First You Have To Buy A Little Boat.........

Welcome to our web page for our family, friends and dogs. It’s just an account of what we're doing.
Most of this information is gained through our experiences and not to be used for training purposes because after all a bowline is still a knot and a sheet is still something to keep you warm on a cold night! The dream is to be setting a sextant under a Pacific night sky... approaching the north shore of Oahu. This may take a few years of pain and heartache and sheer terror but so far few complaints and loads of fun and exhilaration and sense of accomplishment and so many true friends of like mind passing by - hopefully to meet again on some distant shore (or bar).
It was the last year of the 20th century that after years of the normal pressures of life we finally realised our long time dream of freedom afloat. We found ourselves in Falmouth boarding Sundowner with just a couple of bags each, a dog and one of our sons. Unfortunately being weather bound before our trip to our new home port of Weymouth we found ourselves in the charming town of Falmouth existing on extra cold Guinness and pasties alone! Sadly Al had to return by train for work before we set sail.
And so in the winter of '99 our first true sailing lessons began..........

1st February 2009

6000 miles, hundreds of ports, harbours, anchorages and nearly ten years later we find ourselves and Sundowner ashore on the island of Malta.
Winter 99-00 in Weymouth Marina was fun spent working and living aboard.
Winters 00-04 were spent in Guernsey, Sandra being too valuable an employee to be made redundant relocated to Guernsey where we lived for four years paying off the remaining loan on Sundowner as the sale of our house hadn’t covered the purchase of our new home Sundowner, we also built up a small cruising fund. The Channel Islands with their 8 metre tides, 7 knot currents and bountiful rocks were an ideal place to learn to navigate and sail using a hand bearing compass, paper charts and tidal atlases. Oddly enough our fourth excursion out of Beaucette Marina took us back to Weymouth via an overnight stay in Alderney from where you just head north, the sixty mile 12 hour trip split with six hours of east and west currents making an s shape on the chart. Luckily the large ships are also split into east and west shipping lanes.
Winter 04-05 was spent in Portimao, Portugal after a fantastic nine month trip south, even though it turned out to be an abnormally bad year weather wise for cruising we just carried on in blissful ignorance sheltering when necessary. We started with a trip back to England to refit passing back through the Channel Islands, along the Brittany coast, down inside Biscay right into the corner where we crossed the French border into northern Spain along the Basque coast, around Finisterre and south again to Portugal. Being late in the year we were quite prepared to stop to winter at any time but carried on in breaks in the weather before rounding Cabo de Sao Vicente in the company of dolphins on a dark November night.
Winters 05-08 were spent in Gaeta Italy. As our original sort of plan was a ten-year trip to Hawaii we surprised ourselves when we turned left at Gibraltar into the Med quickly along the Spanish coast up and then east slowly passing through the Balearic islands of Ibiza, Majorca and Menorca then east again to the islands of Sardinia and Corsica. A final island of Ponza, then in October another winter arrival in Gaeta, which is situated between Rome and Naples. By now the cruising fund was very low so a few months of each winter were spent working in Scotland. The first summer we travelled south as far as Sicily passing through the volcanic Aeolian Islands before returning to Gaeta. The following summer was spent locally with the odd trip to the island of Ventotene.
Winter 08-09 is being spent here in Malta, last summer we travelled south again down the coast turning west across and around Sicily stopping for a while to enjoy the Egadi Islands. After a short fifty-mile overnight sail south to Gozo we had 2 months to explore the Maltese Islands sometimes in the company of visiting friends.
Our travels this year may take us further east, returning to Sicily around the foot of Italy and through the Greek islands before wintering in Turkey.
We are now at the stage that we feel confident enough in our boat and ourselves to offer any like-minded souls the opportunity to come aboard to share and experience for a while life afloat. Visit www.dreamingsailingliving.com