Namani at Sea

Having recently returned from sailing across the Pacific Ocean in our thirty-five foot sloop, we hear the same question all the time: So, what is it like?

In the small print on our New Year's card from last year we promised to send the next card from a "cold and rainy place". In an attempt to keep our promise, we met with Nana's family in London over Christmas. As you can see above it is indeed cold (at least by our still tropically spoiled standards) and we did indeed have one rainy afternoon during our week "on the mainland".

We moved the content from Nicky's Page to this site (see box "Nicky's Page" to the rigtht - or below if you're reading this on a very small screen). It includes a selection of school reports that Nicky worked on while living on Namani. The latest addition is a movie about "Life on a Boat" which Nicky compiled and edited while we were in Australia. You can watch his final cut on his page or directly on Vimeo. Enjoy!

Well the inevitable has happened: we're back in our apartment in Gelting/Bavaria... After a very nice six-week transition period in Maine we had two days in New York (including a reunion with our friends from Arearea) before Iceland Air took us back to Munich where we arrived on 31JUL. Our luggage wasn't as keen as we to get back and took another day...

While migrating our blog from Sailblogs to this address we had to do some data wrangling with the blog texts, comments, etc., and we wondered if we could plot word frequencies in some meaningful way. wordle.net allows you to do just that: generate word clouds from either plaint text or "word:count" pairs and print them in full color. The picture above shows the 40 or so most frequent words in our blog posts during our four years of living aboard Namani (not counting stop-words like "the", "I", ...). Looks we didn't have much to complain about ;-)

... is a special place to us. Years ago we've sat here many times, dreaming about sailing away (Nana probably as long as she can remember). Now Peaks has become both, the destination for our first Transatlantic cruise and the departure point for our more recent "Pacific Interlude". We're back where we started almost three years ago and watching the setting sun reflect off the cliff on Cushing Island from the backshore is still a special treat ;-)

We're back on the US Coast now, about a month after we left Namani and Australia in early May. We had a wonderful trip back with a few stops to see many old (and some new) friends along the way. Many thanks Margaret and Steve; Fenny, Howe and Elizabeth; Ken and Sylvia; Catherine and Chris; Sheila, Bill and Cecille; Sabina, Graham, Ethan and Lynden; Laura, Gary, Aiden, Gerda and Jack - it's been wonderful seeing you - you have all spoiled us with your hospitality!

After a relaxed few days with Steve and Margaret in Jakarta we caught a train to Yogyakarta in Central Java. We spent a day visiting the Buddhist temple at Borobodur and a Hindu temple in Prambanan before catching the bus to Pangandaran, our current location. It's a beach town on the south coast of Java that was last hit by a Tsunami in 2006. It got little news coverage in Europe back then (the big one was 2004) but still had over 700 people dead here. Tragically, the government had chosen not to pass on an advance warning received from Japan.

In Sydney during a one day stop-over on the way to Indonesia... Nicky had fun with this street artist making giant soap bubbles in Hyde Park. It will probably be our last visit to Sydney for quite a while. We tremendously enjoyed our time here, especially when we were here on Namani over Christmas and New Year. Glad we got to see Tab, Jez and their kids again this time. Until we meet again in Germany ;-)