SnailTrails

When friends call and offer a spot on a sailboat during your vacations, you don’t hesitate! Flights were booked and off I went to Valencia, Spain to meet Declan and two of his friends at the 2007 Americas Cup docks. Blue Juice, a Beneteau First, was going to get us across to Palma de Majorca! These boats combine very good sailing characteristics (especially with the top-notch sails) with comfortable cruising capability – the reason why our former sailing club in…

Read More Read More

High time to post something in the sailing section of the blog. After all, we’ve been living next to the Atlantic ocean for some four months now. One of the upsides of being posted to Dakar it seemed was its location inside the Atlantic ocean and the existence – according to Google – of several yacht clubs and marinas. Alas, after some exploration and discussion with expats here, only one of the clubs is still in existence, but reduced to…

Read More Read More

Outside my home office, snow flakes blow past as winter has Belgium (and most of Western Europe) firmly in its grips. Our yearly January sailing trip to the Canary Islands has become the latest victim of the COVID pandemic: with a lot of luck, we might have gotten there, chartered a boat and returned while conforming with shifting sanitary constraints. But the hassle – and the risk to catch the d… bug – dissuaded us. Meanwhile, the extraordinary Vendée Globe…

Read More Read More

Right now, only a few people know that this website even exists (again), so nobody could ask about where or when the sailing bug bit us. The travel bug is a long-time family member, but the oceans? I’m from a land-locked country, my on-the-water experience limited to canoeing on the Moselle river as a kid. Connie’s been brought up close to the North and Baltic Seas, but without spending any time on boats. She did have a seafaring uncle, but,…

Read More Read More