Our route

It is now half a year ago we left Christchurch, and we're about to cross into a new hemisphere and continent, so I figured this would be a good time to write about our past and future route.

We left Christchurch at the end of May 2012 and sailed up to Gisborne via Wellington. We waited patiently in Gisborne for three weeks to get a good weather window for the passage to Tonga. We finally left Gisborne on 21 June and arrived at Neiafu, Vava'u, Tonga 11 days later.

We spent six weeks cruising the Vava'u group and Ha'apai and it was a great introduction into the cruising life as everything is very close by and it's pretty ideal cruising grounds which is also evident by the many yachts present. Towards the end of August we did a seven day passage to Vanuatu, bypassing Fiji on the way. We spent another six weeks in Vanuatu slowly making our way north. A short two day passage later we were in Solomon Islands where we spent about five weeks before heading further north to Papua New Guinea where we are now in early December 2012.

We're hoping to spend Christmas in Palau, so we will soon make our way first west, then north, all depending on the weather. On this passage we're going to cross the equator, so that's quite exciting.

From Palau we'll sail to Philippines probably in January. We think we'll spend a few months (supposedly the safe-ish season from typhoons) in Phillipines before we're heading towards the north coast of Borneo and we'll hop along Malaysia towards Singapore and eventually Thailand. Our plans are very loose and subject to change, but this is the rough plan anyway. We are pretty much at loss as to what we'll do after that, but I'm sure we'll find out as we go.

Before leaving New Zealand we had only really committed to visiting Tonga and Vanuatu and weren't really sure where we were going after that, although we did think we would head towards Asia. It's really mostly thanks to yacht Carillon that we got onto the PNG-Palau-Phillipines route which happend to suit us the best, both route and time wise. It's always a bit of a puzzle to match a desited route with the different sailing seasons.