The End Of An Era
It’s hard to believe that our South Pacific journey is over. It was a total of fourteen months, but now, we are gone. I hinted at a new adventure, and here it is. Lennie and I currently are not interested in crossing the Indian Ocean. We’ve already spent a lot of time in South Africa, and it’s a lot of sea miles to get back to the Caribbean. Our goal after the South Pacific was the Mediterranean. How in the heck do you accomplish that when you are on the other side of the world? Easy. Seven Star Yacht Transport to the rescue. All along our Pacific journey, we had the feeling that we were going to ship the boat. We started doing our research and found several companies that offer these services, but the schedules are varied and follow normal routes of charter and personal yachts that get moved around the globe from boating season to boating season, avoiding the dreaded hurricane/cyclone season.
We had the boat hauled out for some service work and awaited the shipping date, and yesterday it happened. On April 11th Happy Together was loaded onto the ship M/V Damgracht. In fact, you can find a ship tracking website such as Shiptraffic, and type in that name and follow her as she leaves Auckland Harbour on Monday the 13th headed for several ports along the way. First, she’ll stop in Tahiti for loading and unloading of a few vessels, then she’ll sail all the way to the Panama Canal and then arrive in Palm Beach, Florida in early May. Happy Together will be on the deck of the ship ten miles away from our house in Delray Beach! We can’t wait for this. We will take our Florida boat and go out and meet her. I even brought the drone home so I could film Happy Together from the sky when she’s here. We even considered unloading in Palm Beach and taking a year off of the international travel and spending some time on the East Coast and the Caribbean, but then we learned that there was no credit if we chose to take her off in Palm Beach since we’d already paid all the way to the Mediterranean. We’re going to let her go there. Besides, we know we’re going to love the Med, and we’re not getting any younger.
After the ship leaves Palm Beach, she’ll head to Southampton, England, and then to Palma on the island of Mallorca in Spain. That’s where she will be unloaded in early June. Kinetic has already arranged a captain to take the boat off the ship, get it into a marina, do a little service work so that when we arrive, we are ready to sail. Normally, we don’t mind a little yard work and maintenance, but the situation with visas in Europe means you can only stay for 90 days in any 180-day period. We don’t want to spend many of those days in a boat yard.
Blair, our yacht manager in New Zealand, has done an amazing job with his team of vendors getting the boat prepared for this ocean voyage. It takes a ton of work to remove the sails, all of the halyards, tables, chairs, deck gear, et cetera, and then have a vendor cover the exterior of the boat in plastic. Happy Together is going to go approximately 15,000 miles ….more than halfway around the world. It will see storms, rain, wind, big seas, and the like, which is why preparation is crucial. And then when it arrives, you have to take it down and put everything back in sailing condition. It’s a big job.
I am currently editing our videos for Season 9 of our YouTube channel, which starts in Tahiti and ends in New Zealand after visiting Tonga and Fiji. This will be a fun season with lots of adventure. We are actually going to have four months off the boat right now, which is the first time in three years. We are running out of things to do and really miss the boat. Of course, it’s great to spend time with family and friends, and we even have the wedding of our son Parker in between to keep us busy. But soon enough, we’ll be landing in Mallorca to receive Happy Together, and we couldn’t be more excited.
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