July used to be my favourite month. Growing up in Nova Scotia July meant summer. Not the beginning of summer like June. Not end of summer like August. But quintessential summer. Early crisp mornings, prefect balmy afternoons, and evening that stretched on until the sunset after 9pm. School ended in June and by August it…
Category: Borneo
Telling Secrets and Learning Lessons
Last week I had to make water. This isn’t a new thing onboard, but it is the first time in a while that I’ve had to deal with our engine-driven reverse osmosis system by myself. I spent a couple days looking over the notes I took when we ran it just before Steve left. The…
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Day by Day
In 2008 we thought that we’d take an 18-month hiatus from working as paid crew to buy a boat in California and sail it to Australia. It took us three and a half years to get to Fiji, and by then we well and truly knew that Kate was our home, not just a hiatus….
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Gaya Street Market : A Delicious Birthday Spectacle
A few weeks ago Steve celebrated his Bday. Since birthdays are meant to be special we decided to book a hotel in Kota Kinabalu for a couple nights. Kota Kinabula, or KK as the locals refer to it, is a sprawling middle sized city in the center of the northern coast of Sabah, Borneo….
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HOT hot
The first time I travelled to the tropics was the first time I really travelled anywhere. After graduating from art college I decided to hop on a plane and explore Asia, using the home of dear family friends in Phuket as a base. One day, while exploring Phuket town, I stumbled upon a show and…
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Newton’s Laws & Life Onboard
Life, I find, often gets in the way of our aspirations. A diesel leak forces you to spend two hours on your hands and knees, elbow deep in the bilge huffing fumes and sweating through the good t-shirt you put on in the morning expecting not to get too sweaty or grimy. A routine dentist…
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2025 Recap & Catch Up
2025 was a hard year. I can say this because we spent the entirety of it in the boatyard in Kudat, Borneo, Malaysia. This was not the plan, of course. Which is maybe why hauling out sometimes feels like voluntarily checking into an insane asylum- an olde tyme one that only requires one signature to…
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Galley Notes: 2-4-1 (Tofu) Taco Wednesday
Several years ago, when Steve and I were on one of our motorcycle adventures around Australia, we got stuck in a little town called Mount Morgan, half way up the Queensland coast. It had started to rain a few days before and, fearing flooding, Steve decided it best to start making our way to higher…
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Marina Life
For most boaters staying in a marina is something they do on a regular basis, it’s nothing special. But for us, it is a luxury that we haven’t had in many, many years. Nine in fact. Yep, it’s been nine years since we’ve had Kate alongside – that’s not counting the 10 minutes we spent…
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Borneo: Impressions
I had high hopes for Borneo. Not expectations but hopes. I was hoping that our first border crossing in a long while would be a reboot for us, an opportunity to reset and start again fresh in a new country. I was hoping to leave behind all of the emotional baggage that I had collected…
