2019
Rireana spent another cyclone season in Vanuatu over the 2018/2019 cyclone period. After she finished her work in 2018, she was hauled out on the railway (by a winch mounted on a tractor) at the Port Vila boatyard, stripped of all her deck paraphernalia, and lashed down to large concrete blocks embedded in the ground. […]
2016 – 2018
Rireana at anchor at Lolowai on the island of Ambae in 2017 We have been lax at updating the sailing log. We apologise. We have been more focused on the operations of the Trust than recording the life of Rireana. So set out below is a […]
2015
Well what a year that was! Category 5 Cyclone Pam struck Vanuatu on Friday, 13 March 2015 causing incredible damage. Rireana was on her mooring in Port Vila Harbour. We were in Auckland trying to get on a plane to Vila having just flown in from a scoping trip to India and Bangladesh. We had […]
2014
We re-joined Rireana in early March 2014 in Port Vila where she had spent the previous 3 months on a cyclone mooring. After working in Port Vila we set sail for Noumea, New Caledonia, in early May. Our purpose in going to Noumea was to haul the boat out of the water for maintenance. We […]
2013: Season Four
We launched Rireana at the end of the cyclone season on 30 April 2013. We had spent the previous 6 weeks preparing her for another season of work in the tropics. After launching we proceeded to a mooring in Port Vila Harbour and lived and worked there before heading north to Malekula at the beginning […]
2012: Season Three
New Caledonia In mid-April 2012 we arrived back in Port du Sud marina, Noumea, and boarded Rireana. Thierry had kept very good care of her and we soon had her back in living order. On 1 May, the end of the cyclone season, we hauled Rireana out of the water at Nouville Plaisance, also in […]
Help with transporting donated items to Vanuatu’s outer islands
The problem of transport and access Transporting items to the Maskelynes continues to be a challenge with no direct access by road or air. We are very grateful to the captain and crew of Tallship “Soren Larsen” for helping with the transport from New Zealand of donated items of medicines, books and clothing over the […]
Photographs of ‘Rireana’, our home and pivotal member of the Butterfly Trust
We use our yacht, Rireana, as a base for the work of the Butterfly Trust. Rireana is an Owen Woolley designed yacht, 10.6m long, 3.0m in the beam, with a draft of 1.9m. She is sloop rigged with an added inner forestay. She is constructed of wood – triple skin, diagonally planked kauri – […]
2011: Season Two
We returned to Rireana in February 2011 (after a stint in far north Queensland looking after the vanilla farm of Fiona and Matt George-Allen). We then did a lot of maintenance work on Rireana, before heading south through the Sandy Straits to Mooloolaba and Brisbane. We eventually ended up at Scarborough Marina just north […]
2010: Rireana’s maiden voyage to the Pacific
Journey to the Pacific We sailed from Opua, New Zealand, in June 2010, with Tim Frost as crew, and headed directly for Port Vila in Vanuatu. The trip took about 10 days and was largely incident free. Lynn suffered from bad seasickness initially but in the last 2 or 3 days, when we were being […]