Everything Breaks All the Time: 2 Voyages from Europe to New Zealand, 15 years apart

Book Synopsis: In 2007/2008 Helen and I sailed as crew on 9 different boats, working our way from the Canaries to New Zealand. Along the way we met challenges ranging from taking on thousands of gallons of water mid-ocean, to an engine fire, losing a rudder, and piracy on the high seas. We sailed with some awful people and some amazing ones, learned a huge amount about sailing, the world, and ourselves, made some lifelong friends, and were inspired to start our own family with a plan to take our children on a similar sailing adventure. Fast forward to 2019 and we were living in Edinburgh with our two boys, Roo (8) and Kit (6) who had been brought up spending at least a week a year living on a sailing boat since they were born. They had already sailed to Aberdeen, Orkney, and Gothenburg from Edinburgh on our 13m Ketch Lucky Girl as well as spending a couple of holidays visiting Joel who lived on Serenity, his Grand Soleil 46 just south of Athens. In 2019, I took a long summer holiday and sailed from Edinburgh via Portsmouth to the Scilly Isles. After a break there, Helen and the boys went back to Edinburgh, friends came to join me and we sailed across Biscay to A Coruña in NW Spain. There the boat was lifted out for the winter, and I flew home. In February 2020 we quit our jobs and packed up our life in Edinburgh, put all my bikes in storage and (after a few months’ delay due to covid) moved on board the boat in Spain. Our route since then has been: Spain - Portugal - Madeira - Canaries - St Lucia - St Vincent & the Grenadines - Antigua & Barbuda - St Maarten - Bonaire - Curacao - Colombia - Panama - Galapagos - French Polynesia - Western Samoa - Wallis & Futunjjj - Fiji - New Zealand.

I’m not complaining, it’s the life that I choose (for now), but it’s hard for those who haven’t experienced it to know how much work is involved in a trip like this. Whenever we’re underway a watch must be maintained - so an adult must always be awake. Things break all the time. Getting parts to fix things or even just getting groceries or clothes is normally hard, if not impossible (where parts are concerned). And then there’s the dreaded homeschool…When Helen and I set off to hitch-hike as crew around the world, it felt like an unusual idea. Youtube wasn’t a really big thing, but now seems to have a lot of sailing channels. The really popular ones feature small, beautiful bikinis on beautiful women and beautiful photography of beautiful places. They give the impression of an idyllic lifestyle - relaxing and calm, like an endless vacation. My intention is that if you watch these channels, along with reading this book, you’ll have an accurate impression of what it’s like to circumnavigate with a family. You’ll also get some insight into what it’s like inside my head, you may or may not like this, I’m not entirely sure that I do either. To some extent, I’m filling in the gaps left by sailing channels and enthusiastic forumites, so I’m not going to spend a lot of page space telling you about wonderful things and beautiful places: you can get that elsewhere (and it’s better with pictures), I’m going to focus on the nitty-gritty of what else happens and takes up a lot of my time and energy. It has taken me a long time to come to terms with certain aspects of this lifestyle, ironically, some of them are also the reason that this life appeals. Self-reliance is the big one - in terms of food and water, also in terms of spare parts and know-how.