Since coming back from living in France for 3 years, we've been asked a lot, "are you back for good, are you going to live in Australia now?" The answer is yes, we will be living in Australia but not exactly in the traditional sense. You see, Nathalie and I have the good fortune and opportunity to join a yacht for a circumnavigation of Australia, starting from Sydney in April. It's going to be a 12 month adventure and will cover around 10,000nm as we sail around the entire country.

Sydney

January, 2019

The boat is a Lagoon 52 catamaran owned by a Sydney couple, John and Tania, and if you have to spend a year aboard a yacht, this is the one to do it on. We spent the Australia Day weekend onboard for a shakedown sail on Pittwater and to say it's a comfortable boat is an understatement. If you are wondering how come we got this gig, John and Tania decided they needed extra help to sail the boat and we put up our hands to help. I'm a commercially endorsed Yachtmaster and Nathalie is a French food and wine expert so I suppose we ticked a few boxes when it came to helping them sail the boat. 

I have built a website for the boat www.sailingourparadise.com (the cat is called Paradise BTW) which tells the story about the yacht, it's crew and the trip we have planned. There's a passage plan for the 12 months and yacht tracker. I wonder how successful we will be sticking to the passage plan!

It's such a monumental trip, it's the reason I started this blog site. I want to document the voyage as it would be crazy not write a journal of what will really be quite an epic trip. Now we are just counting down to the first week of April until the trip begins. The idea is to leave Sydney Heads, turn left and keep going until we see Sydney again!

I have added some images in the gallery below that were taken last weekend sailing Sydney Harbour and Pittwater. It'll give you some idea of what sort of boat the Lagoon 52 is and what it is like onboard.

So please subscribe to our blog and keep up to date as we post weekly updates of what it really like to sail the entire coast of Australia, warts and all!!