Finally - we are on our way! If I say "we", I am talking about my crew and me. That needs some introduction. Two years ago I sailed with a family along the Australian coast to Lizard Island in the north. At the time they lived on a boat in Bundaberg where I met them. The father, Bruce Wells, is a New Zealander, the mother, Tuwai, is Fijian and then there are two lovely children: Jamie (10) and James(9). Thank goodness for these names. With my poor memory for names, this presents no problem!!!! They are good sailors and used to live on the limited space on a boat.
In the meantime I have "adopted" the children as my grandchildren and we are having a great time. This time they decided that I needed to teach them French and so the morning greetings are now: Frere Jacques! The attached pictures were taken 2 years ago but later you will see how they look now!

After some delays we took off on Sunday 5/18 and got to Keppel Bay Marina, up the coast on Tuesday morning. The Wellses now live here in their boat and we took the opportunity to transfer some more stuff, get some more groceries (I forgot how much a 9 year old boy can eat!!!) and tomorrow we are off in presumably ideal sailing weather (wind speed 15-20 knots) to Airlie Beach in the Whitsundays!

I am now able to update this blog even when we are at sea - so I promise that there will not longer be the delays as in the past. If you want an easy way to keep in touch press the RSS button and the blogs will get to you automatically when we update them.

Also: if you are interested to see where in the world we are check: map and tracking. Quite amazing: it updates our whereabouts automatically. I am starting to have a hard time to keep up with all the electronic developments. When I started sailing I did not even have access to email on the boat!!!