The dream
Over ten years of sailing in the Solent and around the north coast of France, Brittany and the Channel Islands for our summer holidays in our 38 foot Benetteau, Thursday Island, we were always sad to have to turn back after just a few days to head home. We occasionally met fellow sailors in ocean going boats who were headed for distant and exotic destinations, south across the bay of Biscay to the Spanish rias then down to Portugal, some maybe going further to the Canaries and beyond…
The dream started as just that, an idea that with the right boat in the right conditions, that could be us. Having commuted for 2 to 3 hours a day for thirty years, the appeal of sailing off to distant horizons appealed to Simon. As for me, I was born with an insatiable travel bug and needed no persuasion to sign up for the adventure of a lifetime! We went to all the boat shows and attended a couple of seminars organised by the World Cruising Association. We heard about the preparations for the ARC Portugal and then the ARC transatlantic crossing. The shape of an idea began to form. We would aim to make the trip across the Atlantic Ocean to spend the winter in the Caribbean after spending the summer months in the Mediterranean. We started our quest for the right boat for the right price, a quest that would take us to Spain, Belgium, Turkey and finally to Greece.
The right boat had to be an ocean going boat, heavily built and ideally with a skeg-hung rudder. She needed to be a cutter rig with swept back cross bars and to come equipped with a water maker and air conditioning for the Mediterranean summer temperatures. She had to have a centre cockpit to allow for a large master cabin so that we could get in and out of bed without clambering over each other’s heads. And she had to have enough storage space to live on.
It was incredibly difficult to find the right boat. Twice we went to the point of having an offer accepted only to withdraw the offer after the findings of the surveyor’s report had put a spanner in the works. We met a national sailing treasure, Sir Chay Blyth, and almost bought his boat. We told friends and family about the boats we had almost bought and showed them pictures, invited them for potential holidays, bought the pilot books for the cruising areas that the boats were moored in and then went back to the drawing board twice.
It was after making what we thought of as a cheeky offer on Princess Arguella, an Oyster 55 based in Corfu and having this offer accepted that the dream phase ended and the project phase began…
