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Please keep in mind that we can only check this email account when we get to a place with internet access. Usually we are able to check email pretty often. Sometimes not so often. We’d love to hear from you.
About Legacy
Legacy is a 1989 Catalina 38 designed by Sparkman and Stephens. We’ve owned Legacy since 1998 and have sailed her to Hawaii and back twice, all through Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, and across the Pacific to New Zealand and Australia. She’s carried us over a lot of water. Before that, Legacy’s previous owner, Larry Newland, sailed her to Mexico, Hawaii and to New Zealand. His trip from New Zealand to Fiji put her in one of the worst storms ever in that area: the Queen’s Birthday Storm, where Legacy weathered the 50 foot seas and 70 knot winds without event. Below is a summary log with what we’ve done since we’ve had Legacy…
So what’s next? What’s the plan? You’ll be sorry you asked…
Here’s where we write about our plans, which are firmly cast in butter! We’re leaving the old plans just to be able to look back and see how wrong we were.
Update: The Plan 8.0… Updated April 3, 2023 We’re in Darwin today but won’t be tonight as we’re heading to Saumlaki, Indonesia this afternoon. From there we plan to cruise north to Raja Ampat. After that, we’ll just have to see what happens. We have a visa for Indonesia that can be renewed for up to six months. We’d like to spend longer than that in Indo before heading on to Malasya, Thailand, Singapore – South East Asia in general. Wow, our plans are getting vague!
Update: The Plan 7.0… Updated June 2021 Covid… need I say more? We were planning to head form here in Auckland to Fiji but then there was a bad outbreak. Scratch Fiji. Now we’re hoping to sail to Australia in the next two months, but that’s looking iffy. We have come to accept that plans at this point are foolish and our only goal is to be happy where ever we happen to be or end up.
Update: The Plan 6.0… Updated September 2, 2019 As we sit in our AirBnb condo in Hawaii, taking four months away from cruising, and contemplating the future, we might be less sure of “The Plan” than we ever have been before (that, or we are now thoroughly familiar with how plans change so only rough them in and wait to see what happens). We’ll get back to Legacy in Christchurch, New Zealand in early October. We hope to spend about a month there before making a leisurely trip to Nelson. From Nelson, we hope to get a weather window to sail directly to Hobart, Tasmania. We’ll spend somewhere between four months and two years in Australia, and then it’s off to Indonesia. Well, probably.
Update: The Plan 5.0… Updated December 10, 2018 We discovered how outdated our old plan was while sitting here in Fiji (at the end of our Farewell-Fiji tour), waiting for weather to go back to NZ. And that’s the first part of our current plan – get to New Zealand. (If not, plan B is Australia.) If it works out and we do get to New Zealand for this cyclone season, we’d like to circumnavigate the South Island. Then it’s off to Vanuatu one more time (a farewell tour) with stops at New Caledonia. Form there, Australia and probably Tasmania again. Then it’ll be time to starting thinking about leaving the cul-de-sac and heading on to Indonesia. This was supposed to be a trip around the world, but we seem to have lingered a bit in the South Pacific. Oh well – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Update: The Plan 4.0… Updated April 18, 2017 Tasmania was wonderful. In fact, this last season in Oz has been wonderful. Now what? Good question. We’re going to leave Australia soon for New Caledonia, then up to Vanuatu (haven’t been there yet), back to New Caledonia and then off to New Zealand for cyclone season. We’d planned to try to sail around New Zealand’s South Island but maybe not this time. We’re thinking about trying to find a place to settle for a few months – maybe the entire cyclone season – so we can work on a new idea (we were inventors in a past life). After that, all I can say is that these are the bucket list items before we leave this area of the pacific…
- New Zealand, South Island
- Tasmania once more
- Fiji once more
- Australia’s northeast coast and the Great Barrier Reef
- Palau
How and if we do these is anyone’s guess.
Update: The Plan 3.0… Updated June 15, 2016 We’re late leaving New Zealand this season. The weather has been very difficult. The plan is to head from where we are now, Gisborne, to Opua, wait for weather, check out and sail to New Caledonia. From there, we’d like to go to Vanuatu. Towards the end of the cruising season, we plan to head back to New Cal, then since we’ve stayed so long in NZ this year and will have visa issues (we think – don’t know for sure), we’ll head to Australia (again). We flew to Melbourne last year to extend our NZ visas (yea, crazy, we know) and we both loved it. What an amazing city!
We’ve also heard such wonderful things about Tasmania that we think we’d like to try it. After spending cyclone season in Oz, who knows. I guess it’ll be back to the tropics, then back to NZ for one more season – hopefully in the South Island. I think I’d like to head on through Indonesia, but Cyndi’s pretty insistent on another NZ season and I follow orders well. Long term? We’re still thinking about a circumnavigation, but who knows? “Long term” is a long way off. For now, we’ll just keep doing this while we can and while it’s fun. If you read the previous plans, you’ll see this one is a lot more fluid. Time, wind and the seas are teaching us about making hard, fast plans!
Update: The Plan 2.0… Updated February 22, 2013 Our Immediate Plan: Right now, we’re out cruising, on our way to Tauranga. There, we’ll haul the boat out, do some boat maintenance chores, and explore cities south of Tauranga by car. We think we’ll jump off for the tropics from Tauranga sometime in May 2014 – destinations: Minerva Reefs, Nuie maybe, Tonga maybe, Fiji, Vanauatu, New Caladonia and then, weather permitting, sail back to New Zealand and land in Nelson on the South Island where we’ll spend the cyclone season. If the weather doesn’t cooperate, it’ll be Fiji and then back to Opua. Our Short-Term Plan: Our plans have changed now that we’ve been in New Zealand for a while. (For our original plan, see 1.0 below.) We now think we’d like to come back to New Zealand for several (or maybe many) southern summers. This May, we’ll sail up to Fiji and spend New Zealand’s winter in the tropics. In November or so, we’ll sail back to New Zealand.
We could see repeating this cycle quite a few times, maybe adding in Vanauatu, New Caladonia, Tonga and maybe even Australia. After this, we’d like to end up in Australia for a while, then maybe sail to Southeast Asia, spend some time there, then try to make our way back to Australia, maybe via Micronesia.
Our Long-Term Plan: After bopping about the Western South Pacific for the next three to eight years or so, we think we’d like to sell Legacy in Australia, then maybe buy a boat on the US east coast or even Europe to use to sail the cruising grounds on the other side of the world. Our route for the next few years might look something like this…
Update: December 27, 2016 We got curious about what our tracks really look like and how much they’d resemble the hastily drawn plan above. Here’s the result:
Red is what we’ve done and purple is what we plan to do in this next season. Pretty close, isn’t it? (Evolving Plans)
The Plan 1.0… (As of about May, 2012) OK, here’s what we know, or think we know: Catalina Island is our first stop. Here we’ll rest for a few days after the preparations, make a few last minute adjustments and fixes and then head out. Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands. This is about a 2850 mile trip from Catalina.
The Marquesas are about 800 miles northeast of Tahiti. We’ll visit five or six different islands in the Marquesas. The Tuamotus are the next stop on our way to Tahiti. These old volcanic islands have little left above the surface but a ring of a sandy island with beautiful coral reefs. Tahiti and its surrounding islands, Moorea and Bora Bora are where we hope to spend a good part of the three months we are allowed to stay in French Polynesia.
From French Polynesia, at this point, we’re planning to head to American Samoa and Western Samoa but time and winds will tell. From there, we’ll sail to New Zealand maybe with brief visits in Fiji and Tonga. New Zealand is where we’ll spend the tropical South Pacific’s cyclone season. We should have about six months to explore.
For our second cruising season, we plan to head back into the tropical South Pacific and spend a lot of time in Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu and New Caledonia. Then it’s on to Australia to wait out the cyclone season. After that, our plans are pretty vague. We’d like to head into the tropical North Pacific and visit Palau and the surrounding islands. We have a lot of time to firm up this plan. In general, this is the start of an open-ended circumnavigation. If we find a place we’d like to settle down or stay for a while, we will, otherwise we’ll keep on moving until we circle the globe and end up back in the USA.