some pictures from my time on zephyr over the last few months:

the beauty of cocos.

24?! that's like a real person age. good thing i live in never never land.

my friends paul and sima from boston pose in front of zephyr on the docks in darwin.

maeva, chloe, and lucie. my three friends on rodri and mauritius. i made us paella (which i think was my worst one so far. it was a little crunchy. i choked!) for dinner and they taught me how to do a crepe suzette afterwards.

lots of crops in all the valleys of rodri.

unfortunately i don't speak creole so we just smiled at each other.

big spiders on rodrigues.

i rented a scooter and cruised up and down the windy mountain roads of rodrigues.

one of the better camp sites i've ever stayed at. myself and my three french friends "made sleep under ze stars" (as they would say). thanks for taking me here girls! my time on rodrigues and mauritius would not have been near as special without you.

giant tortoise on rodrigues (mauritius). these guys are friendly. and very lethargic. they also love it when you pet them. this one crooned as i massaged his long, wrinkly neck.

there were so many of these guys in the middle of the indian ocean. up on deck each morning you could find upwards of 100 flying fish. mouths gaping, their big morbid eyes stare at you from their final resting places.

on sailing to rodrigues and mauritius instead of madagascar

so just before leaving cocos - literally five minutes before raising our anchor - we got wind of pirates near madagascar. three incidents to be exact. my initial reaction: "cool!!! that's even better!!! we're still going, right???" but alas, the decision had already been made, and the captain decided it better to sail to the islands of rodrigues and mauritius than to risk battling pirates on the high seas near madagascar. but come on guys, real life pirates! maybe another time.

On the upside rodrigues and mauritius are tiny in comparison to madagascar so it is much more manageable to see these islands in a short amount of time. and i made friends on rodrigues. three french girls who are soon-to-be nurses on reunion island. their english is not bad but certainly not perfect and my french is non-existant so we had a fun time communicating with hand signals and sound effects at times as we explored the island (and to their credit, we often spoke in english as best we could).

geoff said he wanted sushi for his birthday dinner. so i caught a mahi and prepared us some fresh sushi.

a few of my pet sharks on cocos. there were eight black tip reef sharks in total. one time they were all swimming circles around me after i jumped off the boat. this is probably because i often fed them fish scraps. i wanted to hand feed them but i thought better of it in the end. i also tried to pet them but they got scared and always swam away.

it's tough at the top.

it speaks for itself i think.

our anchorage off direction island, cocos (keeling).

the cocos to rodrigues passage was quite a quick passage with strong winds and a sizeable swell especially at the beginning. It was my first time experiencing seas of up to 6 meters. makes me want more! well, not really. I take that one back. although many of the bigger swells were just gentle giants, and certainly weren't breaking, it's still strange to be looking up at the sea. other events on the sail from cocos? Early on when the weather was really squally and it was an uncomfortable ride i proclaimed myself a witch and set out to cast a few sea calming spells. by morning, what-a-ya-know the swell has abated! My revelry is short lived though. Over the course of my next four or five shifts on the following days i am hammered by numerous squalls and drenched by their rains. "yeah, don't fuck with me" says mother nature.