escapade sailing

Isla Santa Cruz Having dragged Jemima away from the sea lions of San Cristobal, we sailed to Santa Cruz.  The doldrums continue to produce glassy calm seas for us, sailing weather best suited to diesel engines.  I am so looking forward to the trade winds further south. Santa Cruz is the centre of tourist tripping […]

The first thing I become aware of here in the Galapagos is that there are quite a lot of rules restricting my usual behaviour. We are used to exploring by yacht, dinghy, paddleboard and windsurfers.  Finding deserted anchorages, freediving with the fauna, spearing the odd fish for supper, swimming ashore and generally doing exactly as […]

Day 1 Farewell Panama. Thanks for everything! Our first full day at sea.  I think I already mentioned that this sea seems to be teeming with life. Today started with a fin whale close by as we left the last of Las Perlas astern. Then the manta rays started jumping.  Really jumping!  High back flips, […]

  It is very hot and the wind is not really enough to motivate us to hoist a sail. We are waiting for some breeze to take us 850 miles across the Pacific to the Galapagos. Our GRIB file forecasts are relentlessly light and variable.  So we have had a few days island hopping in […]

Getting out of Panama was starting to feel like one of those dreams where you just never quite get where you’re trying to go. The weeks went by, antifouling, waiting for a rigger, waiting for the Watt & Sea, installing it, waiting for the canal transit date, provisioning, last minute jobs. Living in a marina, […]

The two giant continents of North and South America were connected by a tiny thread of land, just 30 odd miles across, until 1914 when the Panama Canal opened for business. And what a business! An audacious civil engineering project that included the biggest dam ever built, the world’s largest man-made lake, and the locks […]

I am writing this afloat in the Pacific Ocean! Here is the video of our Canal transit.      

First of all, apologies for the long silence on the blog.  The last update was almost a year ago, at the end of our third winter in the Caribbean.   Now, where were we? Oh yes, sailing round the world. So we lifted Escapade out in April 2017 and left her in a field in […]

The cutting room floor Tidying up the Escapade files we found a few scraps of film from last year plus some recent shots of San Blas. Dawn stitched it all together for this quick end-of-season roundup featuring Dawn, JP, Jemima and special guest Monkey…

The ‘Clearing-off Boat’ For many years while we were working in London and spending weekends on boats in Chichester Harbour, there was a long running discussion about the ‘Clearing-off Boat’ Many happy hours were spent discussing the possible attributes of this hypothetical craft on which we would, one day, clear off.  At that time I […]