Cruising in Europe was once the comparatively simple option, negotiating weather systems in Biscay and overcrowded anchorages being the major concerns for anyone planning to cruise Atlantic or Mediterranean shores in former years.

Today, cruising in Europe is anything but simple, thanks to a moving jigsaw puzzle of Covid-19 travel regulations and post-Brexit restrictions for non-EU citizens.

With much long-haul travel still off the cards and a vast choice of cruising areas to explore, Europe remains one of the best options for safe, enjoyable sailing, though a degree of forward planning and flexible thinking is needed.

Spectacular Isla Sisarga in northern Spain: cruising across borders will require more planning for UK sailors. Photo: Tor Johnson

Attempting to keep on top of latest regulations is a bit like catching snowflakes; as soon as you think you have one in your grasp, it will have vanished, only for a dozen more to have appeared. So while we generally prefer to avoid caveats and disclaimers, the information that follows is likely to change and should be thoroughly checked before making plans.

The situation is liable to change for both welcome and unwelcome reasons, including fluctuating Covid-19 rates, the reopening of tourism, but also as lobbying by organisations such as the Cruising Association and RYA yield some bureaucratic simplifications post-Brexit.

Cruising Europe from the UK

Setting off from the UK into Europe should be simplified later this year (2021), with an online reporting system replacing the C1331 paper form. Since the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020, cruisers have been required to fill out a C1331 customs declaration form with details of their boat, crew, and departure and arrival destinations and dates every time they travel out of or into UK waters.

The form can only be sent by post to the Border Force team in Dover, and if a voyage is delayed by more than 24 hours then a new form with a revised departure time has to be submitted – a situation the RYA described as ‘farcical’. The new system will go live later this year and will be called ‘Submit A Pleasure Craft Report’, filled out via the gov.uk website.

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The Home Office told our sister title Yachting Monthly that Border Force was working with HMRC to develop a ‘temporary alternative method of submission [for the C1331 form] that removes the requirement to post the form via the Royal Mail’ until Submit A Pleasure Craft Report was available online.

The bigger question for British-based cruisers is where to go, thanks to Covid-19 restrictions on returning to the UK. At the time of writing, current UK Government advice is that ‘you should not travel to amber or red list countries’, although travel industry representatives have been at pains to point out that going abroad is not in itself illegal.

That leaves a limited and largely impractical number of ‘green list’ options, requiring only a single test and no quarantine on return.

For example, the Faroe Islands are a stunning cruising destination – Rubicon 3 is among the adventure sail operators offering berths on voyages from the west coast of Scotland to the North Atlantic archipelago – but require a 500-mile passage from Oban.

Likewise when Portugal was on the green list (it has since been moved to amber), there was the option of making an Atlantic loop to Madeira and the Azores, though with a 1,500-mile return leg that would be akin to a full ocean crossing.

For cruisers craving more straightforward sailing in the sun, a charter in a green-listed country such as Gibraltar will have obvious appeal. At the time of writing, European destinations that had been moved to ‘green’ include the Balearic Islands, Malta, and Madeira.

Philip Taveira manages Portiate, a small family-run charter company in the Algarve in southern Portugal. They have four monohulls and a 40ft Fountaine Pajot catamaran available for bareboat charter, and also run day trips. When Portugal moved to green list, they noticed a huge spike in interest from UK visitors.

The Faroe Islands were one of the earliest countries to go on the UK’s ‘green list’ for travel. Photo: Francisco de Casa/Alamy

“There’s been an insane increase in enquiries for day trips from British visitors in the past week,” he reported in late May. Whereas usually their client base is usually made up of Swiss and German, with some French and Dutch, Taveira is closely watching to see if the spike in enquiries from the UK shifts into bareboat bookings.

“The sailing area here is amazing. We have a constant north-westerly wind, and high cliffs sheltering the sea from swell. The breeze builds from about 1pm to sunset, starting off around 5 knots to a constant 15-20 knots. And the scenery is gorgeous.”

Sailing into Europe

The vast majority of British cruisers make France their initial destination. While France is on the UK Government’s amber list as we write this (requiring 10 days home quarantine, and Covid tests both before and after departure), restrictions for those arriving in France from the UK are under review. A compelling reason to enter the country is no longer required, though a test within 72 hours of departure, seven days isolation, then a second negative test, is.

Croatia is likely to be popular among cruisers looking to exit the Schengen zone this summer. Photo: Adam Mrozowicz/Alamy

Restrictions on entering other countries vary and are changing rapidly – as a quick snapshot, Spain reopened to British visitors from 20 May, without the need for a PCR test or incoming quarantine; Greece required a test or proof of vaccine, but no quarantine; Italy doesn’t require a reason to travel but does require five days of isolation, while some countries are still limiting visitors to essential travel only.

However, the EU is considering a passport scheme, granting unrestricted entry to travellers – including Britons – who have had two doses of vaccine.

For cruisers sailing into France, improvements are being made to the entry process. Since the end of the Brexit transition period on 1 January, skippers have been required to sail to one of a small number of Ports of Entry, mainly the ferry ports, to register the arrival of their boat and crew with the authorities – usually the Police aux Frontières. This reverse process was required before departing France for the UK, Channel Islands or any non-Schengen country.

However, following lobbying by the Cruising Association, the French government has confirmed that UK yachts will be allowed entry at any French port. A new form will be available from the websites of each Port of Entry, which can be downloaded, completed and submitted by email prior to arrival, allowing the yacht to enter another local port. This process is already underway for Le Havre and other ports are expected to follow shortly.

Whether this is in addition to, or replaces, the Préavis Douane immigration form is currently unconfirmed. Roger Bickerstaff, of the Cruising Association Regulations and Technical Services group, explained: “It’s all a bit unclear at the moment. I think the intention is that it will, but these things have really got to be worked through in practice.

“One thing we are clear about is that, assuming it’s possible to do cross-Channel and further afield sailing this summer, the procedures just aren’t there. We still don’t really know whether passports need to be stamped in and out.”

While Spanish authorities in the Canary Islands have historically turned something of a blind eye to the Schengen status of yachts preparing for a transatlantic, this is not an official policy.

The best policy may well be to fill in everything and have plenty of patience. “Talk to the authorities, be as helpful as possible, and recognise that the people on the ground probably know less than you do as a sailor going in. They’re struggling, we’re struggling. It will require patience and tolerance.”

Crossing borders

Within the EU a Europe-wide traffic light scheme is in place. Visit reopen.europa.eu and enter which countries you are travelling from and to, and it lists Covid travel restrictions that apply. There is also country-specific information on local curfews and other regulations.

There are regional variations, and even within countries, individual ports also often adopt a different approach. Noonsite reports, for example, that some Spanish ports have not required PCR test for yacht arrivals, while others say that a negative Covid test is recommended.

For non-EU sailors wanting to spend time cruising in Europe, Schengen zone restrictions are likely to have the most significant limitations. All non-EU visitors may spend no longer than 90 days in any rolling 180-day period within the Schengen area.

Cruisers can ‘pause the clock’ by heading to non-Schengen territories – either on or off their boat, as the Schengen rules apply to the person, not the vessel – but they can’t ‘reset’ the 90 days until the 180-day period is up.

Your best options may depend on your longer-term plans. If you’re likely to want to spend next summer also cruising Europe then it may be a case of enjoying a couple of months exploring the Spanish Rias, or Greek Islands, or wherever is convenient to your 90-day starting point, winter your yacht in Europe, and fly home within the time limit (keeping a weather eye on British re-entry rules as you go).

For those who wish to extend their trip beyond 90 days then applying for a country-specific visa extension can be an option. Long Stay visas (known as Type D visas) are issued on a national basis – there is no such thing as a Schengen zone extension. Most have to be applied for from your home country before departure, could take weeks (or longer) to complete the process, and may require proof of income and a visit to the London embassy. You may need a confirmed address; a letter of support or confirmation of a booking from a marina should suffice.

It’s too early to gauge which countries are most receptive to long-stay visas. “The Cruising Association is trying to build up the knowledge bank of understanding,” explains Bickerstaff. “So that as more people apply in each country, we will be able to advise this is how to do it in Spain, how you do it in France. But it is still early days.”

St Malo in Brittany. Photo: Jane Tregelles/Alamy

Another advantage to a visa extension is that it is in addition to the 90-day Schengen zone limit. This may be helpful for cruisers who face a significant return sail from southern Europe back to the UK. Some liveaboard cruisers who were overwintering in Europe and whose ‘Schengen clock’ started on 1 January, 2021, yet have been unable to move on, have been able to extend their visas while they await, but the applications usually need to be made before departure.

Otherwise this summer will see British cruisers attempting the ‘Schengen shuffle’ for the first time. Visiting American, Australian and other non-EU sailors have planned their routes accordingly for years. However, the sudden increase in the number of sailors affected post-Brexit may mean some once-relaxed ports are now taking a more stringent view. As one cruiser told me, “There are a lot more Brits around, and we’re asking a lot more questions.”

Conversely, some ports are adopting a lenient view towards Schengen status while many boats have been unable to move on. Cruisers forums and facebook groups remain a good source of on-the-ground information ahead of arrival.

The main options for stopping the Schengen clock while cruising Europe are Croatia, Montenegro, Cyprus, Morocco, or Turkey (though Turkey is currently red-listed due to high coronavirus numbers). There are extremely limited options for cruising northern Europe, barring a return to the UK.

The good news is that we have received no reports of widespread fines imposed from 1 April, when the ‘Schengen clock’ ran out for many non-EU sailors who’d been in Europe over the winter. Cruising organisations will be closely monitoring whether that changes over the 2021 season.

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My first real memories — tangible memories that I know to be my own and not false memories born of old photos and stories — were formed as a nine-year-old boy on a boat.

In 1993 my mom and dad, Gail and Dennis, took my younger sister Kaitie and I out of school for a year. Along with two cats, Ketchie and Salty, we lived aboard our 36ft Allied Princess ketch Sojourner, cruising down the US east coast and spending the winter in the Bahamas. I was in 4th grade, my sister 2nd, our parents homeschooling us in the intervals between adventures.

I remember building a little cardboard house on the shelf in the quarterberth where I slept for our cat, Salty, who hated it despite my efforts. I remember Salty riding on the bow of Sojourner as we crossed the Gulf Stream, Bahamas bound, perched atop the inflated dinghy and balancing with the grace that only a cat can have on a boat.

I remember that first Bahamian anchorage in Chubb Cay, going snorkelling with my mom over the shallow reef, holding her hand while we swam because I was afraid of touching the coral, and seeing spotted eagle rays swim under the boat. I remember waking up at four in the morning in Nassau on Boxing Day and sitting in the back of an old jitney bus with torn brown vinyl seats to go watch the pre-dawn Junkanoo carnival celebrations.

I have memories of going spearfishing with my dad, when we’d tow the dinghy behind us while we swam and I’d point out the big grouper hiding in the coral heads because he couldn’t see without his glasses on. Then he’d dive down and spear them with the simple Bahamian pole spear, nothing more than a fibreglass rod with a sharp tip and a rubber band. And I remember my friends in school back in landlocked Pennsylvania asking us what it was like to live on a cruise ship for nine months, their idea of ‘cruising’ being quite different from our reality.

These memories are a fundamental part of me, and the reason that I have chosen a career in the specific brand of adventure sailing that we’ve pursued ever since starting 59° North. I’m just a big kid trying to make more of the memories that made me who I am.

A family affair

On March 8, 2020, right about when the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to hit headlines around the western world, my wife Mia gave birth to our son, Axel.

He arrived nine weeks premature, and we spent the next two months living by his side in the NICU department of the University Hospital in Uppsala, about 40 minutes from our farmhouse in Sweden. Initially healthy, Axel got a bad infection that turned into meningitis, and had to have two brain surgeries in the span of a few weeks, when he weighed only 4lb.

Simultaneously, the COVID-19 crisis ripped up our sailing schedule. Unbeknown to all the crew who had signed on to sail with us in 2020, I was managing 59° North’s response from the hospital room while Axel lay in his tiny bed hooked up to machines and monitors, with Mia by his side.

I made the difficult decision to postpone the entire sailing season until 2021 and, with the help of some very adventurous and determined friends, managed to have both boats sailed out of the Caribbean and up to our home port of Annapolis before hurricane season started.

Unlike me, Mia had not grown up around boats. She’s from the landlocked countryside, and while a former competitive swimmer and comfortable in the water, she’d never spent any meaningful time on it. That all changed when we met travelling in New Zealand in 2006.

Mia’s first experience on a sailboat was with me and three other friends in the Marlborough Sounds of the South Island, where we chartered a little 28-footer and spent five days anchorage hopping and falling in love.

I returned home to the Chesapeake where I worked as a deckhand on a 74ft schooner. Mia and I, despite only having spent six weeks together in New Zealand, became a committed couple, and she soon joined me in the USA.

After spending the summer living aboard my parent’s latest Sojourner, by then a 38ft Wauquiez sloop, we decided it was time to buy our own boat, and in 2008 became the proud owners of Arcturus, a 1966 35ft Allied Seabreeze yawl, built by the same company in Albany, New York, that had made the original Sojourner on which I spent that formative year in the Bahamas.

Branching out

Mia grew as a sailor, coming on offshore deliveries with me and getting down and dirty on the refit work on Arcturus. In 2011, two weeks after getting married in Sweden, we flew back to the USA and sailed Arcturus across the Atlantic on our first big ocean crossing, sailing north from the Chesapeake and taking the high road to Ireland via Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.

My mom and dad joined us on the leg from Newport, RI, to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, on what would be my mother’s last sailing trip. She died nine months later, aged just 62, but having left us with the inspiration to hold fast to our dreams.

‘Never for Money, Always for Love’. David Byrne of Talking Heads wrote that line and it’s become my mantra. By 2015 we’d already started 59° North with my dream boat, a 1972 Swan 48 called Isbjorn, with the goal of fulfilling two of my parents’ most important lessons.

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From mom, to ‘do what you love and the money will follow’; and from dad, that ‘whatever you do, be the best, and you’ll always be in demand’. Both are powerful lessons on their own, but unstoppable when combined.

Standing on the dock at the Caribbean 1500 Rally in 2015, where Mia and I were the event managers, we watched Isbjorn glide out of her slip, my dad on board as co-skipper with a full crew of eager adventure sailors ready to point the bow south. Mia and I were left behind, responsible for running the shore support on the rally. “Never again,” I thought, with a heavy heart. I was meant to lead people from the deck, not the dock.

Since then Mia and I have sailed Isbjorn almost 40,000 miles, twice across the Atlantic and from as far south as Grenada to beyond 80° north in Svalbard. In 2019 we expanded the fleet and bought Icebear, our Swan 59, as a way to share the wisdom of the high seas with more crew each year, and to provide opportunities for a handful of sailors like us to make a living delivering these experiences. So far, despite COVID, it’s been mission accomplished.

Speed to Spica

Still, I can’t help but browse boat listings. As our business has grown, so has the size of our yachts. But I’ve always wanted to go back to my roots, and find a small, simple boat we could sail as a family here in the Swedish archipelago, but that could also take us to distant landfalls if we so desired.

With Axel growing stronger by the day, a 1977 Norlin 34 ‘Special’ caught my eye. Swedish designer Peter Norlin’s designs had always stood out, identifiable by their clean lines, pleasing shapes, and that iconic ’N’ imprinted on their bows.

The 34 became a bit of a legend in Sweden for her wins in the Gotland Runt offshore race in the Baltic, and strong finishes in the Fastnet and other classic offshore races of the 1970s IOR era.

This particular 34 was unique: she was a one-off, built to the standard 34 hull, but with flush foredeck, racing cockpit layout and some interior modifications specifically for the 1977 edition of the Gotland Runt race.

She was an offshore thoroughbred built during an era when racing boats still had warm interiors and were meant for fun family cruising as well. After meeting with her loving owner and negotiating a deal, we bought her. We didn’t need to look at any other boats.

There’s an old adage for identifying stars used in celestial navigation: ‘Follow the arc to Arcturus, then speed on to Spica!’ Find the big dipper constellation, then trace the curve of the dipper’s handle and continue on through dark space until you come to a bright star. That’s Arcturus.

From Arcturus, keep travelling through the sky in the same direction, and the next bright star you come to is Spica. Both stars are part of the canon of 57 stars used in celestial navigation. Without much debate, we connected the dots from our first boat Arcturus to our new Norlin 34 and called her Spica.

We went sailing almost immediately. We carried Axel in his car seat down the long floating dock, filled up the water tank and cast off, aiming into the myriad islands that make up the spectacular Stockholm archipelago.

Spica is a refreshingly simple boat; one battery powers the tiny fridge and cabin lights, another starts the engine and a single 50W solar panel on a pole aft charges them both.

There’s no electronics (not even a depth sounder), no pressure water, no autopilot, no chartplotter, no shower, no frills. Just like in my early days on Sojourner, we’d spend our time sailing and exploring rather than fixing and maintaining.

I was in my element tacking and gybing through the maze of islands, rocks and skerries as we made our way out into the Baltic, Axel snug in his car seat on the cockpit sole, Mia keeping one eye on him and another on the paper chart as we piloted through the islands.

Having got used to sailing our Swan 59 over some 8,000 miles in the previous year, tacking her 30-tons between anchored boats with a full crew, handling Spica’s 6 tons basically solo was an absolute joy. Everything felt so light! It’s hard to imagine that Mia and I ever complained about flaking the mainsail on Arcturus back when she felt like a big boat to us.

We’d bought Spica up north, beyond the inshore confines of the Stockholm archipelago. Thus our summer sailing had a purpose: to get her back to our home waters, reacquainting ourselves with the cruising ground we’d come to love on Arcturus, and ultimately to get Spica home to her winter berth before we headed back to the 59° North fleet in Annapolis.

We were lucky to have nice weather for the passage south, but it was upwind the entire way. Peter Norlin summarised his design philosophy as ‘clean lines, clean sailing,’ and close-hauled, despite her old, tired sails, Spica performed. The helm was light with full sail and on the wind I could lock the wheel and let her steer herself, so long as I kept a lookout.

We’d cover however many miles we felt like from day to day, but always with the mission of getting closer to home. At night we’d anchor Swedish-style, bow tied to a pine tree in the rocks with a stern anchor out.

Our only marina night was in Sandhamn, the sailing centre on the east coast of Sweden, a delightful and busy island in normal times, but quiet and subdued last summer thanks to COVID.

Mia and I slept in sleeping bags in the big quarterberth aft while Axel had his own mini sleeping bag tucked into the nest we made him in the starboard pilot bunk.

Since I was a kid, I’ve always slept better on a boat. Mia was even more enthusiastic than me about the new boat, and had no qualms at all about taking Axel. Having lived eight weeks with him in the hospital and watching how resilient he was, it felt comparatively easy taking him sailing.

Ultimately we sailed a couple of hundred miles last summer, just Axel, Mia and I before hauling out Spica for the long Swedish winter. It has set us up perfectly for the future as a sailing family.

I’m hopeful that when he’s old enough, Axel can join me or Mia on Isbjorn or Icebear as mate and we can cross oceans together. But that day is a long way off, and I don’t want to just wait for it to come before we take him sailing.

If there is anything that my mom taught me, it’s that nobody owns tomorrow. Life is meant to be lived, but you’ve got to actively live it. Looking at it one way, we bought Spica at the worst possible time, in the midst of a global pandemic and right after having a premature newborn. Nothing in our life feels certain anymore.

But from our perspective, we bought Spica at the perfect time. We bought the boat for us and we bought it for Axel, with those lessons my mom taught us at the forefront of our minds. In an era of uncertainty, if you take care of the present, the future will take care of itself.

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

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The post Swedish sailing: Exploring archipelagos in a classic Norlin 34 appeared first on Yachting World.

The lockdown of spring 2020 prompted all kinds of unusual purchases. People bought puppies, bikes, hot-tubs… Not many opted to buy a 23-ton, 112-year-old wooden cutter, yet that is exactly what Southampton-based charter operator Charlie Tulloch did when he purchased Golden Vanity.

“Everyone’s got a lockdown story,” he says. “Mine was trying to keep the business running and home-schooling the kids. It was incredibly stressful. I realised that, although we have three boats of our own, we were reliant on other people’s boats to supplement the fleet.

We needed another boat to take more control. When I heard Golden Vanity was for sale, I thought about it – not for very long – and bought her.

“Lockdown madness? I don’t know. We’ll see!”

There is some logic to it. Golden Vanity offers First Class Sailing’s existing customers a very different kind of experience, while her heavy construction provides a steady platform for beginners.

Golden Vanity has a new lease of life working for a Solent charter company in 2021. Photo Nic Compton

But the real reason Charlie bought the boat was emotional rather than rational. “I did some relief skippering on Provident, Keewaydin and Golden Vanity a few years ago, and I liked the ethos of getting young people involved. I loved the boats, the history, the wood, the teamwork, the skills, the look, smell and sound of them. My livelihood is in GRP yachts, but my heart is in these old boats.”

Golden Vanity’s beginnings

Charlie isn’t the first to have fallen for Golden Vanity’s charms. The yacht was commissioned by Arthur Briscoe in 1908 when he was just starting to make a name for himself as an artist. He had previously owned an 8-ton gaff cutter which he, his wife May, their son William and their terrier Jock lived on for eight months of the year, cruising extensively on the East Coast, the English Channel and in Holland and Belgium.

On the way, Briscoe sketched continuously, gathering material for his paintings which depict mainly working boats and their crews, in what turned out to be the last days of working sail. He held his first solo exhibition of mostly nautical paintings on Bond Street in 1906, to rave reviews.

Two years later, when he was 35, he commissioned a new boat, funded by his mother. This was an era when cruising yachts tended to be closely based on working boat types, and Briscoe was in no doubt what boat he wanted: a ‘Mumble Bee’, the little sister of the famous Brixham trawlers he loved so much.

Briscoe designed the boat’s rig himself but left the design and construction of the hull to WA Gibbs and J Sanders & Co in Galmpton, on the River Dart – one of the most prolific builders of Brixham and Lowestoft trawlers in the country.

Photo Nic Compton

Briscoe named his new boat Golden Vanity after the eponymous shanty set in the ‘lowland sea’ – an appropriate name for a yacht that was destined to spend a great deal of time in the lowlands of Holland.

For the next 20 years, Briscoe and May lived on board for most of the year, famously going out in any weather, accompanied by their Dandie Dinmont terrier, while their son William was looked after by his grandmother.

Erskine Childers was a regular guest and is thought to have borrowed the boat and sailed to the ‘lowlands’ (although this was long after he had written his celebrated book The Riddle of the Sands).

Lost to a new love

After the war, Briscoe conceded to some home comforts and fitted a small Kelvin engine and a heads. He also discovered a new artistic medium in which he would excel and make himself a very comfortable living: etchings. He was soon producing striking images of English and Dutch working boats and square-riggers – often etching the plates on board Golden Vanity.

By his early 50s, however, Briscoe had divorced his first wife, May – who by all accounts was a jolly, outdoorsy person – and in May 1927 remarried an Alice Baker, who was more of a city dweller.

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The couple moved to London, and Golden Vanity was chartered out. Briscoe did take his new wife, together with his publisher, on a cruise to Holland. But despite the new engine and heads, Alice didn’t enjoy the boating life.

Golden Vanity was put on the market the following year, and the artist had to content himself with a small lugger based at St Mawes instead.

Changing hands

Over the next few decades Golden Vanity attracted an illustrious list of owners. The two after Briscoe were both former Olympic rowers: including Arthur Frederick Reginald Wiggins, who won silver at the 1912 Games.

In the 1940s, she was owned by Captain Clifford St George Glasson, an influential figure at Trinity House, who kept her on a mud berth on the East Coast for the duration of World War II.

In the 1960s, she caught the eye of another marine artist, David Cobb. Cobb served on motor torpedo boats during the war, and afterwards moved to Newlyn to become ‘a painter of our sea affairs’.

He and his wife Jean Main, also an artist, lived on the 36ft gaff cutter White Heather, followed by the Alfred Mylne 8-Metre Alpen Rose, before buying Briscoe’s more commodious ‘floating studio’, aboard which the couple lived for six years.

Although Cobb was fond of painting ships in their full glory, usually heeling over in a breeze, for his own yacht he chose to paint her alongside a quay with the tide out, having her bottom scrubbed.

Cobb’s painting ‘Scrubbing the yacht Golden Vanity’. Photo: National Maritime Museum

The resulting painting, entitled ‘Scrubbing the yacht Golden Vanity’, was exhibited at the Royal Society of Marine Artists in 1966 and immediately snapped up by the National Maritime Museum – the only Cobb painting in its collections.

Nine lives

Golden Vanity was next bought by an army captain who planned to sail around the world, but got only as far as Inverness before giving up. It was here, in the Inverness coal dock in the spring of 1970, that Peter Crowther discovered her.

He wanted to cruise around Japan and the US west coast. But he was also fascinated by the OSTAR, which had by then been run three times, and was eventually persuaded to enter the 1972 edition of the race with Golden Vanity.

“It would have been a stupid idea to take Golden Vanity across the North Atlantic, so I went south,” he recalled. “I thought I could do it in 60 days, and I made it halfway across in 30 days.

“But I went too far south and there was no wind. The sails needed constant repairing and she wouldn’t go to windward. I didn’t have self-steering, so I rigged up a line from the jib down the side to the wheel with a bungee cord.

“She was a lovely boat and very well balanced when she was close-hauled, but off the wind she would go anywhere.”

A few days before the start of the race, Peter’s cat Gypsy gave birth to a litter of five kittens. Rather than leave them behind, he made a bed for them out of an old suitcase and took them with him. He named the kittens after Lord of the Rings character; the most adventurous being Bilbo Baggins, who delighted in clambering onto the boom.

Peter Crowther with Gypsy the cat. Photo c/o Peter Crowther

One day, Peter came on deck to find the cats looking anxiously over the side and saw that Bilbo Baggins had fallen overboard. He immediately jumped over the stern onto the top of the rudder and managed to scoop the kitten up as the boat drifted past.

Exactly 89 tacks, five reefs, 71 sail changes, and two blown-out sails later, Golden Vanity arrived in Newport to take last place with a time of 88 days – the slowest crossing in the history of the race – a record unbroken to this day.

The story of the transatlantic kittens was immediately taken up by the American press and within days of arriving Peter had sold them all.

After the race, Peter and Golden Vanity carried on their way, sailing down the Intracoastal Waterway to Florida and then across to the Caribbean.

Golden Vanity’s 88-day crossing in the 1972 OSTAR remains the race’s slowest. Photo: c/o Peter Crowther

The yacht was nearly wrecked when she went aground on a reef off the island of St Croix, but Peter managed to refloat her and get her patched up in Antigua. It was all too much for Gypsy, however, who jumped ship at this point, and left Peter to sail the boat back to the UK on his own.

Golden Vanity in disrepair

The boat was sold on twice more, and in 1981 was listed in the Old Gaffers Association newsletter with the inauspicious description: “Extensive work on hull by Uphams of Brixham. Some internal fitting required.”

In fact, Golden Vanity was going downhill fast and languished on her mooring looking very sorry for herself indeed, until three men met in a pub and decided to do something about it.

Local businessmen Howard Young, Jack Spencer and Tony Ripley formed the Golden Vanity Trust in 1983 and bought the boat to restore, and use for sail training for the young people of Torbay.

New lease of life

The trio paid just £200 for the yacht, compared to the £4,000 Peter bought and sold it for, and spent the next five years completely rebuilding the boat with a team of up to 18 people, many of them on the Government’s Youth Training Scheme, led by local fisherman Colin Beer.

One of Arthur Briscoe’s trawler prints enjoys pride of place in the saloon. Photo: Nic Compton

Their 1983/8 rebuild was comprehensive: the topside planking, stem, beam shelf, deck beams and decks were all replaced, as were all her spars. The steering wheel was removed and her tiller steering restored, and her engine was completely rebuilt.

It was in many ways a new boat that was launched into the Dart in June 1988, and it’s thanks to all that hard work that she is still sailing today.

For 11 years The Golden Vanity Trust ran sailing training charters out of Brixham, as well as taking part in several Tall Ships Races. Despite being the smallest boat at these gatherings, in 1995 she managed to not only win her class but won the whole event on handicap, sailing 1,195 miles from Edinburgh to Bremerhaven, Frederikshaven and Amsterdam.

She joined forces with the Brixham trawlers Provident and Leader to form the Trinity Sailing Foundation in 1999 and for two decades the three boats held pride of place on the Heritage Pontoon in the middle of Brixham Harbour.

Coiling a halyard aboard Golden Vanity. Photo Nic Compton

“Golden Vanity was great for teaching small groups of young kids,” says Ben Wheatley who skippered the boat when he joined Trinity Sailing in 2013. “She was so well balanced you could tack and gybe without touching the tiller – just by adjusting the sails and moving people’s weight around.”

Government cuts, however, meant there was less money for the social care work which Trinity relied on for its cash flow, and in 2019 the trust was wound down and all three boats sold off. Which is when Charlie stepped in.

Sailing on board Golden Vanity just before she headed to the Elephant Boatyard for her winter refit, it wasn’t hard to see why Charlie, along with a dozen owners before him, have been seduced by the boat.

She has the patina of age, a sense of being solid and well-built, and of having survived countless Atlantic and North Sea gales. You can see how much love and attention has been poured into her over many years, in a way that a newer boat can never hope to match.

Lockdown madness or not, there is something life-affirming about sailing on a boat that has weathered so much and still managed to keep her integrity. It’s as if the boat itself is saying: life goes on.

First Class Sailing is currently crowdfunding to enable the restoration of Golden Vanity with a variety of rewards available for pledges from £10 upwards. 

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The post Golden Vanity: The rebirth of an artists’ boat appeared first on Yachting World.

Nigel Calder’s works on the technicalities of boat systems are accepted worldwide as Bibles, but he doesn’t generally trumpet his vast cruising experience. He is a modest man, so when we find he has written a book about his early years, we know it is going to be an interesting read.

In fact, Shakedown Cruise (published by Adlard Coles) is a lot more than that. As Calder describes the building and sailing of his first cruiser, the Atkin-designed Nada, with a variety of shipmates, there’s a laugh to be found on many of its pages.
Calder and his wife, Terrie, learn the ropes the hard and by far the best way – from their own mistakes.

Their plan to sail far into the Pacific doesn’t come to pass at this stage, but they make an extended voyage in the Caribbean with a tiny baby and another on the way in the early 1980s, when the sailing world was a very different place to today. The sheer frankness with which this guru confesses all, even how he pays for it, is enlightening. But it’s the dry, seamanlike humour that carries it along.

Anyone feeling doubts about his or her own ability to see a long cruise through should read this and discover how even the greats have to start somewhere.

From Shakedown Cruise by Nigel Calder

Over the course of the next six years we do everything from casting the lead for Nada’s keel to building the deck and interior and installing the systems, including building the freezer system through a process of trial and error (there is almost no technical information available to boatowners and boatbuilders such as ourselves).

I write and self-publish a book on marine refrigeration systems. It is a financial failure and the last time I try self-publishing! It does, however, open the door to International Marine; I am asked to write a book, Marine Diesel Engines. Meantime, we are able to fund the build process for Nada from my wages as we go along.

We launch Nada in 1982 and continue fitting her out alongside a dock in the midst of a small cypress swamp on the Natalbany River, in Louisiana. Our initial sailing trials are in shallow Lake Maurepas, which empties into the western end of Lake Ponchartrain.

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On our very first sail my log notes: ‘Caught in squall gusting to 40 knots with main, jib, staysail, and mizzen up. No one on board with any sailing experience except Nigel. Mainsail slides jam. Boat knocked down. Breidart head (the chimney for our wood/coal stove) and two (separate!) shoes lost overboard. Return to dock and grease all sail slides.’

Our trials and tribulations continue. The next few log entries read:

‘Charlie pulls main halyard cleat off mast. Return to dock and remake all cleats and winch bases with epoxy and machine screws.’

‘Fine run to Blind River but run aground in mouth of river. Greg swims out an anchor and we winch off.’

Nada at anchor at Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic

‘Strong winds. Spend night anchored near Manchac. Next day winds 32-40 knots. Lose dinghy and have some trouble recovering it (seat torn out). Doing over six knots under mizzen and staysail. Cabin side goes underwater – portholes open!’

We decide it is time to explore farther afield. At Pass Manchac between lakes Maurepas and Ponchartrain there is a two-span interstate bridge and the old highway bridge. I had assumed they would be high enough for us to motor under but when we arrive there we discover they are not.

‘Unless we take the mast down it looks as though our round-the-world cruising boat is trapped in twelve-miles diameter Lake Maurepas! I go to the masthead to see if I can use the leverage of the mast to drag Nada over sideways sufficiently to fit under the bridges.

‘Try to get under Manchac Bridge – Nigel at masthead with navigation light removed. Make it under interstate bridges with eight inches to clear, but need another 12 inches on old road bridge (water level at 50ft mark).’ We return to Lake Maurepas.

‘Feb. 6 1983: Good day’s sailing (20-knot winds). Problem mooring up due to wind and current: get stuck on Colonel Mathew’s cypress tree.’

‘Feb. 20: 25-30 knot winds. Close-hauled (tacking) to Tickfaw. Tack too late and run aground on lee shore. Have to strip off and swim out an anchor to winch off.’

Nada anchored off Soufrière, St Lucia, tied to a palm tree ashore

‘April 1: Left at 5pm. Winds gusting to 30 knots even in river. Blowing from south at sustained Force 8 in lake with 3ft chop – just about stops Nada dead. Power out with mizzen only and make anchorage somewhere around Ruddock around 11pm. Winds increase to over 40 knots and seas pick up to 4-5ft, with many breaking.

‘Boat riding hard on 100ft of chain ­– breaks anchor windlass main shaft. All the chain runs out and is only stopped by bitter end shackled to bulkhead (midnight). Anchor dragging previous to this but holds on bitter end shackle now.

‘Wind swings around to west making it a lee shore. Bowsprit alternately completely buried in the water and 10ft in air. Greg and Nigel both seasick. Unable to repair winch. Ride out a sleepless night. Lull around 4am to 15-20 knots and seas calm to 3ft but begin to pick up again around 5.30am and veering to south-west.

Carnival in St Kitts

‘Manage to get anchor and chain back on board by hand and sail under mizzen and staysail at speeds up to 7.5 knots back to Tickfaw (winds 25-30 knots again). At some point staysail outhaul tears off the boom and breaks in half. Back at landing at 9.30 am!’

‘April l6/17: Go out overnight. Broad reach to Blind River and stay the night. Explore mile or two up the river next day and downwind sail back to Tickfaw – 6 knots in 10-12 knot winds. Very pleasant!’

By 1984 we are finally ready to test all systems in the open ocean. We pick a day when the water level in Lake Maurepas is unusually low and work our way under the two spans of the interstate bridge and the single span of the old highway bridge into Lake Ponchartrain.

We have a pleasant sail to a new berth up Bayou Castine in Mandeville. Over the course of the next two years we test Nada and her systems in two extended open-water passages – during my annual three-week vacation break ­– across the 500-mile-wide Gulf of Mexico to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and back.

In the meantime, my oilfield job almost kills me on several occasions (I still bear the scars from one of the fires). The first two mechanics I work with are both injured so badly that neither ever returns to work.

Just before I sign on, three women walk into the company offices in New Orleans and threaten to file a discrimination suit because there are no female employees offshore. The company promptly hires all three and throws them into the bunkhouses with the rest of us with no separate bedrooms or bathrooms. They stick it out but eventually all three are seriously hurt.

The family enjoys a dip while Nada is anchored off Culebrita island, Puerto Rico

After six years, my offshore career is ended by two ruptured discs in my back which have given me problems ever since, but by then Nada is paid for…

As we are readying Nada, some of Terrie’s relatives would like to complete the damage the oilfield has done! They attempt to seize her grandfather’s assets and hide him in a nasty nursing home under a false name.

When we find him and file to recover his assets so we can put him in a decent home, our little house is shot up (Terrie has a number of photo prints hanging up to dry which have bullet holes through them), I am threatened at gunpoint and assaulted, Terrie is subjected to obscene phone calls and death threats while I am offshore, threats are made to poison our well, and friends visiting us have guns trained on them as they come in and out of our driveway. Nada is vandalised.

We get to know way more about the Louisiana legal system and the mechanisms of local law (un)enforcement than we ever want to. Before it is all over, Terrie’s grandfather dies, the lawyers carve up most of his estate between them and Terrie’s father’s house burns to the ground in suspicious circumstances. It is one reason we now live in Maine.

We plan to cruise in a broad arc through the Caribbean, taking in most of the West Indies and the northern coast of South America before transiting the Panama Canal and following the ‘milk run’ to the South Pacific. We had reckoned on leaving in November and are already months behind our planned departure date. Our baby is due in July.

We need to have Nada safely below latitude 11°N, south of the Caribbean hurricane belt, before the onset of hurricane season at the end of June; if there are any complications with the birth, this will enable us to leave Nada without worry.

Nap time for Terrie, Pippin and Paul – a rare treat aboard Nada

We press on toward the eastern end of Lake Ponchartrain, with its lift and swing bridges. On two previous night exits we were forced to climb the girders of the massive bridge structures to wake the bridge operators in order to get the bridges opened, but this time we pass through without a hitch.

The wintertime night air cools and a patchy fog settles on the surface of the water obscuring the range lights for the narrow channel beyond the bridges, a passage we have successfully made in the dark on a number of previous occasions. But this time the tide pushes us out of the channel and at 5am we run aground on a falling tide.

We hurriedly launch our home-built cold-moulded wooden dinghy. I row out an anchor and drop it in the channel, a mere boat length away. Ray and Lyle set to work cranking on the manual anchor windlass. With considerable enthusiasm they drag us onto a narrow spoil bank between Nada and the channel. Daybreak finds our 6ft draught boat in 4½ft of water and stuck fast in the mud. Some start to a dream cruise!

Nigel with eight-month-old Pippin before their voyage to Venezuela in 1987

I do what I should have done in the first place: take the dinghy and pole around to check depths. It does not take long to realise that we will have to go out the way we came in. We set a stern anchor and another off to the side. Ray dons scuba gear and tries to recover the main anchor, but we have pulled it in so deep it is immovable.

We buoy it, cast it loose, and push it to the back of our minds to concentrate on the main problem: getting off. To lessen our draught we take the mainsail halyard to the side anchor and haul the boat down by the masthead until the deck is underwater, a tactic I had read about but not yet tried.

We crank and crank at the stern anchor until the line is bar taut and the crew running out of steam. In spite of rolling the side decks under, we haven’t moved an inch: muddy Ponchartrain has us firmly in her grasp.

A young man motors by in a shrimp boat. We persuade him to tie onto the mainsail halyard and pull us from the side. I jump aboard his boat and he throttles up. Nada rolls over and once again the side deck goes under. The crew is standing on the inside of the cockpit coamings and hanging onto the rigging and mast to keep from falling out of the cockpit. Terrie is hanging onto Pippin. The shrimper jerks back his throttles.

“Give it more gas!” I yell.

“It’ll roll over,” he shouts back.

We take a short break while I give him a brief explanation of the nature of ballast keels and stability on sailboats. The shrimper manoeuvres back into position, takes up the slack, and guns his engines. The rail rolls under; the side deck goes under; the portholes in the cabin side begin to go under. He pulls back his throttles.

Shakedown Cruise by Nigel Calder is published by Adlard Coles, RRP: £18

“More gas; more gas,” I cry.

“My knees are turning to jelly!”

“It’s my boat; you let me worry about it.”

And so, finally, he gives it the gas, the portholes go halfway under, the crew hangs on tightly, and Nada slowly comes free. We use his power winches to recover all three anchors and are ready to move on again; dragging off by the masthead clearly works!

It’s a lesson we remember years later. We foul the bottom once more in Lake Ponchartrain and have to kedge off before regaining the channel.

There is still no wind. We motor through the channel that links Lake Ponchartrain with the Gulf of Mexico. We pick up a little breeze from the north-east in the Mississippi Sound.

Dusk finds us approaching the low-lying chain of sandy barrier islands protecting the Mississippi coastline. We clear the last of these during the night, entering the open Waters of the Gulf of Mexico at last. In the early hours of the morning the wind veers to the north-west and then north, and we are finally able to shut down the engine and reach eastward. We are on our way.

First published in the December 2018 issue of Yachting World.

The post Learning the ropes: An extract from Shakedown Cruise by Nigel Calder appeared first on Yachting World.

Sailing the paradise of the Pacific Ocean with my own boat had been my dream since forever. The first big question was when would be the right time for the adventure? Should I take time off work or retire early?

Since our daughter was born in 2009 and our son in 2011, early retirement was clearly the better option, when the kids were old enough to enjoy and remember the trip, but not so old they missed important school years. The age of the kids from 7 to 11 seemed perfect, so we set the date for 2018.

Having chartered yachts around the world, with one exception all monohulls, the second question was what boat to buy? My wife, Dina, was clear about the space she wanted for a trip over one year. Accordingly, we were looking at 70ft to 80ft boats but soon realised that this size would mean having professional crew on board. Discussing with friends who’d done similar trips led us to consider multihulls.

The Swiss family Schlaepfer aboard their Fountaine-Pajot Saba 50 catamaran RAID. All photos: Ralf Schlaepfer / World ARC crews

A catamaran would provide the same living space, while being more compact and shorter than a monohull. I also wanted to have back-ups for the key systems, and a catamaran comes with two engines, two propellers, two rudders. In addition, with two hulls and short, light keels, catamarans are practically unsinkable and can enter much shallower anchorages.

After a year of evaluations we decided on a Saba 50 from Fountaine Pajot, which would provide for us the right balance between weight, space and performance for long bluewater crossings.

Our reason for choosing the Saba 50 over the wide range of other catamarans was its weight – other brands can be 10-30% heavier. We felt the four-cabin version would give us space for sailing with the family, but leave the possibility to have friends with kids on board.

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Some other brands give more options, especially in colours and interior materials but, for us, at that stage still 100% engaged with a demanding business life, this was not what we wanted to spend time on.

All the same, we’d have liked some options from Fountaine Pajot in the field of ‘make sailing easier’ for a small crew. We added a number of cleats and blocks, for setting reefs or adjusting the topping lift from the helm station rather than from the mast.

Regarding security, the initial emergency tiller only allowed you to steer standing down in the engine compartment with the locker open, and it required quite some work to make it suitable for bluewater needs. Another change was the original 25kg anchor, which we replaced with a 45kg Ultra and double the length of chain.

The Schlaepfer family concluded a 50ft catamaran offers similar living space to a 70ft monohull

To provide redundancy for all key equipment for long crossings, we added a second autopilot and an additional hydraulic pump to the second rudder. Then, a camera on the masthead enabling us to see the blind spots on the other side of the helm while manoeuvring in ports, SSB radio, satellite communication and a worldwide TV receiver completed our electronics.

These were all in addition to the full package of extras available from the yard and rounded up what we saw as essentials for our planned trip. One option we don’t advise is the additional bumpers fixed to the transoms. Ours let water into the engine compartments even after being repaired once. In the end we removed them.

We ordered the boat with the bowsprit option for a gennaker, which proved to be a fantastic sail. We also had additional fittings made for a Wingaker, a Parasailor-type spinnaker with a vent, which is an absolute necessity for the Atlantic and Pacific crossings with their long downwind passages.

For the looks, we added much more teak on deck and rigid metal gates rather than difficult-to-close wires at the transom. As we planned to go diving on our own rather than looking for local dive instructors – and in many nice spots there are none – we also added a dive compressor to our gear, which we never regretted.

Other families in smaller monohulls happily made such a trip too, but the fact that RAID became somewhat the party boat of the World ARC fleet showed us that space and many other amenities like an icemaker for the adults or large TV for kids’ movie nights were an asset.

Sailing classroom

RAID was delivered in June 2018 and we spent the first part of our trip in the Med – an extensive sea trial which allowed us to get to know the boat better and to add to the equipment of the boat in a familiar environment. En route to the Canary Islands, we ‘ran into’ Hurricane Leslie, the strongest storm ever to hit Portugal. After zigzagging its way across the Atlantic, it finally hit Figueira da Foz with 95-knot winds while we waited in Cadiz.

Transom steps offer easy access to and from the water

Leaving on the tail of the storm might not have been the best decision – we paid with heavy swell and rather unstable 30-knot headwinds. We joined the ARC+, which crosses from Gran Canaria to St Lucia via the Cape Verdes, and found the passage surprisingly easy with steady tradewinds. They gave us a crossing in 13 days, placing us third in the ARC+ multihull division.

For the kids, we planned to have home schooling on non-sailing days and took textbooks in all their subjects (maths, geometry and German) to follow the syllabus. We’d discussed the trip with their teachers before we left and they’d been very positive about the experience ahead. We planned to share the teaching between both of us, being very strict with a daily routine of 2-3 hours except on special days with excursions or sailing in heavier weather.

But in reality we found this hard to execute faced with the beauty of the places we visited. It’s important to understand the wealth of learning kids do without formal schooling. This is not only living through different cultures during the trip, but also interacting with all the other sailing families.

The trampoline is the ideal place for dolphin spotting

As a side benefit, both of our kids are now fluent in English after only half a year. English is the predominant language all families choose for interaction with other sailors. The key skills our next generation needs are social competence, creativity, understanding of other cultures and of our planet, plus independent thinking.

All of these are learned on a year’s sailing trip by meeting other sailing kids, local children, visiting different countries and cultures (some really still very archaic) or spending 24 hours camping on a desert island with kids from another boat.

For two months we also had a marine biologist on board, who taught the children about the sea and its creatures. Little wonder the attention span in these classes was longer than in German lessons! Learning kitesurfing or diving was also a good alternative to school sports.

Snorkelling, fishing, kitesurfing and crossing the equator are all experiences well beyond lessons in a school classroom

In hindsight, the most important things the kids learned was not from schoolbooks but from the trip itself. We succeeded with the schooling, in that they were able to come back from our one-year trip and join the same class as their peers without falling behind. And they have re-adapted to school life without any problems.

In mid-January we said goodbye to the Caribbean Islands to sail for Panama with the World ARC. The highlights were the San Blas or Guna Islands, as the local Indians call them. This mostly uninhabited string of islands is truly fantastic and would be worth a much longer stay. In Panama we had a memorable visit to the Embera Indians in their village. It was wonderful to see how our kids immediately started to play with their children.

Into the exciting pacific

Traversing the Panama Canal was an unforgettable dance in a very small space, together with some of the largest ships on the planet. Then it was as if a new book had opened to us. The Pacific was way more exciting and interesting. People are much closer to nature, very friendly and enjoy visitors, as opposed to just seeing them as a source of income.

Galapagos with its incredible wildlife – wow! Only the amount of tourism and space humans have already taken was unexpected. It was a stark contrast to places we visited thereafter. Most memorable were the Marquesas archipelago, with its high mountains, or the islands of the Tuamotus, stretching over 1,000 miles, with 78 paradise atolls where, on most, you would never see a soul.

The Tuamotus definitely warranted a longer visit with their beautiful dive sites, swimming with hundreds of sharks as we did in Fakarava, and unbelievable kiting spots.

Everyone has heard of Tahiti, Moorea or Bora Bora, but have you ever heard about Suwarrow, Niue or the Ha’apai island group in Tonga? Here a yacht is the only real way to get around and explore the unbelievable beauty of unspoiled nature, be it on land or in the sea with an abundance of colourful corals and fish, even whales.

You must respect Pacific islanders’ way of life, so in Fiji, for example, you should pay a visit to the chief of the village including offering him a gift (we gave Cava). Once this is done, you are very much treated as one of their own with the right to swim, fish, go ashore, visit their homes or go to school (which our children did for a week). Coconuts are the property of the local landowner and you should not pick up even a fallen one – this would be seen as stealing.

Dangerous approaches

Charts are not very accurate and the approaches to islands can be dangerous, especially the ones surrounded by reefs, like the Tuamotus. Be sure you enter with the sun at your back around midday and be aware of the tide, as currents can be much faster than your yacht’s engine(s).

The scariest moment for us was a six-hour thunderstorm between the Tuamotus and French Polynesia with winds well over 60 knots, which broke our Raymarine wind indicator. That said, RAID always felt safe, and we kept the sails up with maximum reefs.

Visiting Huahine among the Society Islands

In all, we spent seven months in the Pacific, flying back to Europe from Fiji, where we left the boat. We had intended to go back to Fiji this May, as we felt we wanted to spend more time there, but the coronavirus pandemic has stalled that. Eventually we’ll carry on to Vanuatu, Tanna and Australia. We want to ship the boat back to the Med after that, so she can be our holiday home in Turkey and the Greek islands.

Spare parts

For spare parts, first to my mind is a spares for a watermaker capable of producing a reasonable amount of water. Having no water reduces the quality of life on board drastically. Our Aquabase produced up to 180lt per hour, but failed three times. Obviously, this always happens in the worst spots, in our case in the San Blas Islands and the Tuamotus. The low-pressure pump broke twice, and the high pressure pump once.

Another vital spare part is Volvo’s black box attached to the engine (MDI). Our D2-75 suddenly produced all kinds of rpm without being prompted and it could not be stopped from the helm station. Nobody knew what this could be, and only a search on the internet blogs showed that it’s a well-known issue.

Luckily Volvo sent a replacement, but I don’t understand why they are not recalling all these MDIs. Getting a replacement is probably fairly fast in Europe, but it took us weeks in Colombia!

Bring additional rope and enough cloth to repair sails – as a bare minimum a replacement for the main halyard. A problem for us was the main halyard with a Karver Hook that had too much friction, so we needed an additional line at the head of our sail to be able to haul it down. In addition, one of the plastic masthead sheaves chafed through.

Consequently, we had to climb the mast to cut the sail down. Since then we’ve had to replace the main halyard twice where it chafes against the topping lift. Some additional strong protection over the top 50cm of the halyard has helped reduce the problem.

RAID specifications

Builder: Fountaine-Pajot
Model: Saba 50
LOA: 14.98m 49ft 1in
Beam: 7.99m 26ft 3in
Draught: 1.25m 4ft 1in
Displacement (dry): 15.5 tonnes
Design: Berret-Racoupeau

About the author

Ralf Schlaepfer is a serial entrepreneur who launched his first company at the age of 16. He built up and sold his own consulting firm, and is now CEO of plastic recycling company Tubis Group. He is also mayor of his hometown of Schluein, in the east of Switzerland. He married Dina in 2007 and they have two children, Alexander and Ivy. Ralf got his skipper’s licence 30 years ago and has chartered yachts many times on holiday since.

First published in the September 2020 issue of Yachting World.

The post Family adventure: How we home-schooled our kids while sailing across the Pacific appeared first on Yachting World.

For many, the opportunity to trade a bricks and mortar school for classes on deck or on the beach is part of the appeal of a cruising lifestyle. Here we take a look at some of the different approaches favoured by liveaboard and cruising families, and discover some tips that temporary home teachers can benefit from.

Learning outside of the classroom has been proven to bring benefits including increased self-awareness, confidence, creativity and imagination. However, the endless juggle of fitting in education, boat maintenance, socialisation and online employment can create a challenging dynamic while living in the close confines of a boat.

“Fulfilling the triple role of parent-teacher-playmate can be intense for all members of the family at times,” commented Philippa Steventon, who is home educating her boys on board their Bowman 40 Bella as they overwinter in Spain.

Hands-on lessons using a sextant. Photo: Kate Hall

My husband and I also recently spent two years living aboard our Moody 47 Roam, with our three young boys. It certainly wasn’t easy. Educating our kids was the hardest element of our entire journey, including sailing across the Atlantic Ocean.

Home-schooling styles

• Unschooling: An informal style that advocates topics and activities should be chosen by the children themselves.
• Eclectic: A popular approach to home schooling where parents pick and choose the best parts of several different systems and resources.
• Prepackaged curriculum: Also known as ‘school in a box’, preplanned curriculums can be used as supplied or supplemented as you see fit. Examples include Calvert, Timberdoodle or Oak Meadow.
• Distance learning: Where teachers use online instruction (or a variation) to teach students.

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What method is best?

To decide what style of schooling is best for you and your family, it’s essential to be honest with yourself. What type of parent are you? Are you creative, crafty and excited by the idea of teaching your children? Or, like me, would you prefer to follow a pre-written curriculum to take the fear and doubt out of an already challenging exercise?

I quickly discovered that I didn’t enjoy the pressure of piecing together a curriculum. Initially our plan was for an eclectic style of home schooling, as I loved the idea of my children learning about the world around them. I envisaged teaching fascinating lessons about the history of the countries we were visiting and the science behind the weather systems through which we were sailing.

In reality, it was far more complicated than I expected to create studies for my children that were age-appropriate, engaging and fun. The point is that most people don’t get it right the first time and it’s important to remain flexible, continually assess what is and isn’t working, and be willing to pivot if required.

Having a small microscope on board makes for fascinating learning for young and old alike. Photo: Jennifer Dawson Sampica

Both Megan Waitkoff Downey and Jennifer Dawson Sampica are boat-schooling mums to seven-year-olds. They too have found home educating more difficult than they anticipated.

“While parents understand their own child best and dedicated one-on-one learning is amazing, I also recognise there are a lot of skills and strategies that teachers learn in their studies that I simply don’t have in my toolbox,” admits Megan.

Putting some strategies in place can make learning more enjoyable: Jennifer has found that things run more smoothly when there is a set schedule. “Each Sunday I create a lesson plan for the week. That way, my son and I can check it off together,” she explains.

Finding other experts to teach your children is another great way to engage your child. “Whether it’s a scientist giving a shark talk, a photographer explaining his turtle images, or a tour guide at a nutmeg plant, it’s always better when it’s hands-on,” said Stacey Paczkoski Brassington.

The rich experiences my family were fortunate enough to gain were beyond educational. In Grenada, we watched giant leatherback turtles laying eggs on the beach and learnt how chocolate is made. While exploring Martinique, we climbed an active volcano and visited a slavery museum. Bequia taught us about the history of whaling – and on we went, each location teaching us something new.

“When we left Cowes, the advice we were given by our head teacher was to make sure we keep them up to date with the relevant stages in the English and maths curriculums and that everything else would come from what we were doing on the boat,” adds Philippa Steventon.

Learning alongside local children at Bequia in the Grenadines. Photo: Erin Carey

Regarding duration and frequency, around two to four hours a day, over four or five days a week seems to be common practice and enough to keep kids on track. It will also depend on how long you plan on cruising, the age and temperament of your children, and whether or not you want them to integrate back into the school system.

“Our children were five and seven when we left the dock and I tried to replace the school day with a boat schooling day. It didn’t work,” recalls Kate Hall, who is currently in the Caribbean with her boys aboard their Hallberg-Rassy 46 Kathryn del Fuego.

“There are days when workbooks work perfectly. There are days when they don’t and we play games, use dice, counting and do mental times tables and spelling games instead.”

When children are old enough step by step tutorial books take some of the pressure off parents. Photo: Sailing Nikau

Teaming up

Anyone with children knows that bringing other people into the mix usually improves the dynamic for the better.

The Hall family paired up with two other family boats when their schedules aligned, and organised a ‘boat school’ rota. “While in the Windward Islands in the Caribbean we sailed with three family boats for a period of three glorious weeks. Between us we had seven children and created a Year 1, Year 2 and joint Year 3 & 4 classroom for the three yachts,” recalls Kate Hall.

“Each morning the ‘school bus’ (aka one of the dinghies) took the children to each boat at anchor for the morning’s lessons. At 11am the school bus collected the children for a swim before lunch and then a play on the beach afterwards.

“For parents and children alike it was bliss. No tears or shouting (parents included!); the children even looked forward to their lessons.

“It’s amazing the difference in teaching other people’s children. They listen and are keen to learn from you; you aren’t their parents! Swap the children round and teach theirs or just mix them up (one of yours and one of theirs).

“I was nervous about asking or offering, but once you’ve done it, you would want to do it every day. As parents we all came from different backgrounds and experience (plumber, vet, physiotherapist, civil engineer, stay-at-home mum) but we all had something different to offer when teaching and the children thrived on it.”

If your child loves snorkelling, develop their passion by studying marine life. Photo: Kate Hall

Soft skills

One misconception about home-schooled children is their lack of socialisation. On a boat, addressing this largely depends on what part of the world you are cruising in and how willing you are to put yourself ‘out there’ when it comes to social media and tracking down other children.

The popular Facebook group Kids4Sail is full of like-minded families who are located in different areas all over the world. Each month they have a location roll call, where people can find other boats with similar aged children in their area. The No Foreign Land website is also useful.

In my experience, a common trait of boat-schooled children is their confidence. Our boys learnt to speak to people of different cultures, backgrounds and ages. As a result, they’re now mature for their age and outgoing.

Keeping a daily boat diary can help improve both writing and drawing skills. Photo: Kate Hall

Stacy noted the same: “My boys are confident in meeting new people, asking for directions, negotiating with market vendors. Being out in the world with people gives them social skills and increased self-esteem.”

Was teaching effective?

After four months on land, it has been interesting to watch my children integrate back into the schooling system. Our youngest didn’t receive any formal schooling while on the boat, and is doing well in his first year of primary school. He’s notably more worldly and confident than his peers.

Our two older children have settled in reasonably well, but there have been a few speed bumps along the way. Not surprisingly, sitting still for six hours a day was one of them.

Unfortunately, being different can also make children an easy target for bullies. Sadly, not being up to speed with the latest trends, video games and YouTubers did create some adjustment issues. Luckily, four months on, life has returned to a new normal.

Academically, we have identified a few gaps, but overall they have adjusted well, and it appears that maybe all of the stress and worry about whether we were doing it ‘right’ was unfounded.

Useful resources

With the closure of schools, the list of remote learning resources is ever expanding. Here are some starting points:

Maths

Singapore Maths: Highly effective method that has been adopted around the world over the past 20 years. Books from £12.

MathsOnline: Australian system of online maths tutorials for all ages. Over 1,400 tutorials available, lasting around 5-10 minutes. Can be studied on any devices, around £24 per month.

Mammoth Math (USA): A full maths curriculum. Textbooks can be downloaded and printed on the boat, from around £25.

Khan Academy (USA): Available in 40 different languages. Free online resources with written lessons as well as video.

DragonBox: Maths games app.

Prodigy (USA): Curriculum-aligned maths game, free parent accounts available.

Photo: Kate Hall

Literacy

Teach Your Monster to Read (UK): Free and fun phonics game and app for younger children learning to read.

Explode the Code (USA): Bestselling phonics programme for younger children, available online or as a workbook. £55/1 year subscription

All About Reading (USA): Multi-level programme, with decodable stories, textbooks, and other resources. £166 per pack. (See also: All About Spelling)

English Stars (AUS): Yearly plan for primary aged children, follows Australian curriculum with detailed teaching plans for every module. Around £56 per year.

Science & other

Code Club (UK): Free coding projects for 9-13 year olds using the Scratch program.

Mystery Science (USA): Online video lessons for primary years. Each is based on a story and ends with hands-on activities designed to use supplies you already have at home/on board. Around £20 per month.

Twinkl (UK): Wide library of printable resources and worksheets for UK primary school teachers and parents, in all subjects.

Time4Learning: Interactive multimedia content including animations, instructional videos, worksheets and hands-on projects. Monthly subscription £16-25.

Duolingo: Language learning for Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic and many more.

Complete curriculum

Structured Home Learning (UK): Complete, timetabled plans and resources from reception to GCSE. Modules designed to be completed in a morning. From £299 per year.

Critical Thinking Company (USA): Books and software for all years, covering reading, writing, maths, science and social studies.

Timberdoodle (USA): Comprehensive curriculum delivered on a USB. Christian-based as standard, with non-religious pack options. A full year’s resources range from £500-£850.

Calvert Education (USA): Online learning with individual and family subscription options, over 45 courses. £330 per child or £590 for a family plan.

Oak Meadow (USA): Complete curriculum for all ages, including 36-week lesson plans, optional craft and activity resources. Uses a Waldorf/Steiner holistic approach. From around $400.

Galore Park (UK): Text books and resources used by UK independent schools for KS2 upwards, including 11+ and 13+ exam prep.

Online tutors

If you’d rather bring in an outside teacher, especially for older students approaching key exam years, several online schools offers correspondence-based teaching by tutors.

In the UK, Oxford Home Schooling and Wolsey Hall teach up to IGCSE and A-levels. In the US Laurel Springs is an online private school with lessons delivered by teachers.

About the author

Despite having little sailing experience, Erin Carey, her husband Dave and their three young sons quit the rat race and bought their boat, sight unseen, on the opposite side of the world. Erin is founder of Roam Generation, a communications business sharing the stories of adventurers and sailors.

First published in the June 2020 edition of Yachting World.

The post Home schooling at sea: Top tips for tutoring your kids from 6 liveaboard sailors appeared first on Yachting World.

“Morning Daddy!”“Hey, morning Hazza. Did you have a good sleep?” It’s dawn, I’m finishing the graveyard watch and the kids are just waking up. The sun is rising as we make our way down the western coast of Grenada.

We’ve been hammering along under full sail all night long, eating up the miles from Martinique. A tropical wave came through yesterday afternoon with some nasty conditions so the night’s steady 18-knot tradewinds had been very welcome. We’d dragged our heels a bit getting down south so it’s a relieving sight.

“Can we fish some more today, Daddy? Let’s put two lines out, then we’ve got twice as much chance of catching another mahi mahi,” says my son, Harry. It’s safe to say Harry is becoming a fishing addict.

The children have become adept at catching things

“Where are we? Is that Grenada? Where’s Tom?” Harry is full of questions. Tom is a friend, one of the family we met during our first week in the British Virgin Islands. Harry is excited about seeing him again. Slowly, H, my wife, stirs. She goes to put on the coffee and then my daughter, Lily, appears through the saloon door.

This is just another day of what we’ve come to know as the adventures on Fille de Joie. Our Fountaine Pajot Lipari 41 is our home. We moved on board a few months ago, after I finished work as the tactician for America’s Cup campaign SoftBank Team Japan.

An idea of cruising around the world first popped into my thoughts when I was 18. I was on a gap year after school and working as a sailmaker. My long-standing friend Ollie Nutthal and I were the one-design department at Hood Sails and, when I headed off to university, Ollie set off around the world on his mum and dad’s Tripp 26.

Article continues below…

Caribbean sailing tips: Chris Doyle on making the most of your time there

Chris Doyle’s is a name familiar to all Caribbean cruisers, as the author of best-selling cruising guides of the region.…

How this family made their two-year round the world sailing dream happen

Surreal. Not a breath of wind tonight. The sea’s surface is flat and unbroken. The sky is utterly cloudless and…

Our friends all thought he was insane at the time but his experiences were just incredible. That vision of exploration stuck with me. No agenda. You just headed where the wind blew you and wherever took your fancy.

In 2007 I married my amazing wife, H. She is a fantastic racer in her own right but she comes from a background of cruising here, there and everywhere. Her parents have lived on their boat for the last decade. It was in her blood.

After the Beijing Olympics I needed a break and the cruising bug really started to grip H and me. But we had hardly a penny between us. I had spent everything I had on Olympic sailing for the last ten years and H was just out of university.

We cherished our dream for years. Every sailing job I had was planned to help build our funds for boat purchase and our cruising. Friends would even buy us bits for the boat that we didn’t even have.

Before we knew it the sailing jobs had all led towards the new generation of America’s Cup sailing and some incredible opportunities came our way. The other amazing thing that happened was the births of our son and daughter.

Fast-forward ten years – two America’s Cups, two children, calling five different countries home and finally we decided that, yes, we could potentially do it, take it on and follow our dream.

Harry, our son, was seven and Lily four. All of the people we’ve been lucky enough to meet that had experienced cruising life as a youngster have seemed, to my mind, serious, stand-up individuals so I was sure that, for Harry and Lily, the experience would be nothing but fantastic.

Little did we know what we were letting ourselves in for – the world that is cruising, wow! There are a lot of people doing exactly what we had in mind. And there were so many questions to answer: where are we going to sail to and from? What kind of boat should we have? How big? What does it need? Where should we buy it? How will we educate the kids? How much money do we need?

The questions seemed endless and our research had only just begun. The number of bloggers, web forums, etc. devoted to the subject is enormous. There are even cruisers who act as brokers and paid advisers to others planning their trips.

Decisions, decisions

As for the choice of yacht, I had always loved the look of the modern catamarans. From the first day I was interested in the idea of cruising I browsed catamarans online. This was, I guess, partly because I have done a fair bit of cat racing but there were a lot of other reasons too. We are really keen surfers and kitesurfers. We have tonnes of toys and we have kids with tonnes of toys. So we need space, lots of it, and a shallow draught.

Also, I also don’t like going slow and I have got used to sailing boats dead flat or even heeled to windward. The boats I really liked were, sadly, out of our price range: the Catanas, the Balis and new Nautitechs. H really liked the space of the Lagoons, and the Lagoon 420 was what we could afford and set our hearts on. So we set about finding one that fitted all the criteria, and the things I thought were important (back to that later).

Our initial plan had been to buy in Europe and do the ARC from Gran Canaria to St Lucia in November. We felt this would be a great way to start our cruising life, surrounded by like-minded people and potentially a number of other families. Brexit made that a bit trickier, though, and we started to look across ‘the pond’.

‘A dawn surf with the family, then move to a different anchorage’

We really wanted to spend some time in the Caribbean and if we did the ARC and then went through the Panama Canal in February or March it really wouldn’t allow much time in the Caribbean so we started looking at the idea of staying there during hurricane season and buying there. It seemed more feasible than I had thought.

We found a really nice Lagoon 420 for sale in Martinique. We made an offer that was a bit of a punt and, sure enough, it was rejected. I have never been a great bargainer but we set about negotiating with the broker.

Around that time a good friend sent me a link to another boat that hadn’t really been on our radar, asking if it was something we’d be interested in. It was smaller but much newer. After discussing with our panel of experts it seemed like the Fountaine Pajot Lipari 41 could be a pretty good option for us.

Everything we read about them suggested they sailed really nicely and were very comfortable. This one had little usage and was in great shape. After a trip to the BVIs and a test sail we knew it was right and we bought it. Returning back to Bermuda I was kind of in shock and denial at what we had just done, but at the same time very, very excited.

The boat had all the things we had been looking for. It was an owner’s version so quite attractive for resale. It had a generator, solar power, inverter, watermaker and so on. It ticked most of the boxes, including some of my ones that I now realise really weren’t important. It has a good downwind sail (which we are yet to fly) and a good tender (that floated away in week one and somehow washed up on the beach, we still have it).

H, however, was concerned she wouldn’t have the space the Lagoon was offering. So on the night we flew to Tortola to claim her, everyone was very excited except H, who was, frankly, freaking out about the space or, in her eyes, lack of it.

We arrived with four massive sailbags full of clothes and books and a ton of surfboards and kitesurfing kit. H breathed a huge sigh of relief when we got on board and she saw how much stowage there was. These things are just huge inside and out. They are floating dining tables with underground storage everywhere!

It is a truism to say that from the moment you buy any boat it seems everyone experiences boat envy: those Balis and Nautitechs looked even flasher, but we were generally very happy with our Fille de Joie.

We always knew that catamarans were not fantastic upwind but, to be honest, I have been quite surprised by how well she sails. For sure there’s some leeway but it is achievable to cover decent ground uphill. Anything wide of 70° TWA angle and we start eating up some serious mileage.

Lily and Harry playing ashore

I have a bad habit of always using a bit too much sail I suspect (much to my wife’s dismay) and I have been a little surprised at how loose the boat can very suddenly feel when over-sailed, but it performs impressively considering the comfort it offers.

The motion is fine, too. Many people had suggested we wouldn’t like it but it is generally pretty comfy and we have had a few pretty nasty days and nights at sea. We have had a couple of slappy moments from the central pod but very rarely. And it is so nice not to heel!

The space is incredible. She may only be 40ft long but we have ample room for our family of hobbits and all our toys. Guests would be no problem at all as well; we can happily entertain 10-12 people on board. The engine compartments in the transoms are great; you don’t disturb the family doing your morning checks.

The small details

With kids on board, and with the heat in the Caribbean summer, the generator and the air conditioning has, I have to admit, been great. OK so it’s not exactly the purest but it has made bedtimes very, very easy.

The sailplan is great. The square top main makes me feel like I am racing around and it helps us really power the boat up in very light air. The dinghy with the 20hp engine is also great; we wakesurf behind the tender with the kids, but it is heavy for H to lift on the davits and impossible for Harry to start.

The things I don’t like at this stage? One of my biggest dislikes is the wheel is positioned on the starboard side meaning sailing on port is not that pleasant. The boat is built pretty light. This is great for performance but at times it makes me nervous.

The airflow through the cabins is not fantastic. In the Caribbean, where there are frequent rain showers overnight, you spend the nights playing musical hatches so any underhull hatch openings are a godsend. The kids have a great little one on their side but the escape hatches are very low to the waterline on the Lipari meaning that unless you are in a marina you’re not comfortable opening them.

I find the davits are not particularly strong. When you speak to cat owners it seems they have all had similar issues. The supplied blocks are terrible. I understand why these huge companies try to save on fittings but it really feels like they are playing the short game.

When it comes to marine electronics, the Garmin systems on the boat generally seem great. The screens use a lot of energy but are so easy to operate. We have a Garmin AIS 300i system. This is just a receiver, which means we can see other boats but they can’t see us – that doesn’t make much sense to me.

Also, to get the MMSI number changed if you re-register the boat to another country means sending the whole unit back to Garmin. This is, to say the least, incredibly inconvenient when you rely on your radio and system daily.

You quickly come to realise that the most important thing in your cruising life with the family is safety. We started with very little but we are quickly learning that it is not something you can afford to relax about, especially with children. We have developed very strict rules about the kids’ lifejackets and being accompanied on deck. We use netting where possible.

On that note, one of the greatest experiences we have had on the safety side was spending an afternoon with the guys at Liferafts Etc in Saint Martin while they serviced our liferaft. We were able to get the whole family inside it and understanding how everything worked. The experience and knowledge these guys passed on was absolutely invaluable.

The daily routine is a mixture of sailing, playing and home-schooling Harry on board

Sailing is one thing but, as everyone said to us, the most important thing about your boat is how it performs at anchor. When we brought the boat it had a pretty small Delta anchor fitted and a big Manson Supreme in the locker. After a bit of glassfibre cutting and metalwork we fitted the Manson and, touch wood, so far it has been excellent. Being able to sleep because you trust your anchor is paramount.

Energy storage is the constant battle. Our batteries are a little old and there is just not enough storage for our needs. The family is becoming very energy conscious and we can just manage without the generator but when we head to the Pacific and need freezer space we will be struggling.

Our Spectra Catalina Watermaker has been essential but it is also a big energy consumer. Our solar panels will power it quite happily in the middle of the day but at any other time we are having to steal from our overnight energy storage.

There are a couple of things we brought to the boat thinking they’d be important – our desktop PC being one. Now that was a silly idea. Solar lights, wind-up torches, solar phone chargers, tealight-powered lamps, solar tender nav lights. That is stuff that has proved exceptionally useful.

The Fountaine Pajot 41 Lipari is a world away from Chris’s previous boat. Photo: ACEA 2017 / Austin Wong

Olympic sailing always meant looking after my own equipment and I had always prided myself in getting stuck in with the boat work. Things were simple: splicing, sanding, fairing, the odd spanner and so on. More recently, as the boats I’ve sailed have got bigger and way more technical, the shore crews are bigger and extremely skilled.

Before you know it the boats become so specialist that it is hard to help with much or any of the boat work, especially during this last America’s Cup cycle when everything was hydraulic and full of complex computer software and electronics.

Nothing prepared me for the maintenance side of cruising and the realisation that I knew absolutely nothing at all about how to maintain engines, pumps and alike. We had bought a newer and smaller boat than we intended and I’d convinced myself this would mean less work. More fool me.

At anchor among some bareboat charter cats

At one point the constant maintenance was really getting me down; I just spent all of my days fixing or preventing the next issue. Many of these were down to misuse, which was even more frustrating. With time, the constant looking after of the boat has become quite routine and I have to admit that I quite enjoy it now. I still know nothing, but at least now I know I know nothing!

Riding out the storms

As for the hurricane season in the Caribbean: many people would say to us it’s no biggie, just have a good hurricane plan; there are tonnes of hurricane holes. We managed to insure the boat through the season but it has meant us hauling the boat once already.

I read recently from a very famed world cruiser that ‘these days there are no hurricane holes because they are too busy’. They certainly do seem pretty busy but either way if there is a significant hurricane you are at serious risk of losing your home.

When we arrived in Grenada we were treated to some incredible anchorages that were practically empty, but it has also meant for some very nervous moments. We are very sad to say that most of the places and people we have spent a summer at or with were left in much disarray following the destruction caused by Hurricane Irma.

As I write we are ten weeks in and every day has been an adventure. It’s very easy to meet people with the kids in tow; they say hello to everyone. We’ve met incredible people along the way. The other thing that has been humbling has been the kindness we have seen from old sailing friends we’ve met from 30 years as travelling sailboat racers.

Variety is the spice

Days vary enormously. This morning was a dawn surf with the whole family, breakfast, then a move to a different anchorage. I went swimming to check the anchor, more swimming, lunch and then a relaxing afternoon by the pool in the local harbour’s restaurant. It’s a Sunday so one of the biggest challenges of the trip wasn’t on the programme – home schooling.

Having lived all over the world it was difficult to choose which curriculum to follow. H researched the various options. With Lily our youngest it’s much simpler, as she is at pre-school stage. Teaching Harry, our eldest, was at first tricky but we are getting better at it and he is realising that if he works hard he can smash it out in an hour-and-a-half and get on with the rest of his adventures.

The most amazing things that all of us have learned have come from the day-to-day experiences. The kids can name and identify pretty much every underwater animal. They spend their days searching for nature on the beaches and in the sea. So far we have swum with turtles, sharks and manta rays.

Chris competed in the 2017 America’s Cup as tactician for SoftBank Team Japan. Photo: ACEA 2017 / Austin Wong

Lily can now do back flips and dive to the bottom, 5m deep, aged four. Harry is learning to become a cracking little fisherman and lives for watersports. Their TV and electronics time is minimal. We play cards, play chess, Scrabble, Cluedo. We can sit and chat for hours. The smiles, the laughter… all of this is why we set off on this adventure.

I have been exceptionally lucky to be able to follow my sailing dreams ever since I was ten. Every day has been about trying to be the fastest sailor possible. It is exceptionally hard for any sportsman to find the balance, to spend enough time for your family, yet focus on your work, especially when your work is your passion. I do really miss the racing and it’s really exciting to see the format for the next America’s Cup falling into place.

I really hope I can continue to be so lucky and race at the highest level with incredible sailors. But, for now, the best mainsheet trimmer in the world is my son Harry. Lily is calling the shots. But Mummy is the real boss.

About the author

Chris Draper is a former Olympic sailor who won at Bronze medal for Team GBR in the 49er class at the Athens Olympics in 2004. He has also won the Extreme Sailing Series and competed twice in the America’s Cup, as helmsman with Luna Rossa in 2013 and as tactician with SoftBank Team Japan in 2017. He is now team boss for the British INEOS UK Sail GP team. His wife, H, wrote a blog that detailed the family’s adventures with their children, Harry, seven, and Lily, four, and their adventures and occasional comedy mishaps. Recap on their travels at: sailingfilledejoie.blog

First published in the January 2018 edition of Yachting World. Chris Draper is now team boss of the INEOS Team UK Sail GP entry and the Draper family have sold Fille de Joie and returned to land life… for now.

The post Family sailing: America’s Cup sailor turned cruiser explains his big change appeared first on Yachting World.

This is part two of the Craven family’s story – read part one here.

We approached Cocos Keeling at first light and had to pick our way through the coral to approach the anchorage in the lee of Direction Island. Safely through the pass we were greeted by the most amazing colours – the deep turquoise blue of the anchorage, the brilliant white sand and the rich green of the coconut trees on this island, which has no inhabitants.

In a voyage worthy of many superlatives with stunning paradises where each one seems to better the last, we decided that Cocos Keeling wins hands down; in fact the best tropical island that we have visited.

Cocos Keeling has a fascinating history having been owned by the Clunies-Ross family from Scotland since the 1700s with a history of a thriving copra business here. Darwin visited in the Beagle and formed his theory of atoll development here.

Clearing Customs is a relaxed affair. The police officials dinghy over to Direction Island and, sitting under one of the three covered shelters, they clear you in on the beach, checking immigration forms and stamping passports. Once the formalities are over and we are officially cleared in, Andrew, the police sergeant, advises us on the best place to go snorkelling.

I think his job is officially one of the better jobs in the world – there is no crime here and it’s a relaxed, charming way of life on this tiny dot of an island in the vastness of the Indian Ocean.

The afternoon sees us snorkelling the famous rip. Running around one end of the island, there is a continuous flow of some 2-3 knots through a channel, which has a gully. Dinghy to one end, jump over the side and the current sweeps you along for some 300 metres or so, flying past white tipped reef sharks and copious quantities of fish. We spot eye-catching unicorn fish, napoleon fish, parrot fish and moray eels; some absolutely huge, bigger than our daughter Willow. We glide over acres of coral. In the pristine turquoise unpolluted waters the colours are stunning and unblemished. Without doubt this is the best snorkelling I have ever experienced.

The idyllic anchorage at Cocos Keeling

For the next week, this island paradise is our home and the children revel in it, swimming and playing on the beach, hopping between boats and exploring the island. We make several trips to Home Island, one mile away by dinghy, which you can only do by day – the coral is everywhere and you have to pick your route very carefully.

My favourite place is Prison Island – a tiny island with four coconut trees and four deck chairs (from Ikea!), which someone kindly left there. You sit here surrounded by a sea the same blue colour as a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin and you have your own private desert island.

A number of evenings are spent on the beach sitting around a fire, having a barbecue and sharing stories over beers with our fellow sailors. Many memories are made which will last a lifetime.

And then it was time [for the World ARC rally] to move on – an exciting start with all the yachts leaving in a great spectacle as we rounded Horsburgh Island, leaving it to port and headed west again. Two days out we had plenty of wind and were making great speed topping out at 14.1 knots surfing the waves…

Fifteen months earlier

It was hard to reconcile sailing the Indian Ocean with the situation we found ourselves in 15 months earlier when our plans were in real danger of not happening at all.

It was June 2014. Me, my wife, Nichola and our children, Bluebell, Columbus and Willow had just completed our first shake down sail on board our Oyster 53, Aretha, and a back injury I’d picked up on the London Marathon came back to haunt me.

I was referred to a back specialist, who gave me two options: I could grit it out, taking ibuprofen to reduce the swelling and pain and taking some physio, on the basis that 50 per cent of these conditions sort themselves out; or I could have the operation to take some of the pressure off the nerves at the base of my back.

I went home and discussed it with Nichola. We were set on our plan. On the other hand I could do long term damage to my back if I pushed too hard.

It was an agonising choice and it wasn’t one Nichola or anyone else could make. It was my decision. I slept on it for a few days and decided to go for the operation. The wheels were put in motion and we adjusted two parts of our plan.

Firstly, we delayed our departure date by three weeks to give me sufficient recovery time. Secondly, for the first part of our passage to Portugal, we’d take two crew with us and only take the two older children, leaving Willow, our two-year-old, at home with family. My brother Max and my good friend Ian were our crew – both experienced sailors who’d be extremely helpful for the first part of the passage, the tough Bay of Biscay crossing.

The operation was a success and attention was refocused on our departure date and making sure everything was ready.

The final few days before we departed were intense. When I had done this with the BT Global Challenge, I was one of 18 people getting everything done with full on-shore support. This time round, it was just Nichola and me – with family and friends.

We worked late into the evening packing everything away and by midnight the boat started to look less like a jumble sale. Aretha felt a little like a tardis as everything or almost everything found a home.

Alarms were set for 0500 and on 20 August, 2014 we slipped lines just before 0600 to catch the tide heading west. Wow. This is really happening, I thought as we glided out of Universal Marina. There was a slight mist over the water as the sun rose in a blue sky with wispy white clouds. We motored down the Hamble, down Southampton Water, past the Isle of Wight and out into the English Channel.

Our vision statement had started with the line: ‘On 1 August 2014 we are setting off to sail around the world.’ Here we were, five years since we first inked those words with the world before us. We were 19 days after our planned departure date but we were underway.

It was an incredible feeling as we switched off the engine in the Solent and felt the wind filling the sails and starting to power us along; standing at the helm and steering our ship, knowing that we’d be leaving these waters for two years and off to experience the world. All those 0500 starts on freezing cold mornings when I’d visualised standing at the helm of our boat sailing around the world. And now here we were. Our dream was truly becoming our reality and we were off. It was the biggest buzz you can imagine. We had done it.

For the next two years, we experienced life as a tightly knit team and with friends along the way. Our route would take us from the Solent down the European coast before our first big ocean crossing, the Atlantic. From here, across the Caribbean Sea to Panama, then a magical six months crossing the Pacific before arriving in Australia. Indonesia and the magical islands of the Indian Ocean led us to South Africa and then back into the Atlantic with stops in St Helena and Brazil before crossing our outbound track in Grenada. Not just content with circumnavigating, we then sailed back to Panama and turned right sailing to San Francisco, closing this part of our adventure by sailing under the iconic Golden Gate Bridge.

The experiences flew thick and fast: from the Panama Canal to the Galapagos, the fast hip-shaking dances of French Polynesia, the warmth of the people in Vanuatu, Tonga, and Fiji, the raw beauty of Australia, though the Indian Ocean, to the wildlife in South Africa, and the fast pace of life in Brazil. We shared the storms, the stunning sunsets, the fast downwind exhilarating sailing, the fish, the medical emergencies and a boat that continuously needed attention; all part of life at sea.

We continued to run our businesses while we were away and I’m delighted that we successfully sold my data analytics business as we crossed the Pacific Ocean, celebrating at Bloody Mary’s restaurant in Bora Bora. It was certainly an experience negotiating the sale and purchase agreement in 35-knot winds in the middle of the night over the satellite phone miles from anywhere in the South Pacific.

This plan, that once seemed so distant and so hard to achieve, had actually been achieved and we’d done exactly what we set out to do. Having gone full circle and arrived back in St Lucia, I reflected how grateful I was for spending every day of the last two years with my wife and three children. From the start, the reason why we went to extreme lengths to create our adventure was to have magical life-changing experiences both for ourselves and for our children.

Back in our old world, what was I teaching our children about what I knew of the world and what I believed to be important? Precious little. I thought of the nights I had spent lying on deck with Bluebell and Columbus debating what was out there, the days we spent learning about the planet, the stars, the sea, the weather. We had experienced different cultures, met people from different walks of life, shared time together, laughed, played and seen the world.

One of the most common questions we are asked is around our children’s schooling and what were they getting from this experience. Were we the best parents in the world or the most irresponsible parents?

In response, I share a favourite story from my logbook from when we sailed the Indian Ocean, which made me smile and feel good about our choices:

‘Last night Columbus and I were on deck watching the stars and talking. I’d made hot chocolate for us both – for Columbus in his favourite Taronga Zoo mug with a koala on the front.

‘We fell silent after a while (unusual for Columbus) and he asked if we could put Desert Island Discs on. In particular he wanted to listen again to Sir David Attenborough.

‘At the end, he picked up on one of Sir David’s comments that when he was ten he had started a museum of fossils and a snake skin that he had collected.

‘Since watching Blue Planet and visiting many amazing places, Columbus over the last week or so has announced he’d like to become a zoologist. Columbus is a serious boy and he doesn’t make statements like this lightly. So much so, it provided some super leverage: “Columbus if you want to become a zoologist,” we’d say, “you need to up your game with writing and documenting what you see.”

‘Up to this point, getting Columbus to write had been like pushing water up hill. The past week it was transformed. Every day, he added a page or two of notes and drawings to his journal and with little pushing.

‘At 4pm today, we were all presented with a small piece of paper. It had a drawing of a common wombat and was an invitation to Columbus Museum.

‘On the table he had laid out all the artefacts he’d collected on our travels and proceeded to talk through with great passion on each and every item: names and details that I had long forgotten; the fossils, shells, semi-precious stones, the coral – all were treasures to him. He was in his element. The wealth and depth of knowledge he’d acquired left Nichola and I catching each others’ eyes as we marvelled at how much he has learned.’

It feels seeds are being planted for the future. It feels that what we are calling our real world education is having an impact. I remember Bluebell’s words: “At school we’d only be reading about this in books, but we’re actually out here seeing it and doing it.”

Continues below…

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Caspar’s Top Tips

Create your Vision of the future

•   Take the time (ideally with your partner) to understand what you (both) truly want to do. It took us six months working on this to create a shared vision of our future

•   In this time, the reasons why you shouldn’t go for your vision will show up. Most people will be kind enough to point them out. Note them down but don’t fixate on them. Now is not the time for the ‘how to’ stuff.

Fix a Date and Make it Public

•   Whatever your vision, fix a date and be certain that you mean it. Nothing ever happens without a deadline. Once you have your date locked down, share your plans with everyone and work backwards covering all the things that you need to do.

Managing Businesses and Money

•   For many people, managing money and resources will be one of the biggest challenges. Work out what finances you want for your adventures and err on the side of caution. It’s always better to overestimate how much it will cost that to underestimate it.

•   Learn ruthlessly and accept you’ll make lots of mistakes as you work towards your goals. Surround yourself with people who are doing what you want to be doing and become a sponge for information and insights.

Frequently asked questions

Isn’t it Dangerous?

•   Everything in life has risks. We considered a huge variety of risks including of course the obvious ones like health and safety with the children at sea, how to run and manage a boat etc. For each risk area we researched, we reached conclusions we were happy with.

What about schooling?

•   We spent months researching the national curriculum and left with a vast stack of materials and school plans. Every day we ensured the children did reading, writing and maths. We were surrounded by learning opportunities and incredibly talented people from all walks of life. Our children thrived in this environment.

How much does it cost?

•   Your living costs can be as low as £2,000 a month depending on how you choose to live. Your boat can cost anywhere from £50,000. Only you can decide how much boat work and maintenance you can do yourself, how much you eat out and whether you stay in marinas or at anchor. We found that 10 per cent of boat cost as annual running cost was indeed a pretty good rule of thumb.

Caspar Craven first sailed round the world in 2000-01 on the BT Challenge yacht Quadstone. He now speaks on teamwork, leadership and how to make things happen. His book ‘Where the Magic Happens’ is out in May, and available for pre-order from Amazon now.

The post Sailing away: how to turn dreams into a successful family circumnavigation appeared first on Yachting World.

Surreal. Not a breath of wind tonight. The sea’s surface is flat and unbroken. The sky is utterly cloudless and filled with stars. A half moon lights up the entire picture. It’s so still it’s unbelievable. We are six miles north of the Equator and on the cusp of leaving the northern hemisphere. Nichola and the children are excited. This is their first crossing of The Line. Given we will cross around 2330, King Neptune in all his finery is on ice until the morning. The crossing of the Equator ceremony presided over by King Neptune (in this case me, as I have crossed several times before) will try each of the crewmembers for crimes in court. Inevitably, they will be found guilty and buckets of cold water will be dispensed over each of them.

Yesterday, we had our first Galapagos visitor. A large, unidentified bird (later identified as a red-footed booby) landed on the bows in the afternoon. It perched on the pulpit and didn’t bat an eyelid as four of us stood taking photos of it. It was content to just sit there and hitch a lift. We estimate it was about 40-50cm long – a big bird.

He left this morning and we’ve had various other birds visiting during the day. It’s one of the features of Galapagos animals that they have no predators and are fearless; they come right up to you. We’re hoping to experience more of this tomorrow as we should arrive in Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz by mid-morning tomorrow.

The schooling has been all about South American geography and biology. Our two eldest children, Bluebell and Columbus, re-watched David Attenborough’s Galapagos this afternoon and made pages of notes. They are on their way to becoming child experts on the islands. Columbus, who has been slow to get going with his writing, is making great strides now and writing at length. It’s really great to see.

I’m about to wake Bluebell to join me on night watch. She loved the night watch last night and chatted non-stop for two hours while we lay in the cockpit gazing at the stars and steered Aretha by our angle to Orion’s Belt. I think we can see the Southern Cross now but we are going to double check that tonight.

We are all looking forward to landfall. Spirits are high, in no small part due to showers all round and cooler temperatures on board. Our next post will be from the southern hemisphere and with tales of the Galapagos.

Team Aretha, out.

A long-term plan

In the early summer of 2009, life had been very different. Nichola and I had been married for five years and we had two children, Bluebell (4) and Columbus (2).

I was co-owner of a small consultancy business in the technology sector. I was working long 80- or 90-hour weeks and barely seeing Nichola and the children. By Friday evening I’d be exhausted. Nichola used to joke without much humour that all that was left of me by the end of the week was the pith of the lemon.

We had plans for what we really wanted to do in life: to travel; to explore; to live first class. But that was all some day in the future. ‘When’ was something we were never quite sure about.

A seed was planted in our minds on 13 June 2009. We were at a birthday party in Kent. Over a picnic my brother-in-law told us about a family who sailed around the world and then went on to say what a ridiculous idea it was. Nichola and I looked at each other. Something had clicked in both our minds.

Our world was about to change.

Over the next six months we spent just about every weekend scribbling with pen and paper what we wanted to have in our lives. I wanted to sail around the world again (In 2000-01 I crewed on the BT Global Challenge ‘wrong way’ round the world race) and Nichola wanted to do more travelling. At this stage in her life, Nichola had sailed on a boat just twice.

Piece by piece, we created a vision to sail around the world for two years. It was captured in a mission statement, like something straight out of the corporate world, that we tacked to the kitchen wall next to a huge map of the world with our intended route on it. We involved our children, Bluebell and Columbus, in the planning and made it a regular part of our conversation.

There was one fly in the ointment. Well, several: one a big one and lots of other slightly smaller ones. The biggest was money. It costs a lot of money to sail safely around the world, especially with young children.

The cold reality is that we didn’t have the money to do it. Nowhere even close. What we did have was a compelling vision of the future, time and lots of energy.

Right from the start, we set our departure date. It was to be 1 August 2014 and we were leaving from Dartmouth, eight miles from where I had grown up, close to Start Point lighthouse. That gave us five years to create the wealth we needed to make it all happen.

Completing the ARC

Back then, Nichola worked as an HR manager and I worked in my own business providing data analytics and consultancy as a managed service. The returns were thin and I used to joke I’d have earned more stacking shelves in the supermarket for the hours that I put into my own company.

Once we were fixed on our vision, we then told everyone we knew about it. We became known as the family who were going to sail around the world. Reactions varied from scepticism as to whether we would actually do it to ‘you are utterly crazy’.

We didn’t have to look far for all the reasons as to why we shouldn’t do it. Most people were kind enough to point them out for us. The main ones ranged from medical concerns to how would we do home schooling, to pirates, to the fact that Nichola couldn’t sail and got seasick when she had been on a boat. Plus the fact we’d never owned a boat.

Our approach was that rather than these being reasons for us not to press ahead, they were things to take account of. We noticed that so many people expressed strong opinions. But they were just that. They certainly weren’t facts.

Nichola and I had both been professionally trained in our careers, Nichola as a barrister, I as an accountant. We weren’t in the habit of being cavalier when it came to risk. We worked through each of the different areas, researched extensively and came to our own conclusions.

At a crossroads

By 2012, we were three years into our five-year plan to get the finances in place to be able to head off sailing. What was frustrating beyond belief was that our financial situation had not meaningfully changed.

We were at a crossroads. We had to do something dramatically different. Einstein famously said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That summed up the previous three years.

The answer was to immerse ourselves in learning, namely, learning the skills required to grow a business and to make money. As soon as I learnt new things I’d implement them in our business and test and measure.

There were many things we changed. It started with our lifestyle. We re-examined how we used our time, how we managed our energy and made conscious decisions around what we allowed to influence us.

In my business we grew the team, we launched new products, we tested myriad sales and marketing approaches and adopted an ego-free mantra of ‘it doesn’t matter who is right, it only matters what is right’. I re-learnt how to be a leader and heavily relied on values-based leadership which I implemented in both the business and at home.

We went on to launch multiple new ventures – online marketing sites and 500 niche dating sites – some of which crashed and burned. But some of them were successful. The next few years proved to be very intense as piece by piece we built the businesses that would enable us to fulfil what we set out to do.

The family made a poster of the values they wanted to take on their voyage

While creating money was an important part of it, there were many other things we had to do as well. We had to get a good amount of sailing in to acclimatise the children and Nichola and make sure they liked it. We went on flotilla sailing holidays in the Med and made certain we chose places with the least wind and waves so we could allow Nichola and the children to form happy memories free from any scary experiences. Bad experiences early on would have been a deal breaker for the overall plan.

We had many other areas to focus on simultaneously: how to become medically self-sufficient so we could deal with medical emergencies (which we would later on); how to do home schooling. We had to learn in depth about boat maintenance and repairs, radio licences and so on. It was a long list and weekends were full with training, learning, planning and researching as well as building businesses.

Cutting loose

By spring 2014, Nichola and I were working hard in both our businesses. Not only that, but two children had become three and we now had Willow, a very energetic two-year-old.

In my business, I was virtually out of the day-to-day activity. We’d strengthened the team and transitioned the CEO role from me to my business partner and at the same time had hired an experienced chairman to help guide the business. Nichola was working hard to build her business and had hired an excellent general manager to start running it in her absence.

There was just one thing missing. We still didn’t have a boat. When we attended an ARC seminar, the most common question we got was: “What boat do you have?”

Sea trials for Aretha

The reactions said it all. People didn’t believe we would be there and be ready in time.

Many people we knew were looking at us and asking if it was really going to happen. It’s too late to get a boat now, they said; you won’t have time to get properly prepared. Surely you’d be better off delaying by a year?

When deciding on our boat, we had spoken to people we trusted and focused on recommendations. What had become apparent very quickly was that Oyster Yachts was one of the leading brands for building safe and solid bluewater cruising yachts.

What also became apparent in all our conversations was just how much work we’d have to do fixing our boat and learning about the maintenance of an ocean-going yacht. We heard one story after another of how Oyster responded quickly with advice on how to fix whatever problem you had, and arranged for parts to be shipped to wherever in the world.

The decision was easy and we spent very little time looking at other boats. We decided that, as there were five of us, we wanted a 50ft-plus boat to give us plenty of space, a boat that would sail fast and was rock solid and safe.

That April, we blocked out a Saturday and arranged a series of back-to-back boat viewings of some 11 boats. We had the children with us and it was set to be a full day, starting with the first viewings at 0900.

As the day wore on, we hadn’t found anything that felt right and the kids were getting increasingly fractious. We arrived at the final viewing of the day on the Hamble. By now Bluebell and Willow had had enough and just wanted to stay in the car.

Columbus and I went on ahead to view Aretha. She was the very nearest boat on the pontoon, painted in a stunning blue. She instantly stood out as a special boat. As we stepped on board, I had a feeling that this was the one.

She had four berths including a bunk room which would be perfect for two of the children. She would need some adapting and upgrades to get her ready for what we wanted, and some of the things like the pristine cream seats weren’t so practical as we knew they would be magnets for Marmite-covered children’s hands.

Aretha worked her magic as we explored. Nichola and I knew then and there that we had found our home.

Continues below…

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Disaster strikes

By early May, we had completed negotiations, done sea trials, a survey, and had finalised the purchase of Aretha. We had a good amount of work to do refitting her and getting her transformed from a boat that had been used to the English Channel to one that was about to sail around the world. Everything needed to be fully serviced, safety equipment needed to be beefed up, satellite comms installed and watermaker brought to a fully functioning state. There was a lot to do.

Equally important, we learned how she sailed and took her out for a test sail. I gathered a crew of three experienced sailors, guys I’d sailed with a lot in the Med and in mid-May we slipped lines from the Hamble for seven days, heading west to stretch Aretha’s legs and see how everything settled at sea.

Only a month earlier I had completed the London Marathon. I’d had some back pain and leg pain during the first 20 miles of the run. In the final six miles it developed into excruciating pain and during that last stretch along London’s Embankment and up to the finish line I was stopping every half mile to stretch and get physiotherapy. Fired by the energy of the crowd I pushed myself way further than I should have done.

In the weeks that followed I needed lots of physio and was taking things carefully to manage the pain, taking a lot of ibuprofen. It was uncomfortable but manageable.

We tied up alongside in Weymouth for our first night. Walking around the town, I could feel my right leg tightening in a way that it hadn’t before. Five days later, heading back, we stopped at Brixham and I took a walk along the quay with my good friend Jani.

Suddenly I was doubled over in pain and immobilised “Jani,” I called out to him. “I can’t walk.”

It was as though I had hot coals covering my leg and back. I’d never felt pain like that before. It brought tears to my eyes.

It was only ten weeks before our long-planned departure date. At a stroke, our plans were in very real danger of not happening. We had our boat, our business plans were coming together and now I couldn’t walk.

So many things flashed into my mind: how could we carry on? I’d be a liability; it would all be impossible.

Read on here: how the Craven family set about their world cruise plans and their advice and tips on how to follow in their footsteps.

Caspar Craven first sailed round the world in 2000-01 on the BT Challenge yacht Quadstone. He now speaks on teamwork, leadership and how to make things happen. His book ‘Where the Magic Happens’ is out in May, and available for pre-order from Amazon now.

The post How this family made their two-year round the world sailing dream happen appeared first on Yachting World.