I think it is my job to introduce the mission the boat and the crew in this my first blog. Jane and I came up with the idea of sailing around the world about four years ago. The idea continues to change and evolve with time, usually getting bigger and longer. As it stands today it is to take about four or five years on a circumnavigation. The route that we propose to take is a well trodden path often referred to in the yachting community as the “Milk Run” .This a journey of approximately 30,000 miles around the equator. This is usually done by machining one’s way down the coast of France Spain and Portugal to the Canaries, through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific to Australia, then around the top of Australia, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and the across the Indian Ocean. After that the route home is less certain.

Capisce was bought and customised for that purpose. She is a sixteen year old Moody 44. A Moody 44 is very well built, reliable, strong, British sailing boat approximately 44 feet long. For those of our followers who are not sailors. Capisce which incidentally means “understand me” (slightly aggressively) in Italian is about the size and weight, fully laden of an articulated lorry. We bought her in March of this year and have since then spent a great deal of time and money beefing her up for the journey. In summary this has meant upgrading her safety, power generation, communications, navigation and back up systems as well as beefing up ourselves.

The last six months has taken us from Lymington to Tenerife about 2,500 nautical miles. This has in many ways been an extended sea trial in preparation for our second 2,500 miles which has just begun and is the journey from Tenerife to St Lucia in the Windward Islands of the Caribbean which all being well will take about twenty-two days. We left Tenerife yesterday at 1100 and as I am writing this 28 hrs later we have travelled 150 miles to the south west.

Two days before we left we were joined by Ian and Claire Storie who are crewing with us to St Lucia. Ian and Claire were introduced to us by people in the yachting community, Julian and Sue whom we met and sailed with a few months ago. So far things are going very well.

Today we have clear blue skies, 27 degrees, twelve knots of wind and despite the usual Atlantic rolling we cruising along nicely at 6.5 knots .

Now that things are beginning to settle into a routine on board Capisce the crew will publish a blog every day. You can send us your thoughts and wishes on our ships email system, which we receive via the satellite phone system (please see the note below). I hope you will enjoy following our progress.

That will do for now.

Cheers,

Tony, ( Skipper, Capisce)

Note about emailing us

1. Please do so, we have to try to keep the email clear or else we will spend a fortune downloading rubbish.
2. Our email address, I am speaking to you in code now is: the name of the boat at mailasail dot com (All lower case, the usual format).
3. Please do not send us pictures or forward emails to us. Always start a new one.