About Us
Hello! We are Floss, Dez, Sam (aged 17) and Evan (aged 15). This is the story of our travels and adventures around the world, over land and sea with our kids. The boys were 8 and 10 years old, we left our jobs and schools, rented out our house and spent a year backpacking, Read More
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It has been forty-eight days since we left Port Solent in the UK and headed out into the unknown. We didn’t have anything that could possibly constitute a plan. Tenerife in the Canary Islands was more of a vague, aspirational target than anything else. A place that seemed both so close (just four hours by plane) and yet so inconceivably far away that I couldn’t in all honesty ever imagine us getting there. Falmouth felt difficult. Spain seemed unlikely. Portugal would probably be enough. But yesterday, I flew out from the Algarve quite cross that I had to return to London for work instead of embarking on the four day crossing to the Canaries. Read More
After crossing the Bay of Biscay in our first ever ‘Oh my God! We can’t see land!’ experience, we deserved a bit of a rest, some nice food and a few cold beers. A Coruña (or La Coruña) in Northern Spain turned out to be a lovely town with atmospheric streets brimming with chilled out nightlife, a Roman lighthouse that has been in perfect working order since the 2nd Century AD and restaurants that serve octopuses as hats. Read More
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 Cornish coastline. We were excited, apprehensive, relieved, happy, and just a little bit terrified of what lay ahead of us in the Bay of Biscay. 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. Read More
“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 slab of corrosion-free aluminium was lovingly moulded into an 18m long tube, almost exactly the same as the one we already had, and lowered into the deck of our 1990 Oyster 435 sailing boat. 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 are boat renaming ceremonies that have to be performed, rules that have to followed, and alcohol that has to be drunk (ok, so it’s not all bad) before any changes can take place. Neptune or Poseidon or some other god of the seas or the winds has to be stroked, caressed and plied with alcohol. Luckily, I’m not even slightly superstitious. Read More