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Two months of restoration work and Peregrine is looking as clean as the day we left!

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now we’re really home On July 11th, we sailed into the Sassafras river, the same river we set sail from five years ago! Trevor’s Mom, Sandy, and our good friends Tom, Rose, and Bill sailed out to the mouth of the river and welcomed us home! Friends also met us on the dock and toasted our return with champagne and a few fireworks. In the photo above, Sandy watches Peregrine sailing up the river from the bow of our friend’s boat. Thank you Rose for sharing the picture! 

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We hopped up the coast between South Carolina and Maryland, and we stopped for a week in NC. My family met us in the Neuse River on their boat Selkie Song. You can just make out my sister, Kirsten, standing on the bow. 

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back to the east coast With our circumnavigation complete, it was time for us to sail back to the US. In June, we made landfall in Charleston, South Carolina, and we were welcomed by my Mom and Dad. They drove down from NC as a surprise to celebrate our return home. Having my parents with us made our return joyful, and helped to dampen the strangeness we both felt about being back home. Charleston was beautiful, charming and familiar, but in many ways it also felt surreal. The omnipresence of overt wealth and commercialism is hard to escape in America. 

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circumnavigation complete! We crossed our outbound line on June 4th, while sailing through the Bahamas, finally completing our five year circumnavigation! We celebrated at a quiet, remote anchorage in the Berry islands. The peaceful spot helped refresh us for our return to the US. 

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eating ice cream with friends in Martinique 

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landfall, good food and sleep! We arrived at Martinique on May 13th. It is so good to be on land again! Martinique is a French island, so stinky cheese, fresh baguettes and good wines are plentiful and cheap! And there is lots of good lettuce! On passage we rotate watches every three hours, so we never get long periods of uninterrupted sleep. We both felt a bit shattered when we arrived, but after a little bit of rest and some good food we’re ready to set sail on the final leg of our journey home. Our plan as of now is to sail straight to North Carolina. When we pass through the Bahamas we’ll cross over our line and complete our circumnavigation. 

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rainbow in the doldrums 

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atlantic ocean crossing part two It took thirty long days to sail from Ascension Island to Martinique, and much of that time was spent bobbing around in the doldrums fighting contrary currents and chasing squalls for puffs of wind. Despite the sometimes frustrating conditions though, we had a good time. We celebrated our fourth equator crossing with some skinny dipping, a bottle of champagne, and a feast of cheese and dried pears.

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ascension island After our rest at St. Helena we made a short 800 mile hop to Ascension, a small volcanic island governed by the UK. It is used as a base for the British and American militaries, and as a BBC World Service relay station. People usually only come to Ascension to work, so it lacked much of the cultural charm of Saint Helena. Still, the island was beautiful! We spent four days here hiking over the craggy volcanic landscape. Sea turtle nesting sites are carefully protected on the island, and at night we walked along the beaches in the moonlight watching mothers lay their eggs and babies hatch. 

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The British island St. Helena was our first stop on our journey across the Atlantic. It is a fabulously quirky and isolated place. The islanders are charming and welcoming, and the island’s quaint capital, Jamestown, feels like an English village from the 1950s. We spent ten days here recovering from our passage and enjoying the island’s beautiful hiking trails. 

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atlantic crossing part one The first leg of our Atlantic crossing took us from Namibia to St. Helena and lasted ten days. It was an easy going passage with moderate seas and light winds. The calm conditions made it easier to see wildlife in the ocean. A ten-foot hammerhead shark swam up to our boat on our first day at sea, and several days later a pod of small whales chased the boat for close to an hour! You can see one of the whales in the photo above. I’m still trying to identify the species. 

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walking on dunes in the Namib Desert

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The Atlantic

Today we depart from Walvis Bay in Namibia. We will be setting sail in company with our good friends Tina and Gustaf from the Swedish boat Caminante. It's good to be back in the Atlantic. This is the last ocean we need to cross to make it home! The challenging and often terrifying weather of the South African coast is behind us now, and we're happy to be in the predictable trade winds again. Our destination is St. Helena, the British island famous for being the location of Napoleon's exile. We're expecting our passage to take approximately 10 days.

We've enjoyed our stop in Namibia. We stuck to the coast, stopping only in Luderitz, a quaint diamond town with German colonial architecture, and in Walvis Bay, a prosperous port on the edge of the Namib desert. The Benguela Current keeps the water frigidly cold here, and the harbor is filled with seals and dolphins.

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South Africa Update

We've been struggling to get to Cape Town for what feels like ages now. On the first of January, when we were still in Richards Bay, we started scrutinizing the weather for windows to sail around the Cape. It took us over a month to make it to Cape Town, and by the 7th of February we finally arrived in Table Bay. For 1000 miles of sailing that is unbelievably slow but given this coast’s notorious reputation it's probably not the worst record.

Between Richards Bay and Cape Town we made stops in Durban, East London and Mossel Bay.  We tried to be fairly conservative with the weather and the conditions we ended up sailing in were completely fine, even pleasant at times.  Not all of our friends fared so well with the weather. We feel especially lucky overall. 

The decision making and waiting was stressful and the constant and detailed weather analysis was tiring.  It was a voyage made out of necessity, and I can't imagine sailing this coast for recreation.  

That being said, the scenery and wildlife of the Southern Cape region are spectacular and Cape Town itself is a beautiful city.  We have enjoyed a busy week here, sightseeing with Gwynn’s parents, who came to visit us.

We have spent the past few days scrambling to get the boat ready with the usual minor repairs and maintenance items and heavily provisioning for the next leg of our journey which should with luck get us home. Unfortunately we have no time to do a proper post at the moment. There is a huge amount of sailing to do in the next 4 months and its time to get started.

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Cape Town, the view from Lion’s Head peak