Dana - Intro to Rhapsodie Cruise

Good evening ladies and gentlemen,

 Tonight my sister and I are going to show you all some slides of our adventures living on a sailboat for five years. We lived in the bay area until 1999, when I was seven, and Rachael was nine, when we departed on our voyage. We traveled mostly in the South Pacific, visiting many beautiful isolated islands, some where we were the first white people the locals had ever seen. Throghout our travels, we were homeschooled, and in addition attended school in Australia and New Zealand for about a year. 

Our sailboat is a catamaran, which means that it has two hulls (hand motion), and it is 53 feet long. On our boat, we had a water desalinator, which enabled us to extract fresh water from the sea. We had a generator, solar panels, and many batteries that provided our electricity.  Our food supplies were comprised of the canned goods and such that we stocked up on in California, local produce that we often traded for, and many fish that we caught along the way. 

Our days were spent doing schoolwork, exploring the islands and villages, swimming a lot, hiking, snorkeling, and sailing. We had  a pet turtle named speedy who entertained us on long, lonely passages. There were many other people traveling on sailboats that we encountered during our journies, some of them our age, that we hung out with.

Our lifestyle during those years was very simple, and we miss it.( put map up)

This is a map of the south pacific, for those of you who didn’t know that. California is in the upper right corner, not displayed. 

We started in San Francisco, sailed down to Ensenada, Mexico, where we began the longest single passage of our trip, 21 days long, crossing the Pacific. We ended up in the Marquesis, part of French Polynesia. We then sailed to the tuamotu archipelago, the society islands, which include Tahiti and Bora Bora. From there we went to the cook islands, samoa, fiji, where we spent a year sailing to many islands, Vanuatu, and new Caledonia. From there we sailed to new Zealand, where we traveled the country on land, and Australia, where we lived for a year, attending school . After that, we went to Papua New Guinea, probably the most exotic of the places we visited, and back to Hawaii and finally good old California.

That is enough talking for now, keep some questions in mind for after the show, and enjoy the pictures.