We are two Australians who are going grey while going blue.
This is an example of Australian humour. In fact, under Australian humour “rules” we probably should have been “red nomads”: see here for one reason why, which is also why Richard Branson’s Virgin Blue airline had red livery.
The phrase “grey nomads” is used for those who are older (grey hair), retired (not obligatory!) and travel extensively. Often the travel is by caravan or RV. In our case, we aren’t retired yet, one of us has rather grey hair, and we do plan to travel extensively. But proto-grey-nomads just doesn’t have the same ring… Since our travel will be – at least partly – through our own boat, we decided on “going blue”.
The boat is only a means to the future of travel we will do together. But it’s hard to plan the places without the means, so we have bought our boat and are trying to work out what effect covid-19 has had on our plans! Many of the initial posts are going to be about practical things like buying the boat, fixing things, learning and planning rather than the actual travel. Stay tuned though – the travel will come!
We found our boat in mid 2018 after defining what we want. We found a candidate and purchased our vessel in October 2018. Being special ourselves, the boat is too – there is only one of her on this planet, and she happened to be nearly in the antipodes to us in the Caribbean! Some photos, and renaming and re-flagging has occurred (re-flagging means changing the country the boat is registered with – every boat going out of or into a country’s waters must be registered) and Blu Emu is now Australian (why Blu Emu?!). We have shipped her to the UK, and covid-19 means we are planning a new future…
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Electrification big picture
As I wrote previously, we are going to make our lovely Blu Emu into a parallel hybrid. The key though is how we want to be a hybrid. A hybrid sailing vessel can plan on using their electrical propulsion only when entering or leaving a harbour or mooring, essentially only a small part of the…
Hybrid electric power for Blu Emu
This post will be controversial for some readers, but we like the idea of electric power for our Blu Emu. This post is an introduction to why we want to use it, what we would use it for, and how we intend to actually implement it. At the moment, this is all based on research…
An Itty-Bitty Grub Screw Nearly Sank Blu Emu!
G’day there, well, here is my long awaited first blog post. I’m not going to bore you with the many reasons why it’s taken 12 months to write this after the fact, but it’s done. Yes, it’s true what the title states, a misaligned 10mm grub screw nearly sank the boat and why it happened…
Blue Nomads 