Short Stories

It is a big day in every sailor’s life when they cross the equator for the first time. Then they go from being a pollywog to being a shellback. Traditionally there’s a whole ceremony around it where they have to ask King Neptune to cross and offer rites as thanks. We skipped all that as […]

Both our rudders broke on our crossing from Sulawesi to Halamahera and we had to navigate in through a reef on a remote island in the middle of the Moluccan Sea. If you haven’t read that crazy story, you should. Check it out here: We lost both rudders. My plan was to build some emergency […]

It was in the middle of the night. We were on our way from Bitung to Tifure Island, crossing the Moluccan Sea, around 70 nautical miles. Darkness pressed in around us, with thunderclouds in the horizon, but above us we could see the stars clearly. So far we had great conditions for our crossing. A […]

Out of everything in our whole voyage, the check-in process to Indonesia was the part I dreaded most. I had read early on that Indonesian bureaucracy was something that should be respected (if not feared). Sailors had told many tales of bad clashes with immigration and customs. In that process I learnt two vital things: […]

It all happened so fast! Suddenly we are ready to set sail towards Indonesia. The engine is working and we have done our provisions. We have prepared for this moment, but at the same time, it is a bit unreal to be setting off. Are we ready? Will we make it? As a crew, we […]

We are stuck without a working engine for the Vaka Hop’e. We just launched our boat, and found that the engine we believed was fixed is now completely dead. I believed I had discovered the culprit to our problems in a broken CDI unit, but our mechanic doubted that. Either we wait for the mechanic […]

After a month of battling termite-damaged bulkheads and a cranky engine, we have finally launched the boat and are floating. But on the very first test sail, the engine dies completely and we are drifting helplessly out to sea. There have been so many setbacks and disappointments, that we had plenty of reason to give […]

We are finally ready to do the last push to launch the boat! Exactly one month after arriving in the Philippines, the Vaka Hop’e is ready to be pushed into the water. We met a few setbacks and challenges in coming here, but in the end, we are ready just in time for all the […]

Getting the Vaka Hop’e to the Solomon Islands required a lot of preparations. Granted, I had already sailed her 500 miles in the Philippines last year, and we have most of the things we need to live onboard. But this time we would be crossing borders and crossing oceans, and that required a different kind […]

The unveiling of the Vaka Hop’e went better than feared. Other than it being a little dirty and having small ecosystems growing in some places, it looked great! I was optimistic that we would have few problems in preparation for launching. Before leaving the boat I had written a little list of things to fix […]