Well David made a splendid café latte for each of us today while Chris began drawing and making notes on our poxy little world map. Turns out our imaginations hadn’t really run as wild as we should have let them.
The first part of our master plan still remains. Stay in French Polynesia until May 2021 before heading west with the hopes of visiting Samoa, the Cook Islands and Tonga. Afterwards the plans diverge.
Plan A - head on through Fiji for a bit, then possibly New Caledonia or Vanautu before heading southwest towards Frasar Island, Australia. We need to be south of that area during the southern hemisphere summer cyclone season anyway, so why not cruise down the east coast of Australia, hop across the Bass Strait during a period of extremely calm weather then cruise around Tasmania for a few months. Australia offers plenty of opportunities to secure JollyDogs in a marina and enjoy some inland travel, perhaps fly back to the US and UK for family visits, and obviously visit the Seawind factory in Vietnam to see a new 1370 in the build process. Might as well fly into Phuket for a Thai food fix and a visit with our buds Brian and Charles. With the right weather window, we could depart Oz around May 2022 for New Caledonia and work our way to Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and on towards Papua, New Guinea. From there perhaps we head on to Indonesia for some more good cookin’. As long as we find our way out of the cyclone belt and eventually somewhere where JollyDogs will fetch a fair price we’re good! We reckon we’ll need to ship stuff to Lankawi to put on JollyDogs part deux, but we still don’t know when. Maybe we’ll just sail JollyDogs there and put our stuff in a shed. Depends when our new baby is going to be ready. Cruising around Thailand offers wonderful food, beautiful sights, friendly people. Maybe by then Vietnam will open up as a practical cruising ground! Who doesn’t love Vietnamese food? Anybody sense a recurring theme here?
Plan B - after Tonga sail northwest towards the Marshall Islands and then wander around Micronesia. Eventually still end up at Lankawi to unload our stuff.
Plan C – After Tonga sail to Minerva Reef and wait for a safe weather window for New Zealand. Figure out the route towards Lankawi after cyclone season ends in 2022.
We’ll probably hatch a Plan D etc. by tomorrow, but for now that’s what we’re thinking. Feel free to weigh in with your own adventure thoughts! Email us at jollydogsrcc@gmail.com. Heck, we’ve got some bandwidth right now.
Everybody has to be somewhere doing something. Might as well plan for success, fun, adventure, and mind-expanding cultural experiences. We’d do better if we had a big map to spread out on the dining table. Maybe we’ll bug our geographer pals and very close personal friends Mike and Tami to find us just the perfect map and bring it to us!
I think we’re leaning towards Plan A. Both of us are keen to spend time looking around Tasmania, and Australia holds a really special place in both our hearts, as that’s where we first met. With any luck this coronavirus thing will work itself out by next May and we can visit some of the more remote and “medical resource poor” countries on our way to the land of Oz. If things sort out a bit faster we’ll hope to fly down to New Zealand and enjoy visiting friends and perhaps a little America’s Cup action March of 2021 before launching west. Time will tell.
It’s a high-class problem to have, trying to decide what places to sail to next. Of course, trying to decide where to sell JollyDogs, who to sell her to and when, well that’s also a high class problem. We’re pretty fond of our girl, and she’s really working well in this environment. Looks like we got a few things right. Somebody’s going to be really lucky to call her their own someday.
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