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Stone age

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There is something about French polynesia that most tourists that fly here will never experience. The stone age lifestyle. If you need shelter you find it yourself (often a secluded anchorage in a deserted bay). If you need food you collect it yourself (like coconuts or fish).  If your child falls and knocks out a tooth you... go to the dentist that's bound to be anchored close. The stone age might feel great but when my child hurts herself it's great to have a doctor or two nearby.  So why am I talking about doctors today? It's because they are all here, I take a wild guess that about 25% of the boats we meet have at least one doctor onboard.  Compared to the general doctor per inhabitant ratio in EU which is roughly 1 doctor per 1000 inhabitants   When My knocked out a tooth we didn't just go to our 2 doctor friends. No we looked a little bit more in the anchorage. There were 8 boats so of course we found a dental surgeon (no mere dentist for us) that could help My. C

From Bob Marley to Paul Gauguin

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  Yo mon! In the last couple of months we have sailed from Bob Marley in Jamaica all the way to Paul Gauguin in French Polynesia in the middle of the Pacific. As usual there have been ups and downs but things keeps getting better and better and now here in the middle of the Pacific it feels quite amazing! The water is full of fish, we trade old ropes for fruits with the locals. There is almost no shopping or people in general. The girls right below the Bob Marley statue in Kingston, Jamaica. We didn't go into the museum due to cost and the general tourist trap feeling. We also noticed a funny thing about Jamaica. We heard no reggae anywhere! All over the Caribbean we have enjoyed the reggae but when we come to the homeland of reggae they seems to have tired of it. On the other hand euro disco like Ace of Base still seemed to be in fashion.  I found this in a Jamaican supermarket. Here they have no pretence of fancy wine. Instead you can enjoy this lovely 3,4L plastic jug of "B

Deep in the Caribbean

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 Deep in the Caribbean Since Christmas we have been cruising the Caribbean and stopped everywhere. This is actually our third seasons in the Caribbean, we did 2 seasons there on our last circ umnavigation, but we are still finding a lot of new places and things. Instead of the normal chronological stuff I'll just post some random things here. One thing that gives me a lot of pleasure is lobstering. On our last circumnavigation I just caught a few lobsters but now I'm the terror of the crustacean population. :D Lobster BBQ Look at that BEAST! (the lobster is nice too) Champagne bottle for scale  In the Grenadines the girls found the tortoise island (Baliceaux) and started a farm.  Collecting the livestock Managing the farm We visited some nice beaches. This is the girls looking at some wild horses that lived on the beach in Barbuda. How is that for Paradise!?! Only wild animals in this picture In Cuba the girls finally realised a life long dream of riding in a pink car. PIIINK!

Portugal to the Caribbean

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Portugal to the Caribbean Oh man did we have some adventures on this stretch! So as you might know there have been some Orcas that attack yachts along the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic coast. In general the Orcas attack and destroy the rudder of yachts, a costly and slow thing to fix that could well mean the premature end of an atlantic crossing. When we were planning our next stop after Nasare. we heards that the Orcas were attacking boats just in the next port south of us. So we decided to sail straight for Madeira and thereby avoid the orcas. So we set the autopilot to take us straight out into the atlantic. At sunset we heard a Mayday on the VHF from a boat just where we would have been if we continued south instead of twest. The Orcas had stuck again! Later we heard the boat was towed back to shore with a destroyed rudder.  After this we had a lovely sail to Porto Santo (close to Madeira) and had a great time for a couple of weeks. < Mountaineering in Porto Santo Then we sail