s/v Field Trip

It’s been a while since our last blog post and we want to provide some updates.  We are approaching high school for the kids, and know that our sailing time will most likely come to an end and we’ll be land based…at least for a while. We discussed as a family what we wanted to do for our last 12-14 months of sailing, and everyone agreed we needed to get back into doing our videos.  It’s been almost eight years now since we first left the USA…and created our first videos in Argentina.  We created the videos out of a passion for sharing our travels with friends and family…and most importantly for ‘us’.  To this day the kids still love viewing old videos and get a laugh out of seeing themselves so much younger exploring whatever it is we were doing at the time. Creating videos – consistently – is very challenging.  Connectivity to upload videos is hit and miss, and the raw time required to create a quality video is considerable.  We started to slow dow...

Adventures in the Similan Islands, Thailand View of Sail Rock from below I made a running leap up onto a large rock, and all the other kids were like, “HOW THE HECK DID YOU GET UP THERE??!!”. I have to admit, I was a bit proud of myself! But then I had to wait for the other kids to find a way up!! Yesterday we went ashore to play with another kid boat called Rainbow Safari!! There was this giant rock that had a whole cave behind it, so Niki (9 years), Robby (5 years) and I (11 years) all went exploring behind it. We found a lot of treasure troves full of (sadly) trash and lots of pieces of coral!! Then we walked all the way over the rocks at the end of the smaller island. We found a cave in between two large stones that led far back in a narrow tunnel. We didn’t have time to explore it, because we were going on a hike! We went to this trail that led to an immense balancing rock called Sail Rock. On the path was a massive monitor lizard that quickly scampered aw...

Bring on the BACON!  Since arriving in Thailand, bacon has been a steady staple in our fridge after an entire year without it.  Throughout Indonesia, a predominately Muslim country, pork was obsolete, and we missed our BLTs and bacon and eggs.  (Honestly, how can one be expected to survive without such vital rations??)   So, it was a bit fortuitous that we finally found ourselves in Thailand, land of infinite pork, to celebrate the ringing in of the 2019 Chinese New Year, coincidentally, a year of the pig. This New Year’s celebration, our first ever, was going to be special.  A fellow Antares owner, Eric, and his wife Cora, have lived in Phuket for ten years but are originally from Hong Kong.  They are amazing resources regarding all things Phuket and have helped us source boat parts and services specific to our boat.  More importantly, though, is the friendship that has grown between us in such a short amount of time.  It was a thrill ...

After our time in Borneo, we needed to start considering our cruising plans.  Would we follow the standard cruiser track and head up the Malacca Strait to Singapore?  Or would we try another route and blaze our own trail around the southwest coast of Sumatra? The Malacca Strait is a popular topic among cruiser forums, where sailors commiserate about the sheer number of shipping vessels that congest the narrow waterway between Singapore and Indonesia.  Wikipedia defines it as “a narrow, 550 mi stretch of water between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. As the main shipping channel between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, it is one of the most important shipping lanes in the world.”  The site (link to Wiki article on Malacca Strait) goes on to state that in 2008, the annual number of vessels transiting the strait was 94,000!  These stats weren’t the reason we didn’t take the Malacca Strait path that most cruisers take when they trav...