In this blog post series we take you on the journey from the very beginning of a dream to travel around the world to making it become true.
A year ago we announced to the world our new plan to SAIL around the world.
So what happened to it?
Well, the truth is: we have no sailing experience, nor the time or money to do a voyage for multiple years. Hmm, but does that stop us? Of course not.
Let’s recap the last year:
We started to take the first baby steps. We purchased a 20 foot (6 meters) boat, the Penguin (also referred to as the big fat duck) to do some trial runs. And we took it up the canals from Berlin to Stettin and sailed it to Rügen.
All in all it was a great trip although we had some mishaps like a puke fest for my 2 girls due to rough weather and a very scared dog.
But there is always a next day with sunshine which doesn’t look as bad 
At least this is what we (or was it me?) convinced ourselves.
Sherrie is not so convinced of this sailing thing anymore
During this trip we realized a few things that are essential for our voyage boat:
- Being able to stand up inside the cabin
- Having a dinghy to go ashore to let Mango pee and check places out (Mango refuses to pee on board)
- Some sort of land transport. Walking for 3 kilometers with a toddler on my shoulders broke almost my back. We figured bicycles would be awesome (let’s see how we can store them)
- Self steering! Sticking around the helm without being able to leave it for even a pee break is not very comfortable. Self steering comes in 2 flavors: autopilot and wind vane. Both have their significant downsides (autopilot uses quite a bit of electricity, the wind vane only works while sailing, not under motor), so ideally we would have both
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- More space. The Penguin is a great little yacht but get’s a bit crowded with 2 adults, 2 kids (yes we are expanding our little family) and of course Mango, our travel dog.
And of course there are a few more thing we would wish for our next cruising boat:
- Energy generation that doesn’t rely on the combustion engine like solar panels and / or a wind generator. Although I’m not sure if the math really favors these renewable sources. You can run the engine for quite a bit until you make up for the purchase price of a wind generator (~between 1 and 2k EUR) but definitely a plus is that you don’t have the engine noise all the time.
- A radio (although we still need a license to operate it)
- Radar
- AIS: That’s a receiver that shows all commercial vessels around you so you know at least the name of the boat that runs you over…
- And probably a million other things that I don’t even want to think about since they cost a lot of money we don’t have
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So yes, it looks like we need another boat. That’s why we put the Penguin up for sale ;-(
Captain MJ at the helm
Oh and one more thing I did: I finally got my sea boating license (well, at least the smallest one you can get).
This blog post is part of a post series:
Sailing Around the World, having a boat helps
Sailing around the world, inspiration!
Sailing around the world, a new dream emerges
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