the repair
• The walkaway value of the head gasket-less Carnival (~NZ$500)
• The rental cost of a car during just the repair
• The rental cost of a car for the entire time we need to finish the road trip and return to Sophie (in the event we choose the gasket-less Carnival walk-away scenario)
• The NZ$3,500 we will get for a repaired Carnival on May 1 in Opua
• The potential hotel and holiday park cancellation fees if we choose to remain in Richmond and enjoy Sprig and Fern for a week while the Kia Carnival was being repaired (not an altogether unattractive scenario from my perspective, but Jenna had prepaid our lodging fees for a number of the 18 remaining nights on our trip, and cancellations would potentially result in a not-insignificant cost)
• The cost of the emotional pain and suffering we would incur resulting from a decision to not continue our awesome road trip.

(Btw, Jan Gray, if you are reading this and are willing to accept a challenge, I will give you a Sprig and Fern T-shirt in exchange for your posting, in the comments section of this blog, the mathematical equation that documents and helps us prove the solution to this problem.)

Jenna and I are both from Massachusetts and can occasionally be wicked smart, so we thought about this for about two minutes (and of course discussed it with each other in a caring, open, non-stressful, nurturing, and empathetic way) and decided to rent an equivalent beater minivan for NZ$55-NZ$69 per day (depending on the length of the rental.) For us it was more important to continue with the road trip. The fact that I could purchase Sprig and Fern lager throughout the South Island (which I learned during our 2 minute discussion) had absolutely nothing to do with the outcome of this shared decision.

Meanwhile Leo — who had been begging us to take him to a McDonalds or a Burger King at least once in his entire lifetime — pointed out that there was a Burger King next door to the repair shop. It was noon, we were hungry, and we had 40 minutes to kill before Warwick from the beater minivan rental agency would come to pick me up so I could get our replacement car. We (I) had also promised Leo that at some point on this road trip we would go to a fast food joint.

I must confess that I personally have not patronized a McDonalds or a Burger King since a late night-delayed flight-layover in Minneapolis with Tami Reller and Darren Laybourn on our way to Fargo, North Dakota. That was probably ten years ago. Jenna can’t remember the last time she ate this type of food at one of these places.

But a promise to Leo is a promise, so we went up to the Burger King, ordered our food, and ate it. It was horrible. That’s not just the parents’ view, even the kids thought it was horrible.

Warwick eventually showed up to accompany me to our new rental beater minivan, and Jenna stayed behind in the Burger King with Leo and Hazel and took advantage of the opportunity to have a teaching moment with the kids, laying out for them the bad things that bad food can do to your bodies.

They apparently believed. Hazel has been lecturing us on the importance of eating salads and avoiding fats ever since. Score one for H!

Meanwhile, I got the replacement minivan. The new ride is a Toyota Enima, and it is sweet!

Oh, in my discussion of the blown head gasket in the mountain passes, I may have forgotten to mention the amount of stuff we are hauling with us: 4 bikes, 4 clothing duffle bags, 4 backpacks, 1 food box, 1 food bag, 4 other duffle bags, 1 bike helmet bag, 1 Yeti cooler (thank you forever, Steven Fell!), 4 towels, and 1 laundry bag. I am certain this gear had nothing to do with the strain on the Kia Carnival’s engine as we climbed 8% mountain grades, and we are thankful that the Enima can hold all of this gear.

We were also surprised to learn that New Zealand is a dumping ground for used cars from Japan, which apparently has strict insurance requirements for cars that are 7+ years old. It makes sense for used Japanese cars to come here, since new cars in New Zealand are very expensive and both countries have a drive-on-the-left infrastructure. Our Enima is definitely from Japan, which means the FM radio only goes up to 88.0 and many of the buttons on the instrument panel have labels written in Japanese.

But the new set of wheels handle the New Zealand South Island mountain passes and coastal straightaways with ease. This photo above is similar to one I took for the blog 15 months ago in Texas when we crossed the USA in our BMW X5, except this time the gauge displays 100+ KPH as opposed to 100+ MPH. Same idea, though. I am not sure if the “Keep Left” sticker is there to remind tourist drivers of New Zealand’s primary road rule or to prevent them from dwelling on the fact that their beater rental minivan has 220,000 KM under its belt.

In the good news department, we learned today that the repair shop in Richmond (did I mention that Richmond is the home of Sprig and Fern, the best beer in New Zealand?) now thinks that the problem with the Kia Carnival may not involve the entire head gasket but simply a single cylinder. This will hopefully contribute towards a lower repair cost.

Regardless, our road trip will continue. We left Sophie on a dock in Opua, where we are having some final repairs done in our absence, including the installation of the correct diesel heater parts and the completion of our 230v inverter swapout. We will also have the folks there install a propane line that runs to our transom, so we can mount a permanent gas barbecue on our stern rail to more easily cook all of the fish we plan to catch upon our return to the tropics.

In a few short weeks we will be back onboard our beloved Sophie, and we will sail her 60 miles south to Whangerei to haul her out of the water for a week and have her bottom painted. We plan to use the week she is out of the water to reintroduce our children to structured Sophie School while also provisioning the boat with all of the things that you can buy here in New Zealand that you can’t buy in the tropics. (Mainly lamb and NZ$11/bottle pinot noir.)

Then we will be joined by our Seattle friends Ravi and Alison, who haven’t done any offshore sailing but are adventurous souls who quit their comfortable jobs in America to spend a year backpacking the world.

We will also be joined by DAN ROGERS! He is the Best Man from our wedding, the person who shares a birthday with Leo, the person who taught me how to fish, and the person who helped us guide Sophie from San Diego to the Marquesas. He caught what I now realize is a really big trevally, pictured above, when he was with us in the Marquesas.

The seven on us will depart New Zealand on Sophie on May 1 (weather permitting) and head for Fiji. Since the prevailing winds down here tend to blow from the southwest, it is theoretically easier to head north than it is to head south in this part of the world. We hope to do the passage less than a week, similar to the amount of time it took us to head south to New Zealand last November. We also plan to take advantage of Sophie’s motoring range and will be quite happy to exchange diesel fuel for safety in order to get up to the tropics more quickly.

Waiting for us in Fiji will be our friends Ian and Becky, you know, the couple who became famous for being hooked on fishing. And they are bringing with them a brand new Relaxation Station — a floating inflatable conversation pit —  which we hope will become Sophie’s own portable version of the former Fiji surf resort “Cloud Nine“.

Let the (Southern hemisphere) winter begin!

Have I mentioned lately how lucky we are?