Endless Summer

This one is for Daily Post

This week’s Photo Challenge ‘Summer Lovin’ made me think about how much I’ve enjoyed a summer like warmth since joining SV Amandla.  The irony is, I haven’t lived in actual ‘summer’ since I boarded the boat.

How’s that?  Its all about avoiding the cyclone season while sailing.

I joined Amandla in February, 2013 in Isla Mujeres, Mexico during the Northern Hemisphere winter. Mexico as you can imagine is a wonderful place to be at that time of year.

Unfortunately, the winds changed the day that I arrived, so the next day, we sailed on to Florida for a month of refitting the boat and provisioning for a long journey ahead.  Still, Florida is not a bad place to spend the winter.

We finished preparations for our Pacific voyage the day after spring arrived.  Now we just had to get to the Pacific.  Our route from the Atlantic: The Bahamas, Jamaica, and Panama.

Certainly the highlight of this was our crossing of the Panama Canal on April 18-19, 2013.

We left Panama on May 4, 2013 and headed for Galapagos, 1 degree south of the equator, and back into autumn.  Despite its proximity to the equator, temperatures in the Galapagos are relatively cool because of the Humboldt Current.  Of course, this was light sweater cool, not Polar Vortex cool.

We sadly had to leave Galapagos after 20 days as Amandla’s ‘visa’ was up.  We left on a 21 day passage to The Gambiers at 23 degrees south, arriving just in time for the Southern Hemisphere winter.  Although cooler than the other French Polynesia archipelagos further north, the Gambiers were still relatively temperate.

We enjoyed a lovely spring in the tropical Marquesas and Tuamotus in French Polynesia and started northward to The Big Island of Hawaii as the spring was preparing to turn into summer in the Southern Hemisphere.

Winter turned to spring in the Northern Hemisphere while we were in Oahu.

At the end of April, we set sail to return to French Polynesia in the Southern Hemisphere, visiting Huahine and Taha’a in the autumn, and welcoming the warm winter in Bora Bora.

We have since divided our time between Tahiti, Moorea and Raiatea.

So where from here?  Current plans are to leave Polynesia at the beginning of August and then head to New Zealand via Suwarrow, Western Samoa and Tonga.  We will spend the 2014-2015 Southern Hemisphere cyclone season in New Zealand which is considered a safe place to anchor.  It will be the first time that I will experience ‘actual summer’ on SV Amandla.