Morumba is a gorgeous bay that is the most prototypically Malagasy place we visited. It’s made up of a couple of tiny fishing settlements, several islands spread out among a lagoon, and plenty of baobab trees and lemurs. The small…
Madagascar: Nosy Lava
After a full day and night of sailing from Nosy Be arrived at Nosy Lava, a small uninhabited island and former prison colony about 80 miles to the south. The island has a really nice reef surrounding it and is…
Boat Life: The Boat
Obelisk is the sailing boat version of a Sherman tank.The model of the boat is a Sky 51 which was an American design built in Taiwan in 1982. At 51 feet and 22 tons she’s much longer and heavier and…
Madagascar: Nosy Be
We arrived in Nosy Be in the late afternoon of 11/7. The anchorage was beautiful and we were surprised at how many other cruising sail boats there were (probably around 6). We talked with an American boat and learned that…
Madagascar: Nosy Hara and Mitsio
The sail to from Diego Suarez to Nosy Hara involved going over the northern cape of Madagascar, which can potentially be tricky, but for us it was really beautiful, maybe the most enjoyable day of sailing I’ve had so far.…
Madagascar: Diego Suarez
Diego Suarez sits in a gigantic deep water harbor and gets its name from the Portuguese sailor who discovered it almost 500 years ago. It’s one of the main commercial harbors in Madagascar and is probably the biggest city in northern…
Passage: Reunion to Madagascar
We all had a great time in Reunion, but by the time we set sail out of St Pierre on October 26th we were more than ready to get to Africa. Before we could start the big sail, around 550…
Reunion Island
La Reunion is part French Riviera, part former African colony. It has fancy boulangeries and casinos with high stakes poker tournaments as well as mountain hamlets with no road access that once served as a refugee for escaped African slaves.…
Passage: Mauritius to Reunion
We sailed back down to Port Louis to that we could check out of the country. They were closed by the time we arrived so we spent a night tied up to the customs dock, then checked out in the…
Mauritius: Grand Bay and Beyond
Grand Bay is a beautiful little bay that is very crowded with tourists and boats. This is Mauritius’s low season but there were still around 10 catamarans full of tourists that would leave the bay and sail out to a nearby…