escapade sailing

This is turning into a very lazy, low mileage winter. We sailed in to the Guna Yala 4th January and we’re still here.  Since then we’ve probably sailed about 300 miles in short hops between islands.  Last winter we sailed 4,000 miles, this year we might do 1,000. Weeks go by with the anchor buried […]

21st February 2017 Chicha Ceremony   I’m staring into the bottom of the upturned calabash bowl again.  This is my third or maybe fourth bowl of chicha.  Each one contains about half a pint of opaque brown liquid, tasting earthy, boozy, slightly sweet and with a hint of burnt coffee.  The three men drinking with […]

07.01.17 Over the hills.. Two years ago we crossed the Atlantic and dropped anchor in Falmouth Harbour, Antigua. Now we are 1,100 nautical miles further west, across the wide Caribbean. Behind me are the misty, jungly Darien mountains of Panama and behind those, the Pacific Ocean, now just 30 miles away from where we are […]

This all seems a bit out of date now, we’ve been offline for a couple of weeks , but here’s the blog notes.. 29.12.16 Leaving Cartagena  30.12.16 Islas Rosario I wake to silence. No wind, the sun is just rising. A boy paddles past in a dugout. the water is glassy and I can see […]

The extraordinary customs process was still rumbling on but the port capitan gave us permission to sail the boat 50 miles or so round to Cartagena, so we left the brown waves of Puerto Velero and motored out in a calm, back in to the blue. Cartagena makes quite a spectacular landfall. Arriving by sea, […]

  Merry Christmas xx    

13.12.16 Pablo’s hippos Eventually we had a signed document from the Port Capitan and were free to leave Santa Marta.  The next passage was a quick 60 mile hop across the bay and in to Puerto Velero. Our route would take us past the mouth of the mighty Magdalena River.  It flows north through Colombia […]

02.12.16 So we left Willemstad and sailed up the West coast of Curacao, checking all systems were working ok. Great to be sailing again, having been away from the boat for a few months we tend to forget just how fast and powerful she is.  Escapade was romping along, out in the blue again with […]

November 17  Some famous old salt once said that sailing around the world is just a lot of ‘boat repairs in exotic places’. This boatyard in Curacao isn’t very exotic, but it seems a reasonable price to pay, a week or so of maintenance at either end of a 6 month winter cruise. Mission Critical […]

Here Today, Gone to Maui It was a glorious summer, but now autumn has arrived in Guernsey,  I’m in a thick wetsuit with the first numb hands of winter. Escapade is waiting for us in a Curacao boatyard, but it’s still hurricane season in the Caribbean.  Not quite time to go sailing yet, we could squeeze […]