When you live on your boat 24/7 you get to know sounds and what I was listening to at 4.00am on a Monday morning didn't sound right.

Every night for the last 18 months as I lay drifting between sleep and awake I'd heard the fridge compressor click on, run for a specific amount of time and then click off. This night it wasn't doing that. This night it was clicking on, powering up to speed and clicking off, then 5 seconds later i...

I'm the weak link in the chain when it comes to listening to my little inner voice. But I'm finally, after nearly six decades, getting much better at listening and acting on what the voice tells me.

When we're leaving an anchorage, and we've left quite a few in the 15 months we've been sailing,  Aannsha and I have a routine we follow. She does all the front end stuff and I do all the stuff at the back. The same happens when we...

Bringing up the chain and anchor when we're leaving an anchorage is the moment that I have least control over A B Sea. It's also the time that I need to be very aware of water depth, wind speed, wind direction, other anchored vessels and most importantly, people in the water.

I'm telling you this because we recently had a close encounter with a guy that was snorkeling. We'd been anchored for several days and noted that the rock...

We are the first to admit that we're total novices at this whole boat owning and sailing malarky and one of the things we really appreciate is constructive criticism and advice from our viewers who are not sailing novices.

When we showed an underwater shot of our snubber attached to our anchor chain in episode #084 we had several helpful comments advising us that the snap hook we were using was not strong enough for the task th...

This is blog #100 that's a milestone because it's a nice round number. It also means that despite some of the challenges we've had getting Internet connection, I've managed to successfully bring you a blog every Friday on schedule for almost 2 years. I might celebrate with an extra ration of rum! Or beer.

Mainland or bust

After waiting out the Meltemi wind for 4 days at the Greek island of Kythnos we finally had a window of oppo...

The wind gods seemed to be aiming their fury at a different part of the Aegean Sea than the area we were in and that gave us another opportunity to climb further north in our seemingly never ending quest to reach the Greek mainland.

At 7.30am on Wednesday the 4th of September 2019 we weighed anchor and headed away from the island of Serifos in a generally northern direction. I say generally because once we stuck the nose of A B...

Every year in Queensland Australia, the arrival of spring was announced by the first chorus of frog song from the pond in our garden.

At the other end of the year there was no sound to accompany the arrival of autumn, but there was a palpable change in the energy of everything. An unseen, but none the less tangible, stillness seemed to emanate from the trees, plants and even the very air itself.

Why am I reminiscing about Austra...

We should have learnt by now that boat jobs always take longer than we expect them to.

However after the relatively quick and easy 1 hour replacement time of the head sail furling line, we were quietly confident that replacement of the main sail furling line would be a similar time. How wrong we were.

From start to finish it took us 5 hours working on a cloudless, windless day in 36C / 96.8F temperatures. By the end of it we wer...

Some things require the patience of a saint

The Greek cruising tax has to be paid in advance and must be paid no later than the 3rd day of the month. We paid in advance for our first 3 months when we arrived in Samos and now we were in Milos we needed to pay for the next 3 months. How time flies.

I logged into the TEPAI website where I'd previously registered all of the boat's details and my details hoping that I could either A)...

I've said it before and no doubt I'll be saying it again, on a boat one job always leads to another.

The job in question was to replace the furling line for our head sail. We'd first noticed that the outer sheath of the line, at the cockpit end of things, was beginning to fray when we were at the Greek island of Amorgos. We planned on buying a replacement line as soon as we got to an island with a half decent chandlers shop.

The...