Saturday 25 July 2009

About to leave for Madagascar!

Chagos is amazing. We are having a great time, fishing heaps, not as much diving as we would like but our shell collection is still increasing everyday! Shark city here! We have some amazing footage and photos but unfortunately our brand new underwater camera has given up on us already! Still under warranty so hopefully we get a new one in Africa.

We are getting ready to leave in the next couple of days as the weather has calmed down a bit (from the daily 25 - 30 knots to 15 - 25 knots winds)and the seas seem more forgiving. Russ has fixed the rudder and we are now working on the alternator with the help from Darren from Ovation. It's a down-sized community here (from the 25 plus boats to only 6) but a very nice and multinational group (Japanese, Americans, Aussies, but Kiwis rule here!). We are hoping for a 10 to 12 day passage to Madagascar but we will take our time getting to Nosy Be, so we should be back to civilization sometime mid-September. Hope this update finds you all well. XXX

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Monday 6 July 2009

CHAGOS!!!

We are here! Actually we arrived 3 days ago, on the 3rd of July but been having far too much fun to stop and email! Sorry! The trip was long, 13 days, but with good winds (sometimes too good). Moonwalker sustained a bit of damage I'm sorry to inform, giving us some serious heart pumping moments: try fishing your rudder casing with you rudder in it, at 3 am with 25 knots of wind... Russell did it! But all good guys, remember? We have 2 rudders! And we can totally fix the other one here. Our fridge isn't working well either, our alternator is gone (thank goodness for our solar panels and the constant SE trades!)and our GPS didn't work for 4 days (hand held GPS saved us)! Oh well welcome to life onboard. Chagos is just stunning, we are loving it.

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