News

New Project for Us

/ Doug / 16 Comments

WILDLING has been sold! The new owner lives in France, so WILDLING will be staying in the Med. We wish the new owner many safe and happy miles of sailing on this exceptional catamaran!

We would like to sincerely thank the team at Grand Large Services, led by Pierre Delhomeau for managing the sale of WILDLING. GLS is a sister company of Outremer Yachting and handles the post-warranty servicing and management of Outremer boats. Pierre managed the entire sales process for us and took excellent care of WILDLING throughout. I was in and out of hospital and physical therapy during most of this, and needed someone I could completely trust to handle the sale. I can’t speak highly enough of Pierre and the GLS team, they are super professional, kept me informed at every step, and went above and beyond to take care of the highly complex process of selling WILDLING. I never imagined selling a boat of this size could be a stress free process, thank you all!

On the personal front, my shoulder is coming along nicely. I’m now at the point where I am beginning to use it again, but I’m still 6 months away from full recovery. It’s a slow and painful process, and requires more patience than I was born with, but I’m starting to see light at the end of the tunnel.

We are building a new sailboat to replace WILDLING. Robin and I decided to downsize our next boat, because most of our sailing will be just the two of us, with our kids away at university. We want a boat that is safe, comfortable, capable of crossing oceans, but still fast and able to be sailed single-handed by either of us. After much discussion and research of potential boats, we have chosen an Outremer 4X.

Our 4X is named PUFFIN, after the little sea birds that we love. She is currently under construction at the Outremer factory in La Grande Motte, and will be launched in August this year. We have booked passage on a yacht transport ship to bring PUFFIN from Palma to Brisbane.

We have been working closely with the Outremer team to customize PUFFIN to our needs. The basic 4X design is excellent, so we have focused on some additional weight saving options to make her faster, and a number of sail handling changes to make her easier to sail solo. We have also been able to incorporate some of the construction techniques from the Gunboat line into PUFFIN, which is a great benefit of the same company owning both Outremer and Gunboat and having both construction factories co-located in France.

I will detail all of this and more in our new website and blog. I’ll post a link to the new website as soon as it’s ready. In the meantime, here are some preview photos of PUFFIN under construction.

Outremer 4X, PUFFIN – Hulls and bridge deck
Port hull, looking Aft
Starboard hull, looking forward

Outremer 5X #2 available in the Pacific

/ Doug / 2 Comments

Outremer 5X hull number 2, MOANA is in Fiji. I caught up with the owner Urs Rothacher this week to see how things have been going. I’ve been following Moana with interest for some time because up to this point, she’s the 5X that has traveled the furthest, so I was interested in learning how the voyage was going.

Moana at anchor in Tahiti

Moana at anchor in Tahiti

Urs purchased Moana 1 year ago, and is planning on ending his voyage in New Zealand in October this year, so he’s putting her up for sale soon, and will deliver her to a new owner anytime between July and October in either Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia or New Zealand. Here’s more information about Moana along with details on how to conact Urs.

The original owner of Moana was Johan Salen, who along with his wife are veterans of multiple Volvo Ocean Race campaigns, so both very accomplished sailors. They sailed Moana with their young son from La Grande Motte, to New Caledonia where they sold her to Urs. Here’s the post I wrote in 2015 after talking with Johan about his experiences crossing the Pacific on a 5X. After purchasing Moana, Urs continued on to sail the east coast of Australia and then back across the Pacific to Fiji along with his wife and three young boys.

There are a couple of things that stand out for me about this particular 5X and the two families that have owned and sailed her.

  • Moana is a 5X that is well configured for short handed sailing. I like the way that Johan configured Moana. He knew that she would be sailed mostly either single-handed or with a crew of just two people. He kept the rig and sail controls simple and efficient, and has provided the best validation to date that the 5X is truly a boat that can be sailed by a cruising couple alone. And although it’s tempting to dismiss this claim due to the exceptional abilities of her original Volvo Ocean Racing owners, Urs and his wife (who are experienced sailors, but still normal humans) confirm that regular folks can handle a well configured 5X.
  • Moana is a sailors boat, without a lot of the heavy, complicated (and expensive) options that some of us have chosen. All 5X boats are comfortable, and Moana is no exception, but some of the more elaborate items have been avoided to keep her light, easy to sail, and easy to maintain. No air conditioning, no generator, single wheel helm. And some nice options well suited to shorthanded ocean sailing, cutter rig for simple and efficient headsail changes, watermaker with high and low power modes, redundant auto-pilots, oversized solar array and so on.

I like this boat a lot, and the fact she is already in the pacific is a great opportunity for someone that wants to cruise this region, but doesn’t have the time available to sail a 5X from France to Tahiti before they can begin their pacific cruising program. Urs hasn’t listed Moana for sale yet, so if you’re interested, you have a great opportunity to get her before she goes on the market.

Here’s an Article about Moana that was recently published in the Australian Multihull World magazine.

Construction update & “mini Outremer cup” report

/ Doug / 3 Comments

Most of the purchase contract details for Wildling are figured out now, but there are still a few decisions to make. I added some content and links to the Construction page, to make things a bit easier to follow as we go through the design and build process.

Robin, Lindsay, Gavin and I were recently in Sydney, and were lucky enough to participate in the first Australian version of the Outremer Cup (the annual Outremer owner’s meeting and race held in France). There are two Outremer 49s in Australia (at least for now) and the folks at Multihull Central in Sydney organized a great afternoon of sailing on Sydney Harbour followed by a sunset barbeque and drinks at their Annandale offices and marina.

A big thanks to Multihull Central and Outremer 49 owners Mark, Lilian and Phoebe for inviting us to join them on their beautiful boat. We had a great time! Winds were light, around 8-10 knots and both boats were match racing nicely between 6 and 8.5 knots, proving that the Outremers are as comfortable in regatta mode as they are crossing oceans!

Here are some pictures of our afternoon on Sydney Harbour

Getting ready to start

Getting ready to start

Under the bridge

Under the bridge

Tacking

Tacking

Everyone loves the helm seats!

Everyone loves the helm seats!

Trimming the gennaker

Gennaker is up, so furl the jib!

Gavin on the tiller

Gavin on the tiller

Lowering the mainsail

Lowering the mainsail

Happy Outremer 49 owners!

Happy Outremer 49 owners!

Sailing under the Anzac Bridge

Sailing under the Anzac Bridge

Welcome aboard

/ Doug / 3 Comments

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.