Merry Christmas!

Team Lovinda is still back home in Norway, and the Christmas we should have been celebrating in South Africa this year, will be celebrated with the family: mothers, daughters and grandchildren here.

 New rudder added on and painted, tower corrected and topsides polished. Ready to sail away again, whenever we are!

The repair of Lovinda too in Opua is by now almost finished. TTT, we say in Norway (Things Takes Time).

Realizing that there would be no more sailing in the Tasman sea this year, flying home and staying home was the most reasonable thing the stranded skipper could do. In the meantime Irene has retired from work, although she is still doing some work one day per week for the hospital management.

We are thinking about the very nice people we have met during the first half of our circumnavigation. Some of you are still in the Atlantic, some in the Pacific, some in the West Indies, in South America, New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam,Thailand and South Africa. Some of you may already have returned home, to Norway, Australia, Germany, Canada and Hungary in some way or another. Besides seeing the world, or rather some of it, meeting you people, is probably one of the most exciting achievements about travelling around the world.

We are looking forward to returning to NZ to continue our journey before the start of the next sailing season in the southern Pacific in April 2017.  We are also looking forward to seeing some of you again, and meeting people we do not know yet.

It is our intention to staying with our initial, brief plan to leave NZ in early May and navigate for New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Solomon islands, Papua NewGuinea, Australia, Indonesia, Cocos Keeling, Christmas Island, Mauritius, Madagaskar and South Africa within the end of 2017. Further sailing home via st. Helena, south America, the west Indies before crossing back to Europe late spring 2018. Whether it will be via the Azores og Iceland is not yet decided. It is a long way to go, but we are hoping for a safe return back home the summer of 2018.

In the meantime we wish all our friends and followers of this website a merry Chirstmas and a happy new year!

 yeah, its hard to be a “Nisse”?