COUNTDOWN TO YOUR BIG ADVENTURE

FIVE SKIPPERS TELL ELAINE BUNTING ABOUT THEIR PLANS AND PREPARATIONS TO GO VOYAGING

- ELAINE BUNTING

For most sailors, preparing for an Atlantic or round the world voyage typically takes between a year and three years. According to the surveys we carry out annually with ARC rally skippers, that is the average time it takes to choose and buy a suitable boat, equip it, train up and get all the moving parts of work and domestic life aligned.

Right now, almost everyone’s plans are on ice, but this uncertain period of enforced stasis may actually be a good opportunity to take stock of your life goals and what you need to reach them. If you’ve always dreamed of sailing away or of a long voyage and a break from normal, striving life ashore, this could be the time to create more serious plans.

To find out how other sailors are planning their journey along the typical three-year ‘runway’ and what their challenges have been, we spoke to a five sailors at different stages. What follows is a snapshot of their choices and approach.

FLEXIBLE PLANS

TOM AND CLAIR CREAN

Tom and Clair Crean are from the UK but living in Switzerland, where Tom works as an IT consultant. Tom is from a sailing family – his father used to work for Westerly when they built cruisers and cruiser-racers in the UK. They have been thinking and planning to leave for the last two years and when they came to look for a yacht for a budget of £50-60,000 it was Westerlys and Moodys from the Eighties and Nineties that Tom thought of, boats with a “centre cockpit for a decent aft cabin and solidly built.”

As with everyone we spoke to for this article, finding a good and well-maintained example of a particular type of used yacht was not easy and soon the Creans concluded that they “would never get 100%”.

The yacht they eventually bought three years ago is