Vagabond Voyagesvideo
Dream VS Reality: Couple Life on a Sailboat & Rolling Anchorage / Tablet or iPad for Sailing? #101
November 21, 2025 · 21 min · 8K views · Niué
What this video covers
Tom and Anissia spend ten days moored at Niue in the South Pacific before departing on a 250-nautical-mile, roughly 50-hour passage to Vava'u, Tonga, crossing the International Date Line and losing one calendar day.Watch The Niue anchorage rolls badly whenever swell arrives from the north or south; crossing northerly and southerly swells — the latter running 2.5 meters — made sleep impossible on multiple nights, forcing the couple to sleep in separate berths.2:57 Tom addresses couple life aboard directly: 24-hour togetherness creates tension, and separate sleeping arrangements are more common among liveaboard couples than outsiders assume.3:03 Departure costs at Niue total NZD 350, covering customs, mooring buoys, and a garbage fee.6:46 Tom compares navigation tablets: his iPad (Wi-Fi/cellular model required for GPS) has never lost its GPS fix, while the Blackview Active Pro rugged Android tablet and a Huawei phone both drop GPS intermittently at critical moments.14:20 He recommends iPad over Android for reliability, notes that the weather-routing app Weather40 and the Furuno radar's Wi-Fi app run only on Apple devices, and rates an SVB-purchased waterproof mount at roughly €150 as worth the cost.15:57 Anissia uses scopolamine patches (Scopoderm) for seasickness on the passage; Tom takes Stugeron prophylactically.18:10 The crew catches a fish on departure and spots humpback whales surfacing alongside the boat.12:24
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