Our first week afloat

The work of the last months finally pays off… we have a boat, and for the first time we can go and sail her!

We were quite anxious: how would we really find her? How would we find her manoeuvrability? How would we handle the responsibility? But in the end: it was a great and very satisfying experience!

We were happy to share our first few days aboard with our sailor friends Francesco and Eliane who also flew out from Switzerland to join us. It was great to have their company and their sailing experience, and we can only thank them for their patience while we were trying to solve little problems and find things amongst the many tools and spares we helpfully inherited from the previous owners.

After they left us on Tuesday morning, we had a few days to carry out some more maintenance activities and take her out by ourselves. Having already got to know her a little, we now felt prepared to handle her ourselves, and we worked very well together despite some challenging conditions as more variable weather set in.

Here are some impressions of our first trip from my phone: better quality photographs from our real camera to follow!


Dipping our toes in…

We are starting this blog today as we move away from our life on land in Switzerland and start a new life aboard a small sailboat, currently moored in Cagliari, Sardinia in the middle of the Mediterranean sea.

We have many reasons for making this step, but ultimately after a year and a half in which sailing  and boating has increasing dominated our free time and our lives, it simply feels like the natural next step.

For those of you without much experience of boats, you might be imagining an easy life of clear sailing, swimming, snorkelling and sundowners. We certainly do hope that these will be major features… but eternal holidaying it is not. This new way of life will contain more than its fair share highs and lows, joy and frustration, adventure and boredom. But in the end we hope to learn much about ourselves and the world around us.

As we dip our toes into cruising, we hope you will join us here and follow our experiences through our words and photographs.

Alex & Angie