One day in the spring of 2021, while going through a closet full of stuff in our Massachusetts condo, out slid a box of old paper charts from our voyage. I reached into the stack and a large chart of Bora-Bora unfolded itself in my hands. The perfect circle of reef, the lagoon of dazzling blue, clouds streaming like cotton from the island’s volcanic peaks – it was all suddenly real. The South Pacific, and the promise of cruising New Zealand waters, had enchanted us again. We had to go.
THE PLAN
We sketched a plan. From our home port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in November we’d head to Bermuda, then Puerto Rico, then the Panama Canal, the Galapagos, French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, the Kingdom of Tonga, Fiji, and arrive in New Zealand a year later. About 10,300 nautical miles, most
