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 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…

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…

Schedules are never great, and up until now we’d managed to keep ours at bay. We had a fairly big deadline looming though in that we had to get to Almerimar (south Spain) by the start of October. Just to make things more interesting, I also had to fit a quick trip to the US…

We had spent the first couple of weeks of our trip in and out of marinas, so it wasn’t until after our first overnight trip (from Bar to Corfu) that we started to suspect that there was a problem with our house bank of batteries. We have 7 batteries on the boat: 1 x engine…

We left Itea with the same fresh Northerly wind that had been with us for the last couple of days in the harbour, only for it to die out after an hour of sailing. We were still having issues with our batteries so running the engine for a while got some juice back into them…

We’ve been day sailing so far, making between 30 and 60 miles a day, but sooner or later we were going to have to do some longer legs. I’ve sailed at night before, but this would be a first for Jennifer and the boys. We had heard conflicting reports about Albania, and were still a…

We had finally made it out of marinas the day before, having left Marina Veruda after sorting the arch, and had a short day motoring (no wind) down to Otok Ist, where we picked up a mooring ball and had an entirely quiet night. The next day we set off for Uvala Kosirina, a lovely…

When we bought Hullabaloo she had a pretty decent cruising inventory: AGM batteries, generator, watermaker, gennaker, bimini, cockpit tent, even a chain counter so you can tell how much anchor chain you have out without having to guess or count chain markers. The main thing missing was solar. We were going to be away for…