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Firefly - Extending Firefly's voyage



We are into day 4 of the crossing from Galapagos to French Polynesia and now that we are settled into our routines I wanted to let our friends and family who are following our voyage that we are making a significant change to our plans.......

Firefly will be spending an extra year in the South Pacific and visiting New Zealand during the next Northern Hemisphere winter.

Having introduced annual World ARC rallies starting from this year, World Cruising are also offering the option for World ARC participants to drop off the rally for a year and rejoin the next one as it comes through.

Susie and I have been interested in this option for sometime. Now we are underway and have some experience of long term cruising, we have decided that we are unlikely to get the opportunity to visit New Zealand again on our own yacht and have signed up.

The cruising plan changes as follows;

We sail with World ARC 14/15 as far as Fiji and stay there when the fleet leaves for Vanuatu in early July 2014. In July will do some extended cruising around Fiji with our daughter, Rosy and then haul out during August and head back to the UK for a month or so. Returning in September we will take a our time cruising through Vanuatu, and then reach New Caledonia by Mid October. World Cruising will then arrange for us to join an existing rally (Its called something like 'All Points South' and arranged by a NZ cruising association) and that will take us the 900nm to Opua in the Bay of Islands, North Island, NZ by early November. Firefly will be based in NZ until May 2015 and during that time we expect to circumnavigate the North Island and spend time on the North of the South Island (great Sauvignon Blanc!). We anticipate taking another trip home in April 2015 before World Cruising arrange a small rally to feed us back to Fiji, hopefully taking in some of the more remote southern islands en route. We join World ARC 15/16 in Fiji in July 2015 and finish our circumnavigation via Australia, Bali, Cocos, Mauritius, Reunion, South Africa, St Helena and Brazil, returning to St Lucia in the Caribbean by April 2016.

Several of the current World ARC boats will also be dropping off the rally at the same time. Some are only signed up to go as far as Australia anyway and although its not confirmed as yet, Firefly will be part of a small fleet of between 5 to 10 current World ARC boats going to NZ.

Finally, the wind has filled in well from the South/South East and Firefly is making good progress, beam reaching towards the Marquesas in 12 to 15 knots of wind with a favourable current - long may it last!

Paul

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