Welcome to our blog, where we will be sharing our adventures building, launching and sailing our new catamaran, which we have named Wildling.

We recently sold our former sailing catamaran, Zangezi, after an incredible 4 years and 4,000 nautical miles of sailing around Australia and South East Asia. When we arrived in Singapore at the end of our voyage through Indonesia, our intention was to take a month off to visit family back in Australia, and then continue on to the Philippines. Unfortunately, typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines and created so much devastation that we had to delay our plans until things settled down.

During this time, the kids went back to school and I went back to work, and the plans for our continued voyage seemed to be moving out of reach. We considered exploring SE Asia during our vacation time, but increasing reports of piracy around the Philippines and the areas we most wanted to visit made that unsafe and out of the question.

Since our long term objective has always been to cruise the South Pacific from the Galapogos to Australia via Tahiti and Fiji, we decided to explore the options for making that voyage a reality at some point in the future. There was no way for us to sail Zangezi eastwards, and we didn’t want to continue west beyond Asia, which involves running the pirate gauntlet to reach the Med, so we decided that rather than have Zangezi sit in Singapore, not being used, which was really heartbreaking, we would sell her and buy a boat in a more suitable starting location for our intended voyage.

And so we came to the decision to purchase a boat in France, and to spend our vacation time exploring the Mediterranean until we’re ready personally and professionally to set off westwards, across the Atlantic and into the Pacific. We don’t know when that will be, but right now the important thing is that we are on the path towards it.

After a lot of research and discussions we decided to purchase a new boat, rather than used, which means that it will take a while before we will be sailing again, but the project of building new really appeals to us both as we can get closer to what we really want. For many reasons which I won’t go into here, but will describe in detail in other areas of the site, we decided on an Outremer 5X catamaran. Since we’re not in a rush, we decided to schedule construction to begin next March, with a planned launch date in December 2015.

Between now and then, we will be posting updates on the construction during our visits to the factory in France. I’ll focus more on the technical details of the design and the options available when building this class of offshore sailboat, and Robin will give her perspective on how crazy I am to want to buy a 59 foot boat that can sail almost as fast as the true windspeed, but more importantly, how she is fitting out Wildling so we will be safe and comfortable during our long ocean passages.

We’ve learned a lot during the last 4 years, so we really know what works for us, and what doesn’t. We hope to share all of that with you during this project, and give you a sense of what cruising and crossing oceans together as a family is really like.