Around the world trip

Around the world in 32 feet

Sailing around the world is often done in 50' plus yachts these days. Tom Dymond bucked the trend and headed off in a Nicholson 32

In the final days of our circumnavigation on Blue Eye, fate offered up a curious meeting. My school friend James and I had opted to complete our journey around the world through the French canals – we assumed they would offer an ease and serenity that beating up the

Portuguese coastline was unlikely to provide. Serene the canals might have been, easy they were not. After three years of travelling by boat, we should have known better.

Regardless, Blue Eye rumbled into a marina in Rouen in northern

France, the Yamaha engine of our Nicholson 32 wheezing away after a solid month of use in the waterways. It was there in Rouen that we met Matt and Tim, two

English sailors younger even than our 27 year old selves. Rouen – where river becomes sea, where one journey was coming to an end, and where another was just beginning.

Our journey began in Portland,

England in August 2016. James and

I left with 32 feet of boat beneath us and 24 years of life behind us. If either of those numbers seemed too low to our family or friends, they kept any concern well hidden. They cheerily waved us off the dock on a hot summer’s morning, perhaps inwardly reassuring themselves that the numbers which really mattered were the amount of miles that we had sailed in preparation, and the volume of hours that had gone into readying ourselves for the trip. Both of these numbers were indeed very high, but I remain unconvinced that one can ever really be ready to leave. There remained so many gaps in our experience (which remains true even now), and it had recently come to light that there was also a gap in between the propeller shaft and the hull. We knew by that point, at least, that a boat is never without problems, and we also knew that sooner or later we had to jump. It was only a small gap, we told each other, so we jumped.

One day at a time

Arriving in Camaret, France the following day a realisation washed over us. Our bid to sail around the

ABOVE

Blue Eye reaching across the Caribbean Sea towards Bonaire of the ABC Islands

BELOW LEFT

Blue Eye sailing out into the Pacific Ocean at dusk, leaving New Caledonia behind

BELOW RIGHT

James at the bow as the San Blas islands of Panama loom closer

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Overlooking the stunning Anambas Islands of Indonesia world was not the overwhelming project that it seemed when stated like that, but rather an accumulation of smaller (though rarely ever small) passages, that one day might be aggregated into one satisfying line: “We sailed around the world.” The reality of it, however, was that we sailed from England to France, and then we rested and indulged. Then we sailed from France to Spain, and did the same. And then from Spain to Portugal, where again we could re-stock, take stock, and sort out that gap between the propeller shaft and the hull. Once Morocco, the Canary Islands and the Cape Verdes lay in our wake, we had very much settled into our vagabond lives.

Nothing like a gale force wind to shake things up a little. Out in

the Atlantic, on Blue Eye’s first ocean crossing, a storm engulfed our little home. There had been some tough moments in getting that far, but Force 10 winds were new to James and me. Fortunately James had bought Blue Eye with such conditions in mind. She was a sturdy Nicholson from the 1970s era of how-about-another-inch-of fibreglass-on-that-hull? Blue Eye, therefore, was just the vessel to withstand the house-sized waves that the Atlantic was throwing up.

“Thirty-two feet?” exclaimed the Antiguan when we safely reached the Caribbean on the other side. “I got shoes bigger than that!” he declared, and the delightful man held his belly as he chuckled at the apparent ludicrousness of our journey. We laughed with him. Out in English Harbour Blue Eye was tucked in amongst not only the significantly larger sailboats, but also the superyachts of the billionaires. It baffled us that anyone would want a boat that big. Did they not realise they could see the same places – perhaps even more places – on a boat ostensibly smaller than a pair of Antiguan shoes?

Living on the kedge

James and I had committed to a frugal lifestyle for our journey. We avoided marinas unless absolutely necessary, far preferring to anchor out in the bay where we could swim around the boat and dinghy ashore when we needed. Out at sea we stubbornly sailed through the lightest conditions, resorting to the diesel engine only when we had all but come to a standstill. And in day to day life we indulged in hiking, snorkelling and reading books on the deck of Blue Eye. The best things in life are free.

It would be remiss of me to suggest the trip was not expensive in some ways, however. The Panama Canal, for instance, is wildly damaging to one’s bank balance. And in some cases also one’s pulpit – ours was ripped from the deck in an unfortunate episode in the first lock. That, in turn, damaged the bank account further. We lived our frugal lives so that the emergency funds never ran out – one never knows what might break next on a boat.

Having made it into the Pacific Ocean, life became as cheap and wonderful as it would be for the three years that we spent away. There are some 8,000 nautical miles of sailing between Panama and New Zealand – where we were to seek shelter from the cyclones at the end of the season – and those miles are interspersed with paradisiacal islands and incredible people. For every new island that we rolled into, after a week (or weeks) on the ocean, we were shocked anew at how welcoming the locals were to their gorgeous bit of land jutting out of the seemingly infinite blue sea we sailed across. In French Polynesia, waterfalls cascaded down through the forest-cloaked mountains. In the

ABOVE

The azure blue waters of a Caribbean anchorage

BELOW LEFT

James displaying what’s on the lunch menu, a mahimahi fresh from the Pacific Ocean

BELOW RIGHT The Panama Canal

Cook Islands, turquoise lagoons lapped at golden beaches, as the spray of humpback whales glistened in the air beyond the reef. And in Fiji, we picked mangoes from the trees and coconuts from the ground, as we endeavoured to cram in as much of the sweettasting Pacific as we possibly could.

Pit stop for repairs

Half a world of sailing, however, takes its toll, and Blue Eye was in desperate need of some repair work. Having slipped between the forever alternating high- and low-pressure systems that define the fearsome passage to New Zealand, James and I could spend six months readying our home for the second half of the world.

The list was not-insignificant: osmosis of the hull, a wobbly rudder, a broken gooseneck, a worn cutlass bearing, seizing seacocks, faulty solar panels, a faulty VHF, a faulty tiller pilot, a faulty automatic bilge pump, and an engine with its own extensive list of troubles. It was a miracle we got to New Zealand at all, come to think of it. It was time once again to delve into the funds tin.

Gloria Steinem once said of writing that it was the only thing she could do without feeling like she should be doing something else. In taking back to the ocean in mid2018, sailing north now for Papua New Guinea, James and I observed the same thing in ourselves about being on the ocean. The suffocating trivialities of daily life fell behind as we watched New Zealand dip below the horizon once more, and the liberty of a life on the wind came rushing back into our sails. Living in the confines of a small boat, James and I had – quite naturally – not always seen eye to eye, but at this stage of our journey and our friendship we were steady and poised like a pair of perfectly trimmed sails. If our course fell off the wind then one of us would steer us back up, and if they overcompensated

ABOVE LEFT

Eating from the mango trees on a stroll through one of Fiji’s arid western islands

ABOVE RIGHT

Blue Eye getting a fresh lick of paint as the yard season in Whangarei, New Zealand comes to an end

BELOW LEFT

McKenzie, of Papua New Guinea, and his son, visit Blue Eye to trade fruit and shells for medicine and fishing gear

BELOW RIGHT

Tom on watch as Blue Eye’s Aries windvane steers them downwind in the Indian Ocean and brought us too much into the wind, then the other one would take control and bear us away again. It was in this manner that we reached The Louisiades, an archipelago on the edge of Papua New Guinea, and on the edge of the world.

The inhabitants of The Louisiades travel between the scattering of palm-packed islands in their dugout canoes. They spend their days fishing, either from those canoes or with nets cast between them along the shoreline. On the off chance a foreign sailboat has arrived (Blue Eye was only the fourth that year), they will go and say hello, offering to trade their shells and fruits for medicine and fishing hooks. They eat the coconuts from the trees, and grow what vegetables they can in the unforgiving earth. In the evenings they start a fire – often with sticks and their bare hands – and sit around it long into the evening, sharing their food and retelling their stories. It was by far the most humbling destination we went to in the whole world.

A change of pace

Navigating westward through the Torres Strait, between Australia and Papua New Guinea, we eased under spinnaker towards Indonesia. Life was good until we stepped onto Indonesian soil, and were promptly bribed out of several hundred dollars on account of tedious visa complications. Time to dip into that emergency tin again. e hustle and bustle of Southeast Asia was a drastic change from the peacefulness of the Paci c, but not necessarily an unwelcome one: we partied in Bali, got chased o the beach by Komodo dragons, and settled into the chaos of Malaysian cities.

We came to know the true meaning of chaos on the morning that a oating sh farm crashed into us as we slept peacefully at anchor in a Malaysian river. e oating wooden structure had been ripped free of its anchors upstream – no doubt on account of the vicious spring tide – and it was just our luck that it careered into the 2.6 metre width of Blue Eye, anchored innocently to the side of the 100 metre wide river.

James and I rushed up onto the deck, yanked from our sleep like sh from the sea, and stared in confused horror as the structure bent in two around the bow, like a stick being snapped across a leg. One half of the sh farm continued its quest downriver for the open sea, whilst the other remained stubbornly attached to Blue Eye, pinned by the tide against our hull that it set about scratching mercilessly. e emergency funds ran a little lower that day.

We broke free of the grip of the oating sh farm, and that of Southeast Asia. Blue Eye pointed west once more as we set o across the Indian Ocean – our third and last. And then, to the surprise of

ABOVE LEFT

Blue Eye beneath a rainbow in Lamen Bay of Epi Island, Vanuatu

ABOVE RIGHT

James’s drone captured the a ermath of the events in the River Santubong, Malaysia

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Anchored in the muddy waters of the River Rajang of Malaysia

BELOW RIGHT

A Komodo dragon defends its territory on Rinca island, Indonesia

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many, we took up the Red Sea. The presence of international navies has made that stretch of water far safer than the prevailing memories of piracy incidents suggest. Blue Eye and her crew arrived to Eritrea safely, albeit rather weary, 28 days after having left Sri Lanka.

Red Sea struggles

The hard work was still to come, however, as we beat up through the northerly winds of the upper Red Sea, weaving between fleets of container ships and fields of oil rigs. The problem of the Red Sea is also one of red tape, as anyone who has ever sailed to Egypt will surely attest to. Finally, we squeezed through the Suez Canal and found ourselves in the Mediterranean Sea, only a stone’s throw from home.

Traversing the Mediterranean, so often idolised in the minds of the armchair sailors, proved far tougher than crossing any ocean. The wind can come from any direction, but generally it is the case that it blows from the direction that one wishes to travel. If planned properly then a voyage around the world can largely avoid sailing into the wind but, knowing this, the Mediterranean decides to make life a little harder and no passage has ever been made in that sea that wasn’t into the wind.

Home stretch reflections

Tired, Blue Eye reached the south of France, and began her meandering last stretch through the rivers and canals, through the countryside and through Paris, homeward bound.

It was, as I said at the top, not as easy as we had hoped. We were thwarted by a procession of heatwaves, our overheating engine, and the under-dredged canal system. At times when we were – quite literally – stuck in the mud, it was not always certain that we would make it to Rouen.

Alas, we did. And as we did a boat called Smiler arrived from

ABOVE LEFT

Blue Eye at sunset in front of Suakin, Sudan

ABOVE RIGHT The Suez Canal

BELOW LEFT

Tom in Paris on the last lap of the journey

BELOW RIGHT

James (left) and Tom (right) celebrating their completed circumnavigation

Tom has written a full account of his adventures entitled Hooked on the Horizon, available for £9.99 in paperback. To order a copy, go to tsdymond.com the opposite direction, crewed by two young and enthusiastic Brits, Matt and Tim. In looking at them it were as if we were looking at our very own selves three years prior: younger, more energetic, a little more naïve dare I say.

Three years is a relatively short amount of time to cruise around the world in, but it was the right amount of time for James and I, and we were looking forward to the routines and normalities of living at home.

For Matt and Tim, the journey was only just beginning, and we gave them all we could in material things and general advice to try and help them. We were jealous that they had it all ahead of them, but no less grateful that we had it all behind us.

When Blue Eye reached Portland Harbour a few days later, and our friends and family stood on the dock to wave us in, we could finally aggregate all those mini adventures into the hallowed words.

We sailed around the world.