The way home

I just retrieved this plot of the trip from Tahiti to San Francisco. More details are at at ShipTrack. Allow about 15-20 seconds for the page to start plotting our track since 2009.

More photos

Today I realized I had never posted pictures from the 2012 cruising season in French Polynesia, or from the sail to San Francisco from Tahiti. So now there are three new pages in Where We've Been.

The first page covers our second visit to the Leeward Islands of Huahine, Raiatea, Tahaa and Bora Bora with a few shots from the 2012 Heiva in Bora Bora. The second page covers our return visit to Moorea and more pictures of the spectacular scenery in Moorea. And the last page covers the the four weeks and 5,000nm of sailing from Tahiti to San Francisco, with a brief stop in Hawaii.

Jury Rigged

Fay's latest article is about our friends Vaughn and Sharon Hampton on Reality, and their passage from the Marquesas to Tahiti with a jury rigged rudder. It's a great story of how the cruising community comes to the assistance of cruiser's in need. The story is also testimony to Vaughn and Sharon's tenacity to make the 850nm passage to Tahiti with a jury rigged rudder. Read it at Ocean Navigator, or this PDF. Always available In The News!

Updated Where's New Morning

I've updated Where's New Morning to refer to shiptrack.org which will show our track since 2009. It takes a few seconds to plot all the points so give it a little time and watch the red dots. You can also use all the usual Google Map controls to zoom in/out, display satellite pictures, etc. Enjoy!

Anchoring scope and swing radius spreadsheet correction

Thanks to a good catch by Marty S. I have corrected an error in the Anchoring Scope and Swing Radius spreadsheet on the Downloads page. The 5:1 radius was not calculating in yards, but in feet. We rarely use more than 3:1 with New Morning's 55kg Rocna so I never noticed the error.

The question was also been raised about why the spreadsheet uses yards instead of feet since most US boaters think of the length of their boat in feet (though everywhere else in the world they think of it in meters). The reason is that when anchoring I use a Bushnell laser rangefinder to measure distances to swing obstacles. My first year of cruising I found that I significantly under-estimated distances so I bought a rangefinder designed for golfers to measure the distances objectively. The rangefinder reads out in yards (or meters). When anchoring I use this to measure the distance to other boats, moorings, marked ledges/reefs, etc. Using the spreadsheet (I keep a copy in a plastic cover in the cockpit) and the rangefinder simplifies the process of determining exactly where/when to drop the hook.