2-4-1 in the BWS February Issue

There is still a few days to pick up the February issue of Blue Water Sailing magazine where you’ll find information about building an onboard medical kit in my regular column, Heather Francis Onboard, as well as a story about our time in New Caledonia earlier this year! You can also subscribe to the digital…

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Exploring the (mostly) Uncharted Vona Vona Lagoon

We weren’t sure how far we’d get. Beyond the depth soundings over the Katherine bar on the western edge, some details around the perimeter and a small scale chartlet of the port of Noro, home to the Sol Tuna factory, the rest the Vona Vona lagoon appeared as an empty grey expanse on both our…

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Soggy Sollies

We haven’t been moving much recently. Haven’t budged for 17 days actually except when blown around on anchor in passing squalls. We’ve been hemmed in by a weather that is being kept over the Solomon’s by a couple cyclones that formed in the coral sea. Days and days and days of rain. It started off…

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Galley Notes; How to Dress a Squid

So, you’ve managed to convince some cephalopods that your lure looked tasty and now you’ve got a bucket full o’ squid. Visions of calamari are dancing in your head, but just how to you get from whole animal to delicious, deep fried morsels? “Dressing” a squid does not involve turtle necks or tutus, it is…

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Throwback Thursday; Provisioning for the Zombie Apocalypse

When we left San Diego our destination was all points south and west. We had given ourselves a time line of about 18 months to reach Australia (we obviously didn’t quite make it as it is almost 8 years later and we’ve yet to touch Aussie waters) and knew our jump off point into the…

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Galley Notes: Confessions of a Fungi-phobe

Shopping for fruit and veg in the Solomon Islands couldn’t be easier; most days I don’t even have to leave the cockpit. Outside urban centres like Honiara and Gizo (where there are stores and fresh markets and people have jobs that pay money) we almost never go ashore for fresh goods. Guaranteed sometime during the…

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New Year, New Islands to Explore

After over a week of heavy rain and sometimes very blustery winds the weather has finally broken. We are taking this sunny opportunity to escape from the dirty little town if Gizo and start exploring the surrounding islands in the western province of the Solomn Islands.  Our first stop is to check out a cyclone…

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