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…
Category: Sailing
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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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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Galley Notes : The Glow Up
Kate’s galley has always been well looked after – the wood varnished, the countertops oiled, the sink scrubbed clean – but after 17 years living onboard it was starting to look a little dingy. The countertops that were installed shortly before we bought Kate were constructed out of 4-inch strips of thin hardwood, glued down…
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Reading Round Up
Seeing as it is still January, and therefore people are ok with being all nostalgic about years past, I thought I’d take the opportunity to post a round up of the articles that were published in Cruising World Magazine 2025. I got back into the swing of things by writing a feature on a 126-year-old…
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Galley Notes: Babaganoush on a Rainy Day
Eggplant has long been the bane of my culinary existence. It grows in abundance in the tropics and so has been a constant at the markets for as long as I can remember. They are usually of the Asian variety, long and thin, pale purple or with stripes of white, small seeds. I’ve seen them…
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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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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…
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Day Tripping & One Night Stands
In theory, day sailing is a great idea. Sail during the good daylight hours, throw the pick in a (hopefully) protected anchorage by mid-afternoon, have plenty of time to cook dinner, go to bed at a reasonable hour, and wake up refreshed to do it all again. But in reality, it is a little different.
