Karl & Kara Go Sailing

Monday 19 th August, Direction Island, Cocos-Keeling Islands, Indian Ocean Territories. Monday morning, fresh coffee, views of a beautiful blue lagoon and palm-fringed white sandy beach. Big decisions of the day include whether to snorkel before or after lunch. We've been here a few days now and have settled beautifully into island life. We have been five boats up to now with one new arrival yesterday morning (the excitement!, we watched him come all the way in and then eavesdropped on his conversation with the Federal Police and Border Force on arrival. Well it was the only thing going on!). Anchorage residents currently include a retired Australian man who has been sailing the world for years, has lived previously on Christmas and Cocos Islands and has lots of stories of the good old days back in the 80s and 90s. There's an English/Aussie man with his Indonesian wife, bub and another bub about to arrive; they're in the middle of relocating from Indone...

Wednesday 14 th August, Direction Island (aka Tropical Paradise), Indian Ocean. Now, first of all. Those last two blog entries were a bit of a rush. I uploaded them at the Christmas Island tourist office where I bought an hour of WiFi. Things started out alright but getting towards the end of the Christmas Island blog entry I was racing against the clock and grabbing whatever photos came to hand. So a couple of good 'uns got left out. I have now added them so you can go back and look if you're bored. We did indeed leave Christmas Island as planned on the Saturday morning and after a quick, uneventful, if a little boisterous, passage we arrived at the Cocos-Keeling Islands this morning.   One of Karl's routine tasks - clearing the decks of the kamikaze flying fish that leap to their deaths overnight.  One of my routine tasks - working another galley miracle.  Another day, another sunset. Holding on tight. It was a squally, squ...

Christmas Island (featuring earthquake number 2, I kid you not). No it's not all Elves and reindeer, mainly crabs and birds. And a few people. But a lovely, lovely place. We've been really enjoying it. Internet, and telecommunications in general, is not their forte however. We arrived, as planned, early Friday morning. The Border Force ship “Ocean Shield” (say it in a loud, booming, TV announcer voice) was hovering over our shoulders and called us up to ask who we were and what we were doing (seriously dudes, you've been tracking us all the way from Darwin, I'm pretty sure your database knows who were are and what we're doing) and then stayed hovering to make sure we did what we said we were going to do. Which we did. We came into Flying Fish Cove and picked up a mooring. No dramas, no stress, no problem. Then we congratulated ourselves on completing a 1500 mile journey (actually for us it was about 1700 miles with our little detour north to find th...

Slow Boat to Christmas Island. Thursday 25 th July, Indian Ocean, 60 miles west of Ashmore Reef. Clear blue sky, nice 15 knots of breeze, positively hooning along (compared to the last week anyway) at over 5 knots on a dark blue 3000m deep sea, Karl in his underpants and a coffee by my side. Life is good. Well, we left Darwin last Thursday after a few final pints in all our favourite places and having formally “cleared out” of Australia with Border Force. On our last night Darwin treated us to the ultimate smoky, deep red sunset followed shortly afterwards by an equally smoky, deep red moonrise. And our local Lola's provided the accompanying IPA. The next morning we got up early, went into battle again with the lock, emerged victorious and were on our way. Farewell mainland Australia. As well as the lovely sunsets, Darwin left me with a parting gift of a nasty little virus so for the first couple of days I had lost my voice completely – Karl seemed to en...