Sailing Kujira

As we head into the darkness of our first night out on the Atlantic Ocean, the waves are rolling behind us. With every one of them, you can feel Kujira’s skinny ass being lifted up before getting an acceleration as we surf down the wave. It is crucial to keep the whale perpendicular to the swell if we want to avoid a very unpleasant feeling of being rolled over. In reality, the waves, despite being around 3 meters, are still too small and not steep enough to present a real danger for us. Yet, with the mizzen out and over sheeted, Kujira is quite difficult to keep under control and Neco, our autopilot, struggles too much to keep him in line. That is why I find myself helming all evening until 1am. Once things have settled down a little, Kim takes over for her night shift. Not everything is negative though. For a start, we make really good progress and for the first and nearly only time we manage to achieve more than 140Nm in 24 hours. We also gain in confidence and experience. Those fir

With just over two weeks to go to New Zealand and back, including flights, every minute is worth gold and I made sure that we would have no hiccups on the way. This includes not having to transit via Tokyo, as originally planned. When I bought the tickets back in May, Lufthansa was offering a flight from Madrid to Auckland via Munich and Tokyo. The catch was that in Tokyo, we needed to transfer airports, from Haneda, south west of the capital, to Narita, east of the capital. At the time, with 18 hours layover, I saw that more as a treat than a burden. Just enough time to have a little booster shot of Japanese food and culture. What I didn’t know at the time, was that foreigners were still not allowed back into the country due to strict COVID regulations, and it wasn’t known when these restrictions would be lifted. June, nothing but likely the restriction would be lifted after the summer. July, nothing but speculations that it was going to change soon. August, nothing but definitely bef