This is the story of our loop through the South Pacific-- a trip that started in California in 2001 and ended back in our home port more than five years later. (We'll skip the two years spent in Mexico to save space.) If you're at all intrigued by the South Pacific and its expansive frontiers, take a moment to come along with us.

Sail south 'til the butter melts, then turn right... The dream started long ago while we toilied at our professions, sweated over spreadsheets and wrote checks for college educations until our knuckles went raw. Our ship didn't come in; that's not how life works. No, after years of forward planning we went forth and found our future home on the docks in San Diego and put in two more years of sweat equity before she was ready. After a long shakedown cruise in Mexico there was no hope of ever returning to our old lives. Instead, we kept going south until the butter not only melted, but churned counter clockwise.

LOOKING BACK AFTER  12,000 MILES:  This was the dream: to follow the wind to the Marquesas, Tuamotus, Society Islands and onward through the  Cook Islands, Samoa and Tonga. We were undecided about making a stop in New Zealand in the beginning because we thought we'd never wear out on the tropics. Yet, after a couple of great years in Mexico and a memorable nine month run through the beckoning warm zone of the South Pacific, we were ready for a cool change. And that meant the land of the Kiwi where we dallied away another two years cruising its amazing shoreline.

FIRST LANDFALL, FROM THE LOG OF THE SAILING VESSEL EMERALD April 22, 2004:

   "22 days sailing Southwest. Venus has finally settled her celestial argument with the moon and scales the  horizon like a cold temptress reclaiming ownership of the dawn. Her message this morning is the same: we are nothing--just a tiny cocoon traversing this illimitable heaving desert. Emerald is a saber cleaving the star-splattered swells, flinging up a  bioluminescent trail in her wake, marking the limits of all that we have known, or could ever know. But somewhere in the void ahead lies the landfall of our deepest desires: an island which has been pulling us through the years like a gravitational field towards the destiny of this particular dawn. The clock is ticking. The wind is up. It's wild out there tonight. We're moving too fast -8.5 knots...9.1... but there'll be no shortening sail because we've been drunk for hours on the alien tang of  oranges blossoms, wet jungle, tidepools and lingering cookfires. Then I can see in the fading starfields off to the west a dark dragon's back spearing the horizon. Fatu Hiva at last."

Hi. We're the owners of a '95 Royal Passport 47 aft cockpit cutter (RP47AC). Bob Perry and Passport Yachts did a fine job in engineering this boat for a passage like this. She's fast, but still hauls a lot of goodies, even when she's fattened up with expeditionary stores. Half the fun is diving some of the world-class, remote places reachable only by yacht, like Minerva Reef, the wild pass at Kauehi Atoll or the flanks of Suwarrow Atoll where the reefs are pristine and fourth dimensional. That's why we installed a built-in electrically-driven compressor to keep us in bubbles. This is our fourth sailboat and we made the commitment to living aboard so we could loop through the Pacific in an open ended fashion over a period of years. So, we left home in mid 2002 bound for Mexico. Though the Sea of Cortez was so appealing we barely escaped the lassitude and ease of it all, there was so much more waiting for us over the southwestern horizon.

   Only because of our daily mantra of If not now, then when, did we finally pull up our Mexican roots to pursue the wider vision that wouldn't leave us alone. So one day we put to sea. By the end of 2004, we were hopeless goners in love with the South Pacific and had reached New Zealand after logging 12000 miles since leaving California (not a big deal in so many years). By 2006 we were still obsessed with sailing up and down the east coast of New Zealand's North Island in between weather fronts. We developed a passion for  diving the clear-water offshore sites, like Great Barrier, Great Mercury, Red Mercury, the Poor Knights and Hen's and Chicken's Islands.To us, New Zealand will always be as good as it gets when you factor in lifestyle, climate, the people, and the amazing seascapes that wrapped around us on any given day.

 Wagner Stevens  of Annapolis, Maryland, builds solid sailboats capable of taking on just about any world cruising dream. The Royal Passport 47 displaces around 32,000 pounds fully loaded in passagemaking configuration. Her Perry-designed hull means that a sailor can count on an easily-managed and comfortable boat in all conditions. We've owned three other cruising machines, including a Crealock 37 and a Swan 44, but this boat gives us the best of all worlds: seakindliness, safety and capacity.
   She really proved her worth in the big windy lumps between Tonga and New Zealand as we closed in on our Tasman landfall. And just recently, back in California again in 2007, I was reminded of her strengths while we sprinted around Point Conception and out to San Miguel Island in a 45 knot Spring gale. There's nothing like having your tail kicked in your own back yard after you thought you've seen it all.

A chance to be in the center of this photo is why we came this way.This anchorage in Fatu Hiva-the gem of the Marquesa Islands- now lives in our memory as the essence of the South Pacific dream. Although we've harbored in scores of remote islands between here and New Zealand since this first landfall, Fatu Hiva still retains the title as our favorite island in the South Pacific.
      A mysterious darkness shines out from its ebony lava and fast-changing skies even in the glare of the noonday sun. Like the terrain, the few people who live here are oblique and not easily known. Perhaps Fatu's strange power explains why some of the best artisans in the Pacific reside here: great art and mysticism are inseperable.

Some call it the Pacific Puddle Jump.   (Here's another link) Others refer to this route as the Coconut Milk Run. Whatever term you use, it's a hell of a long trip--one of the longest open ocean passages on the planet. On average, most boats can do it in around three weeks, plus or minus a few days. Three departure points are common: San Diego, Puerto Vallarta, and the Panama to Galapagos Route.
   Leaving from Mexico in late March, we traveled through the Marquesas, Tuamotus and the Society Islands. After visiting dozens of French Polynesian islands, our course hooked north to remote Suwarrow atoll in the Cook Islands, then to American Samoa, south to the Tongan sentinel of Niuatoputapu (c'mon,-try to say it), and all through the stunning Tongan chain. By November, we sought an overnight anchorage at lonely North Minerva Reef  and then resumed steering due South watching the latitude numbers tick up as we added layers of clothing and tried on seaboots for the first time in years.
  Our wanderings came to a temporary halt when we reached the New Zealand's North Island by late November. When it was all over, we had logged 7862 miles since leaving Puerto Vallarta, Mexico eight months earlier. 

What's it like being out there for over three weeks? I'm often asked this question by the curious, the timid, and those who are going to do it next. For us, the onerous task of sailing to the Marquesas was just the necessary first step in acclimating to the larger task of looping through the Pacific basin over a period of years. The camaraderie of the Puddle Jump group made it even easier- we didn't feel as if we were doing this alone. Just like misery, insanity also loves company.
    Our boat was ready to go by mid March of 2004, and yet I kept stalling, generating new lists of projects. This suspicious dawdling is my way of dealing with trepidation. I've seen it come up before long ocean passages in the past. So, after a group of boats departed in a perfect wave of fresh wind which was forecast to whisk them a thousand miles without pause, we still sat in our slip. I fed the marina ducks, topped off the water tanks, listened to the wind rattling the palms in Paradise Marina. my mate paced the dock, shot me a crossed look. I looked at my watch."Maybe tomorrow, we'll go tomorrow," I muttered. She shot a second disgusted glance my way, started the diesel and heaved off our docklines. In two hours, we were sliding along in Banderas Bay under full sail heading for a union with destiny southwest of the equator.

  Although a pack of boats departing a day before us radioed in reports of brisk winds and good mileage racked up for days on end, Emerald was mired in light airs just a day and a hundred miles behind. Worse, the forecasts called for these light winds to dry up completely just behind us and when it happened, the next wave of boats remained stranded in their anchorages for another ten days. We whisked along under cruising spinnaker or reacher-drifter, day after day, almost all the way to the equator, ghosting along at six knots in twelve knot breezes for a dozen days days before the trade winds kicked in. I love this photo- we're so heavily over-provisioned that Emerald's riding about a foot lower than normal. Later on, I lightened her up considerably.
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A sailor's charts are gold. We stocked a pile of paper charts for backup, but electronic charting with a laptop computer taking constant input from a GPS took us safely all the way to New Zealand. I was surprised to see our venerable old Dell make it across the puddle with nothing more than a cracked screen hinge.( We had two backups just in case.) To the left is a sample plot of our position and those of other boats radioed in daily on the Pacific Maritime Mobile Net, which is a ham radio-linked group dedicated to making trips like ours safer. Each evening at 0330Z (three and a half hours after midnight in England), we checked in with the USA and Aussie-based net operations and radioed in our position and a detailed weather report. Concerned friends and family could then check on us through the  Pangolin YOTREPS website.The software used is important: CMAP seems to have the best reputation out here among the cruisers we were in contact with, and Nobeltec received good reviews too.

800 miles out Ascension, a Beneteau 38, was creeping up on us. Her skipper is a die-hard racing soul with vast experience in making wake, and soon a magic rendezvous at sea was shaping up. As our little seashells slid along together for a few hours in the nothingness of the open Pacific, we felt the ancient bond of lonely wanderers crossing paths. Then, Ascension gradually coasted ahead with a pumped-up chute, and under his expert sail-tweaking hand, picked up speed, passed ahead of us and eventually disappeared into the night.
   For days afterward, we sailed on uncomfortable seas that rolled and squashed us down into the indigo troughs of swells generated by storms far away, but by now Corbie and I were used to the constant grinding, squeaking and sloshing of life aboard a sailboat on the open sea. But not too far ahead a potential gauntlet of weather waited for usus-the notorious ITCZ.

   The ITCZ (Intertropical Convergence Zone) haunts a region just north of the equator. After days of sleigh-riding in the trade winds, yachts cruising to the South Pacific have to drill through this band of thunderheads, thick squalls and sudden steep seas. We stayed in touch with a weather expert--Don Anderson--on shore who guided us through this notorious gauntlet. Don deserves special thanks for his gratis work in guiding cruisers across the Pacific. We expected to face  some tough days of windward work and were sure we'd find ourselves motoring through this notorious patch of sea. Instead, we sailed directly through the ITCZ directly into blue skies and sunny weather by the time we crossed the equator on Easter Sunday. To make it official, we swam across the equator, one at a time, while Emerald drifted on a windless sea. After 20 hours becalmed and slowly powering, small cats paw ripples began to stir, and in a short time we were running before the wind again, racing for the Marquesas.

  22 days and a whole lot of shaking later. Knowing land was nearing after 22 days at sea, we didn't sleep much the night before Fatu Hiva puffed up out of the dawn like a genie smoking up out of a bottle. This lonely chunk of rock, only eight miles long, was the gem of our dreams, the first stepstone in an oceanic walkway of islands spanning all the way to New Zealand. It stands above the surface of an endless sea like a jagged tooth marking a submerged mountain which drops below it to the abyssal plain. A few hours after this photo was taken, we were at anchor in a rolly secluded bay, sound asleep for 14 hours, now shrouded in the quiet mystery of coconut palms and the unfamiliar crash of surf on the beach.

The canvas had indeed done miracles. We dropped our anchor in Fatu Hiva. It was time to take stock.  I realized that I had became a hopeless mystic on the way across. Just two years after divesting ourselves of a hobby farm, a spacious home and a busy professional practice, we were now relaxed, tied into the moon's phases, and fully disconnected from the wired, amped-up world we'd left behind. There would always be shoreside concerns, family to worry about and financial realities, but there was an indisputable new dimension added to our world view . 
    The existentialist philospher Andre Gide captured the essence when he put it like this: Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

  Sailors might approach this passage in different ways. The trip could be seen as an engineering feat (a Shuttle mission in a way) or a daring mountain climbing expedition, a practical course in meteorological science, even an extended bluewater fishing trip. It surely was all of these things. Yet after all those days in the the wind, with the ancient sea just an arm's length away, I began to see this voyage as a mysterious trial of the inner self. Though many have tried to describe this indescribable aspect of ocean wandering, no one but Bernard Moitessier could adequately convey the transcendent voyages of the heart that overtakes the soul on long ocean passages.

Words of the guru:



"Why am I doing this? Imagine yourself in the forest of the Amazon. Suddenly you come upon a small temple of an ancient, lost civilization. You are not simply going back and say, "I have found a temple, a civilization no- body knows." You are going to stay there, try to decipher it . . . and then you discover that 100 kilometers on is another temple, only the main temple. Would you return?"-
--Bernard Moitessier

UPDATE Sept 2006; We've bitten the bullet, taken the cure, come to our senses, and shipped Emerald back to the West Coast after four-plus years of wandering. I'm writing this from a marina in San Diego, grooving on the warm sunshine, azure skies and dry air, and though we'll probably head out for another round of exploration, we're going to take a break for a few months.

Mid July 2006- A second NZ winter: This place is like a magnet and we're finding it hard to leave. We're wintered up in Gulf Harbour again and have just finished a stint caretaking a small ranch for some friends in Stillwater. We're prepping Emerald for the trip back to the US, which will commence around August 15. In the meantime, we're happy to see that Fischer Panda has done a superb job in making good on their offer to upgrade our genset; it roared to life for the first time a few days ago.
  This return to the earth thing in Stillwater is scary: just last month we were out sailing the Big Blue and now we're petting asses in a mucky stable.

Stillwater is just an easy half hour's drive from downtown Auckland, though it feels like it's a hundred miles from anywhere. Check out this gorgeous setting...nice temporary digs for folks used to living in 400 square feet.

June 2006: We're still out there, somewhere along the coast of New Zealand, ducking weather fronts. We'll blog in about the time of the solstice. ( So far, this winter is at least 10F cooler than last, and the South Island is snowed in).

March 2006, notes from Great Barrier Island  New Zealand:  We've been cruising the East Coast of the North Island extensively, racing against the inexorable drop of the sun's arc north of the ecliptic. Summer peaked around the end of January, when the Puhutukawa trees went into their full blood red explosions of color on the shoreline, when the drill of the cicadas in the jungled forests was as loud as a buzz saw. Emerald took us out to bastion-like Great Barrier Island ( aptly named by James Cook centuries ago) a number of times before we felt the surge of the open sea swells again by looping south of the ship-grabbing, weather-wracked point of  Cape Colville. South of this on-steroids cousin of California's Point Conception, we came under the spell of Great Mercury Island; this gem held us in awe as we ducked incessant weather fronts out there for a week while we partook  of the coves, the crays( think lobster), the warm water of summer (74 F), and the nearly unlimited hiking ashore. And this is just the start- the best cruising is just ahead, they say, good as gold until the end of May.

 September 2005 notes- Wintering Over: EMERALD is moored in Gulf Harbour Marina on the Whangaparoa Peninsula on new Zealand's North Island. So far, this Austral winter has been the sixth mildest on record since 1860, and three of these warm events have occurred in the past five years. There is grave concern down under about global warming and eventual extended drought. Antarctica looms silently to the the south of us, and huge pieces of its ice shelves have been splitting away, as we humans proceed on one of earth's wildest climatic experiments ever.
  We're waiting for Spring, so we can wrap up a ton of boat projects and be off for some local cruising in the Hauraki Gulf. Then, In April  2006 we hope to sail away from this enchanting land, bound for Fiji and Vanuatu unless we're too rooted in this amazing country. We've moved ashore for a couple of months while we upgrade the interior of our boat. Auckland is only a short drive away, so we're availing ourselves of stuff we'd usually not have a chance at : rugby games,the opera, a ballet or two, diving out at the Poor Knight's Islands, even signing up for a cooking class to see how  they cook up that  salt and pepper squid  down here.
  The landscapes down here draw us in like walking into a postcard. There are incandescent seascapes around every corner, ethereal dripping mossy forests, fern-swept glades and green paddocks full of newborn lambs. The air here is some of the least polluted on the planet, and visibility is astounding. Though it will be hard to leave this enchanted island, we'll have to get a move on and soar away...like Moitessier's seagull, not too far from now.

Made it through a New Zealand winter: August 2005 notes: We'll soon be flying out of New Zealand for a while before returning to cruise here in early summer. Predictably, the arrival of Spring has delivered a few Equinoctial gales. The benign winter calm has given way to strong wind and drenching rain, and when MetService posts "fine" conditions, it's still pretty much a constant drizzle. As a result, the streams and waterfalls are in great shape right now, and when the sun rips a jagged tear in the cloudlines, it pumps the forests and paddocks up to even higher levels of green like a quick injection of adrenochlorophyll. The fields are full of sprinting newborn lambs and the air is a dense nectar of bliss syrup as  fruit orchards explode to life. There is no place on earth like New Zealand.
   Climatologists report that the Pacific Ocean is shifting into the dry side of its thirty year cycle. The easterly winds down here will intensify and it is predicted that NZ as well as the US West Coast will experience ever-increasing years of drought for at least the next half-cycle. It will be interesting to see what effect, if any, this gradual change might have in store for voyaging weather next year.

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