After a week of sailing along the English south coast in pretty rubbish weather with the wind constantly in the wrong direction, we picked up Uncle Adam in Falmouth, filled the cupboards with baked beans and Angel Delight and we were off! We slipped the lines at 6am as the sun rose over the, Read More
On Monday 13th August 2018, we sailed out of Port Solent Marina in Portsmouth, UK, on our biggest adventure yet. An adventure to explore the world using a sailing boat as our base and home.
“Of course you don’t need a new mast. Nobody has ever replaced a mast on an Oyster!” That’s what we were told over and over again, by rigger after rigger and surveyor after surveyor. But here we are, many months later, with our brand new mast gleaming in the sunlight. Over in Sweden, a, Read More
Renaming a boat is something that seems to strike fear into the hearts of superstitious sailors everywhere. Apparently it’s really bad luck to change the name of a boat, even if the current name is a bit rubbish. If you are brave enough to anger the gods by changing a boat name, then there, Read More
I’d been looking forward to “hauling out day” for about a month. It marked the official end of our first sailing season and would be the start of a new chapter in the book that I’m going to write about all of this when I get around to it (although I said that about, Read More
The learning curve of an inexperienced, new boat owner has been a lot steeper than I expected. Owning and fixing up an older sailing boat for cruising the world has been much more of an emotional roller coaster ride that I was prepared for. During the first five months, we have had many boat, Read More
After buying our Oyster 435 sailing boat in Ipswich, absolutely nowhere near our home, we needed to get the boat back to Portsmouth so we could start preparing her for our sailing adventure. Getting her from Ipswich to Portsmouth involved crossing the terrifying Thames Estuary, riddled with sand banks, wind farms and massive ships,, Read More
Every sailing boat needs cool boat stuff! People planning to sail the world, sailboat cruisers and liveaboard families definitely need cool gadgets and fun stuff on their boat. From towable water toys to cool drones to spear guns! So here’s our list of cool boat gadgets that we really, really want on our boat, Read More
This is the story of how we negotiated and renegotiated the price of our boat, after getting a marine survey. It’s a summary of how we searched for a boat, found a boat, made an offer on a boat, had a boat survey done, haggled, negotiated, whinged, cried and eventually, handed over a huge, Read More
Buying your first boat is a crazy, terrifying, exciting, frustrating and above all, expensive business. Buying a used sailing boat is even worse. There are so many traps to fall into, so many untruths to uncover, so many complicated procedures to follow. We’ve just about managed to stumble our way through to boat ownership., Read More
