Changing Tack

Our journey is almost over (for me and the boys anyway). We are flying home from San Juan, Puerto Rico, while Neil gets a crew and sails back to Edinburgh. The boys and I are looking forward to going home soon to see family and friends. We had such an amazing journey, but there are…

Before I left for our journey I was sure that by the time I came home I would know more about sailing. I had not realised all the other things that I would also learn. 1. How to gut a fish This is not something I ever wanted to know how to do. Neil has…

We finally don’t have any deadlines. (Except, I suppose, we need to go home eventually.) When we were sailing in the Mediterranean we had to rush around to get repairs, meet family and get to Las Palmas for the ARC. We can now relax and explore at whatever pace we like. Though it does feel…

We are finally in the Caribbean following 18½ days sailing the Atlantic ocean. Completing the ocean crossing has certainly felt like a great achievement. We arrived 2 days earlier than we had planned. The chart plotter on the boat gives an ETA depending on speed. It felt good watching this slowly change, but I did…

I am writing this 10 days after arriving in St Lucia, and Las Palmas seems so long ago now. We had spent two weeks in Las Palmas preparing for the crossing, with daily trips to the local chandlery (Rolnautic) as we continued to find more and more to do. On our penultimate night Jennifer had…

We are with over 200 boats in the ‘Muelle Deportivo de Las Palmas’ in Gran Canaria. Most of the boats here are on ARC too and everyone is very busy preparing so there is quite an atmosphere of activity. We are also on a pontoon with lots of other boat families, so there are plenty…

We had expected to be in La Linea for only a few days, but it was two weeks before there was a decent weather window down to the Canary Islands. Even then the window was pretty small – if we left on the Thursday we would catch a pretty big swell from the previous low,…

We arrived in La Línea de la Concepción, on the border with Gibraltar, after a rather wet night hugging the coast from Almerimar. We had waited in Almerimar for several days hoping for a switch from the westerlies we’d been getting, but this never came so we picked the least bad day and motored through…

  One concern I had before we started sailing was about how isolated we would be. It was going to be just the 4 of us, with no other family or friends for a year. I did know there would be other people sailing and that we might meet people when we stopped in a…

When we bought Hullabaloo two things that were highlighted on the survey were 1) the rigging was 12 years old, and 2) some of the seacocks needed replacing. While the insurance companies like the rig to be replaced every 10 years – and your boat sinking because of a faulty seacock is a literal downer…