Islands

In a year, we visited 64 islands. After a while, it became a kind of gimmick, where I sometimes just touched the ground if the island itself was impossible to land on. There are a couple of places which I stepped on this way, without actually getting out of the water. This is a list of all the islands:

near Europe: Jersey
Berlenga (Portugal)
near Africa: Porto Santo
Madeira
La Palma
La Gomera
Tenerife
Gran Canaria
Sal
Sao Tiago
Fogo
Sao Vicente
Santa Luzia
Boavista
Sal Rei (Boavista)
Sao Nicolau
Carribean: Grenada
Carriacou
Sister Rocks (Carriacou)
Sandy Island (Carriacou)
Petit St. Vincent
Union
Petit Rameau (Tobago Cays)
Petit Bateau (Tobago Cays)
Baradal (Tobago Cays)
Canouan
Bequia
Saint Vincent
Young Island (Saint Vincent)
Duvernette Island (Saint Vincent)
Martinique
Dominica
Guadeloupe
Terre-de-Haut (Iles des Saintes)
Ilet-a-Cabrit (Iles des Saintes)
Terre-de-Bas (Iles des Saintes)
Antigua
Red Head Island (Antigua)
Rabbit Island (Antigua)
Lobster Island (Antigua)
Galley Island (Antigua)
Long Island (Antigua)
Nevis
St. Kitts
St. Eustatius
Saint Martin
Scrub Island (Anguilla)
Anguilla
Rocher Creole (St. Martin)
Sandy Island (Anguilla)
Virgin Gorda (BVI)
Beef Island (BVI)
Tortola (BVI)
Peter Island (BVI)
Salt Island (BVI)
Anegada (BVI)
Europe again: Flores (Azores)
Faial (Azores)
Sao Jorge (Azores)
Terceira (Azores)
Bryher (Isles of Scilly)
Tresco (Isles of Scilly)
Saint Mary's (Isles of Scilly)
United Kingdom

People ask me all the time which was the best place. With so many of them, it's plainly impossible to choose. I would go back to many of them, given the opportunity. Let that be my answer.

Night watch

I have never slept like I did the first week we were back home. I'm not the soundest sleeper and on a yacht I wake up regularly. At anchor this can be useful, because whenever I feel a movement which is new or different from before, I can check things out. With our new Manson Supreme anchor, I have never had the necessity to re-anchor at night, even though I've had to add a second anchor from time to time because the wind turned or some current swept us too close to another boat. Especially in the Caribbean, using both anchors was often necessary.

While underway, waking up from this, usually I ended up having to wake up anyway because of some necessity to help the helmsperson. Only occasionally, this proved unneeded.

Only in marinas do I sleep very deeply, so I like marinas. Sleeping in short bursts has been a habit the last year, and I've managed to get enough sleep this way. But the stationary bed I have at home made me sleep undisturbed for hours after sunrise. This effect wore off after a week or two. So now I'm back to waking up occasionally at night. The first night on the boat last Friday, made me realize it's really been a year of living on a boat.

A year can be a long time indeed.

Getting used to sleeping on passage is always a challenge, and as our crossings got longer, my routine got better established. I've now established a routine of sleeping most of the night in a system of watches where I stay awake most of the day, only to take an hour of rest sometime in the afternoon.



I'm just not very good at keeping night watches because my biological clock doesn't adapt itself very well. So while waking up regularly is no trouble, I have to get my sleep during the dark hours. During the crossing to Madeira, I still took up a daily nightshift and ended having severe sleep deprivation, up to the point where I saw a wonderful eighteenth century wooden square-rigger one night, about to cross our path just ahead.
This hallucination tought me that I can handle lack of sleep, but a skipper should not let it go that far. So for the other crossings, I tried to avoid long watch shifts at night, if my crew agreed to this. The nights are very long for everyone, but as skipper it's a problem if your judgement gets impaired by lack of sleep. In that sense, a year of cruising can be made up of long nights indeed.

Still, the things one sees at night every now and then do provide exceptional spectacle. Staying awake is the price I willingly pay.

Cherish the memory

The most asked question we've been getting from friends and relatives pertains to what we've seen. I started by answering "everything", because it's just too hard to tell anybody everything we've seen. It would take months to tell, and then still they wouldn't get exactly what we've seen.

But the question remains, what have I seen?

I've taken a lot of pictures, about 2400. A lot of those are on my flickr site, and a lot of them also end up here. A lot of what I saw, though, isn't on it.

We saw the famous green flash, I actually saw it five times. I saw it twice one day, which is supposedly impossible. This happened when we were sailing between Martinique and Dominica. There was a nice big Atlantic swell running, and we were sailing on a close reach. The sky was bright and open, and I was looking into the sun as it set. The first green flash was on the down slide, in the trough of the wave. Then we were lifted and I saw it again, just as we were dipping down the next wave. It was just moments apart and I perhaps doubted seeing it the first time, the second time just confirmed what I saw.

After that, we saw it again, usually at sea, the last time as we were leaving the BVI on our crossing back to Europe. Sometimes it was bright green, then it was more emerald. I have seen other things which my mind clearly was making up, but this is something I won't easily forget.

It's also something I wouldn't even want to try and photograph, to not risk missing it. Some things are too important to take a picture of.

It's like that mountain I climbed in 1997, on top of which I spent the most lonely and difficult night of my life. After I got off it, I resisted taking a picture. Sometimes it's just like that.

Another thing I saw and the rest of the crew with me, was a night rainbow. On our first crossing, the moon was so bright and we got some rain in the distance. So we saw a rainbow from the moonlight, with all the colors, only much fainter and blueish. It's the first and only time I've seen this, and it seems to be rare enough to make me doubt I'll ever see it again. It was beautiful and eerie and I've almost told no one about it. There are things which I'll now carry with me for the rest of my life, cherishing the memory and perhaps feeling lonely sometimes because they're so hard to share.

But I'm grateful there were always people with me I could share these moments with, the good as well as the bad. I hope they will carry them along and cherish the thoughts they might have about us, about taking the trip, about being there.

Ostend

On July 1st, at noon we arrived back home in Ostend.

After a swift sail from Nieuwpoort in a North Westerly force 4, we got into our slip at the Mercator Marina. A few friends and family joined in our welcome home meal of Zeeuwse mosselen (mussels) with Belgian fries.

We finally covered 12600 Nautical Miles in 360 days. We sailed non-stop for about 100 days and we did about 3500 Miles over the shortest distance of 9000 NM as originally projected. The highest sustained wind we got was 26 knots and the highest wind gust was 34 knots. This means we evaded all gales in a one year trip, which is one of the aims of my weather routing.

We're all very happy to be back. Thanks for all the encouraging e-mails, comments, messages we got from you, all our friends and relatives!