So lets see where I was at,… yes that’s right – I arrived back home on Guppy about a month ago and it didn’t take long until I was out on the ocean again. I was contacted by George and Ellen onboard Winddancer, a boat that I had met in South Africa. They told me that they are in Raiatea (close to Tahitie) with an engine that’s not too good and that they would love me to join them for the 2400nm trip across to New Zealand. At the same time I had another offer to crew on a big catamaran but let that go as I felt more connected to Ellen and George on Winddancer. So I booked a flight the same day and not even 48 hours later I landed on Raiatea. George built Winddancer about 25 years ago and they have sailed all over the world with it since then. The next day we did some provisioning, and I tried to get to know the boat a little before we cleared out of Raiatea and left the next morning. The first week we had some great warm winds pushing us along at 6.5 knots through the beautiful clear water. It was such a great feeling to be out on the ocean again. After we’d passed the Cook islands the voyage started going south, still great winds but it did start to get a little colder. For days and days we didn’t see anything except for the endless blue. Not even birds or fish. I started to wonder what had happened to all the beautiful creature’s I knew being out there before… One group of enormous dolphins turned up and played with Winddancer for about an hour. But these where the only dolphins we saw… A couple of days before we reached the Kermadec islands the days turned grey, waves started building and the wind turned against us. The following week we beat into 20-25 knots of wind, which made us go way more south than we wanted to. The nights where cold, but George and Ellen who aren’t exactly the youngest people anymore kept having a great spirit. Ellen kept serving us great meals every day, even when the floor had turned into the wall and everything was trying to attack her. And George, who is in his seventies, just reefed and cranked the sails like a young strong man would do. I learned to have a lot of respect for these two people, and was so glad to be there with them instead of a big fast catamaran.. Finally the winds and waves slowed down on us and we were able to sail in a straight line to New Zealand which was a real blessing. But the winds kept dropping out and soon enough we where becalmed. Once the wind had stopped giving us a hard time out there, nature made up for all that in no time. It only took one day to forget about the waves smashing into our faces and the winds keeping us busy with the sails. We saw Albatrosses circling around the boat for two days, and two little brown birds followed us for at least four days before exploring other horizons. But the best thing was the whales that showed up next to Winddancer – gently moving along, not even noticing that we were there. Slowly we kept moving along towards New Zealand, still sailing as we didn’t want to kill the engine that was already dying. Eighteen days after we had left Raiatea we saw New Zealand again, the same islands and the same heads that I saw first when I came into New Zealand with Guppy last year. Just now there were no breaking waves and no forty knots of wind blowing me towards the shallow waters. Instead we slowly watched the Poor Knights islands and the Great Barrier getting bigger until we could also see Bream head and the shoreline of New Zealand. We got there in the middle of the night, so that we only got a few hours of sleep before clearing in and a long day of getting up the river with almost no wind and only being able to motor at 2kn. But I wasn’t in a hurry and neither where Ellen and George. We enjoyed looking around, especially as George and Ellen hadn’t been going up the river since they left on Winddancer in 2001! A couple of days later I drove down to Auckland to pick Daniel up from the airport, who had stayed in Europe a little longer. His brother also came over after traveling in Australia for a while. So we are now showing him around a bit and enjoying the lovely summer.

Laura