Sailing Sabbatical

This trip had been years in the making. The original plan was to sail from New Zealand, but COVID closed the Pacific longer than anywhere else. We adapted — friends flew to Europe, found their Lagoon 400 in Greece, and named her Good Stuff, a nod to common New Zealand slang. I flew over and joined them, spending five months cruising Greece and Türkiye. Then a surprise baby put the crossing on hold for another year. We hauled the boat out, flew home, went back to work, and waited.

Take two. With a one-year-old now on board, we reunited in Sardinia and worked our way west through the Mediterranean — Spain, Gibraltar, Morocco — before a month-long yard period in Spain to prepare the boat for the Atlantic. That meant working through everything: mechanical maintenance, rigging checks, provisioning for weeks at sea, and organising extensive first aid and safety gear — with last-minute repairs still needed once we reached the Canaries.

We departed Cape Verde and crossed in 19 days. After years of preparation, the crossing itself was uneventful — which is exactly what you want. We were becalmed in the middle of the Atlantic for three days, time moving slowly in a small cabin with an 18-month-old. We made landfall in Barbados and celebrated in a bay full of other boats who had just done the same thing.

From there we sailed north through the Caribbean — the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos a particular standout — before finishing in Fort Lauderdale. The trip was full of contrasts: sailing into cities like Athens and Fort Lauderdale on one hand, anchored alone in a remote bay on the other. When things went wrong in remote anchorages — and sometimes they did — there was no marina to call. We had to diagnose breakdowns and fix them as best we could. Routes were replanned on the fly when the weather had other ideas.

You figure it out because you have to, which was all part of the fun. In total we saw 17 countries and sailed 10,000NM

A dream trip, years in the planning, and worth every bit of it.