Surviving the fearsome storms of the Japanese sea

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Ship diary Chichijima to Bepu, Japan (680 nautical miles)

Day 0 – 12.12.2017 (Tuesday)

Preparations for the winter sailing from Chichijima Island to Kyushu Island have started. All day we clean, fortify and tie everything really carefully. The security ropes are fixed on the rails all over the boat and life belts are set. We have also bought several winter sleeping bags from the thrift shop in the library. I finish fixing the front mast, paint it and wind the protruding bolts with tape and rags. Continue reading

Pirates of the Southern Seas

LRM_EXPORT_20180414_010827Pirates of the Southern Seas

IMPORTANT! This post is not chronological. We skipped some posts about Indonesia and Papua New Guinea FOR NOW. They will be translated later. For the moment we will post in advance a few stories from our sails with the yacht “Alabama”.

(So in short: before this we traveled some more islands in Indonesia, mainly hitchhiking, then we spent two incredible months in Papua New Guinea and found a yacht to Fiji. There we later encountered “Alabama” and its lovely crew who quickly became our family.)

Let’s go back to “Alabama”. We are accommodated in one of the many cabins of the boat and everyone had their own. The yacht is really spacious, with wooden cladding that gives the impression of an old ship. Not only her current crew is unorthodox, but its whole story. We find some documents on board, from which we learn that one of his previous owners used the boat to traffic drugs, and three members of the crew were killed, one of whom was beheaded by pirates or drug barons in southern Philippines. Well, we certainly will not sail with her around the Philippines 🙂

Lines are being pulled, people climb up and down between the engine compartment and the deck. One is running, the other is rocking in the hammock, the third one smoking a cigarette, the fourth brewing coffee in the kitchen, the fifth taking a shower naked , the sixth singing or playing the guitar… The crew consists of ten really interesting people with dreadlocks  and hippy outlooks. The atmosphere is joyous.

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