Merry Christmas and happy new year to all!

Our family traveled to Malta for Christmas but returned to Palma due to a high number of COVID cases in Malta.

While in Malta we have registered our Koopmans 45 “Sunday island” to Valletta Malta and received our new official number, call sign and MMSI.

People often ask the origins of the name “Sunday Island”. Previous owner of 30 years Peter Voogd chose the name Sunday Island from the story of a young man J.W.Wray living near Auckland in 1937. Having no job he started building the wooden yacht Ngataki, from logs collected from the beaches.

With friends he undertook long voyages in the Pacific, one of the first islands discovered was Sunday Island. There is a book of his hand: South Sea Vagabonds, a remarkable story how to design your own boat, to build it and make it seaworthy, without money, and sail the seven seas.

Sunday Island is part of the Kermadec group otherwise known as Raoul island to the North of New Zealand.

The boat was well build and survived, she is now in the collection, with other iconic yachts, of the British Maritime Heritage Museum.

We are now back in Palma and our intentions to return to “Sunday Island” for the new year have been flawed with Emilie testing positive to COVID. Thankfully Emilie is recovering well but we remain stuck in Isolation at our house. What a shame we are not Isolated on Sunday Island in the Pacific!

Hopefully we are back onboard for some time in January.