Sorry for the long blog silence. We had a great time in Okinawa, so great in fact that we did not have time to write. We met many lovely new people, saw new marine wildlife, witnessed a sports fishing competition, visited one of the world’s largest aquariums, took a magical evening walk in a park where tens and tens of fireflies swarmed around us, and contemplated the futility of warfare at the Peace Memorial Park. We played billiards, threw darts and went bowling – all things that we would not normally have had time to do as a family. Of course, the girls have also done schoolwork, and we have worked on the boat, and handled other everyday tasks such as cooking, cleaning and laundry that are way harder to do on the boat than on land.
We have also re-evaluated our sailing plans for this year. Ideally, we would now be in the Russian city of Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka peninsula. However, we are just too late to make it up north during the summer. Timing-wise, things started to go wrong from the very beginning, with the Northeast Monsoon never giving us the break we were looking for to cross over to Taiwan. That lead us to making the decision to sail down to the Philippines first, which in turn led us to experience some very bad weather and forced us to stay in Subic Bay for longer than intended. The weather in Japan has also been a surprise to us. We knew that these sea areas would be rough, but we were not really ready for there to be such a regular and frequent pattern of gale-force winds (and mostly from the wrong direction too). As we are a slow boat, we mostly need at a minimum one night, two days of good weather to make a crossing between any two Japanese ports, and such weather windows have been rare. Therefore, progress has been slow. Japan is a very long country (the ordinary map distorts the size of Japan – the country is over 3000 km in length), so to get from Ishigaki to Hokkaido takes a very long time and requires a considerable amount of days with good sailing weather.
We are not complaining, however. We were originally not meant to visit the Philippines, but ended up having a really interesting time there – we’ll never forget the pristine snorkeling waters of Hermana Menor, the lovely hotel owner in San Fernando who not only let us stay anchored at the hotel beach but helped us in every way imaginable, or the two nights anchored in the middle of a river in busy Aparri where fishermen came to take photos of us. Likewise, even though we were never intending to stay in some of the Japanese ports for so long, we’ve met the loveliest of people and have had amazing experiences in those ports. Even the experience of very heavy weather in the South China Sea taught us an awful lot, so we would not even trade that experience away!
Accordingly, we’ll gladly take whatever this year still has in store for us, and will continue to enjoy the opportunity to sail along the Japanese islands for now. As the weather continues to play tricks on us though and it is very frustrating to constantly wait for a weather window that never arrives, we’ve decided to wait 2-3 weeks for the seasonal rain front to pass further north before continuing further into Kyushu. We’ve found a good place to leave the boat in the Ryukyu island chain and will take a short “holiday from the holiday” in Europe. We’ll try to write a couple of overdue blog posts about our sailing trip while in Europe, but the next time our boat moves will not be until mid-July at the earliest.
