Willie's Adventures Sailing and Fishing

My My next big adventure is to sail half way across the Pacific Ocean crewing on a 53 foot blue water ketch. The boat is an Amel Super Maramu. There will be four of us on board. The owners, who sailed the boat to the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal last year, myself and one other crew, who I have yet to meet.

I fly to meet everyone in Panama and we start by transiting the Panama Canal to the pacific side. Once we provision the yacht we will do a shakedown and training cruise to the Las Perlas Islands. The Las Perlas Islands are the little group of islands in what looks like a bay surrounding Panama before you reach out into the Pacific proper. You can see them on the Google Earth shot below. Assuming everything is in working order, we will then set off for the Galapagos islands about a thousand miles away.

The timeline is about a week to get through the Canal, a week to provision the yacht on the Panama side, a week shake down cruise to Las Perlas islands and then a further week at sea non-stop to the Galapagos. More on subsequent plans in later posts but overall the aim is to get to Tahiti and fly back by mid/late June. The yacht and the rest of the crew are carrying on to New Zealand but my licence from the family rightly does not extend that far. Wish me luck and look out for subsequent posts.

A couple of us from the Squash Club hired an RAF boat I have access to for a weekend cruising around the Forth Of Clyde. We had a great time and ended up in Oban on the Saturday night needing to get back to Largs on Sunday to return the boat, pick up the hire car and catch our flight back. The weather on Sunday was at the top end of our experience, although once we had the sails set properly, the boat performed beautifully as seen on the accompanying clips.

This blog is an attempt to  diary my adventures sailing and fishing. I love to get well off the beaten track and to places that are difficult to reach and where relatively few people go. Until recently, these were mainly based around fishing trips but in the last couple of years I have revisited sailing and plan to use sailing as my means to visit unspoilt places. The header sunset picture was taken when I waas crewing on a catamaran between Port Said in Egypy and Crete. That was my first offshore passage amounting to around 600 miles. The picture on the right was taken on a recent trip to the west coast of Scotland. The Scottish weather is a bit like the weather I am used to in Ireland. If you don’t like it , just wait half an hour because it is about to change.

A lot of the time , I will be off-line and plan to use the i-pad app Blogsy to create my blog off-line and upload it when I can get a good enough internet connection. It is my first attempt at this so forgive me if it is rough around the edges or some parts of it don’t appear to work. Also, please point it out to other people who you think might be interested. Finally please add comments so I know that you are out there.