London to Auckland

This post in memory of Douglas John Ell and Vanessa Margaret Beare Dear Friends/Supporters You have probably noticed that not much info has been forthcoming in the past few days. I apologize for that but there is a very good reason. We did make the south coast of Turkey at Fenike two days ago but [...]

[Read more →]

We’re still here. Hoping the parts will arrive today. If they do we ‘ll be off on a mission tomorrow to make Cairo by Saturday afternoon so watch the tracker. Cheers J

[Read more →]

What would you do if stuck in north western Turkey waiting for parts? The answer was obvious to us so we hired a car and visited the Gallipoli Peninsular. This is the site of a major battle in 1915 between Commonwealth forces and the Turks in an attempt to control shipping in the Dardanelles and [...]

[Read more →]

Most of you will be aware that this ride was seriously underfunded from the start. But we persevered because it’s a great cause and we were optimistic that more funding would come. But until yesterday that wasn’t the case and with expenses on our credit cards reaching their limits, I put out an emergency call [...]

[Read more →]

We had asked the boys from Aqua Motors who had done the service to pick us up from our hotel at 6.45am for a 7am departure, but they were late so we caught a cab to the marina thinking they might be there waiting. They weren’t. They were now waiting outside our hotel. We couldn’t [...]

[Read more →]

Today we spent the day repairing the damage to Ivan’s Seadoo and doing a routine service on all three.Thanks to Vidal Itkin and the boys from Aqua Motors for all their good work and assistance. In the evening we had a wonderful Turkish dinner on the waterfront near our hotel. I hate to take advantage [...]

[Read more →]

Waking at 7.30 we ate breakfast and then decided to head down to customs via the Seadoos. When we got to the Seadoos, we were again thrown into shock. Some one had got on them to steal from the glove boxes and front compartments and had untied Ivan’s front rope. This meant that his machine [...]

[Read more →]

We had planned to leave Port Tomis at 6am to avoid the wind and after a minor mechanical, got going at 630am but the wind was up already. The wind was howling from the north west and the sea was getting rougher all the time so we curved in towards the Bulgarian coast to avoid [...]

[Read more →]

There are some who say that the Black Sea is always rough. I for one can not argue this point. We had a late start out of Tulcea due to the fuel pump opening time and the need to change dollars to kashushniks at the local money changer to pay for the fuel. By the [...]

[Read more →]

Fuel is turning out to be our biggest nightmare. It is so difficult to find it and it’s very expensive. We can use 750L in a day. Here in Turkey it is 2 Euros per liter. That’s 4 NZ dollars. You do the math. Even if we did have the money to pay for it, [...]

[Read more →]