We plan to take our little Seawind 1000 catamaran ‘Seabbatical’ from Sydney Harbour, to Lady Musgrave Island. As I still have the demands of running a business and kids at school, this will be a mini seabbatical and so finding time is important but demanding. We will wait for the South Easterly trades to kick in which usually start around Easter time in Sydney. So in May we will send the boat north to Brisbane which is also as the cyclones start to slow down. Trade winds blow from the South East from around May through to October each year. These trades strengthen the further north you go while in NSW they are often aligned with low pressure fronts moving through from the south. These low pressure systems move further north during winter and further south during summer. During summer we are more affected…
‘Pirate Pete’ is the proud new owner of the brand new Seawind 1260, that Cumberland Charter Yachts will be welcoming in to the fleet in August this year. We asked him what his background story was in buying the Seawind 1260 and why he chose to have it chartered in the Whitsundays. Here is his story: Where it all began I guess my story began in 1986 when I was at university studying to be a PE teacher. A friend and I hitch hiked from Canberra to the Whitsundays for an adventure as we had never traveled that far north before. We had no money (hence the hitch hiking) and camped by the side of the road or people who gave us lifts offered to put us up for the night. We arrived in Airlie Beach and stayed in a backpackers for a week…
Peter Johnson is our newest member of the Seawind Family with his Seawind 1160 ‘Pegasus’. The story of his journey to becoming a sailor and boat owner is inspirational. In his own words ‘Because life is just too short not to follow your dreams’ ‘Dad was still relatively young when Alzheimer’s began to take him. At the point where they said he might have as little as a year left, I took compassionate leave to spend more time withim. I struggled with the injustice of it. He was being robbed of the long and enjoyable retirement he’d worked so hard for. I was in my late forties and jaded after nearly a decade at the same media company, less in love with my work, working longer and longer hours and unhealthier for it. The need to spend more time with Dad was also a…
In 1999 my partner, Jess, and I decided to invest in a cruising yacht to be placed in the charter fleet in the Whitsundays. After many years racing dinghies (mainly NS14s) together, we were to embark on a journey that would eventually lead us to owning and cruising a blue water capable yacht and sailing nearly 28,000 together. I had previously read about cruising catamarans so we visited the 1999 Sydney Boat Show and inspected a Seawind 1000. We fell in love and after receiving a lot of positive feedback from the charter businessw we decided that a cat would be the best way to proceed. So we chose a Seawind 1000 and lined up with a company called Tropical Sailing. The boat (#1073) was built in Wollongong by Seawind and because Tropical preferred their boats to have “Tropical” in the name (they already…
SEAbbatical Destination: Vanuatu By Brent Vaughan Port Orla It’s the middle of winter, 26 degrees, sunny and almost humid, but there is a nice gentle breeze that drifts across the ocean. We are in the small coastal town of Luganville on the north island of Vanuatu, Espiritu Santos, to enjoy some of the local hospitality and the most accessible wreck dive in the world. While Luganville isn’t much to write home about itself, it was once a major US military base during World War II and it provides the gateway to exploring these remnants of the past and the spectacular landscapes and islander culture that surround it on the islands of Espiritu Santo. While Vanuatu is most famous for its Volcanoes (its located on a fault line), the originator of bungy jumping (tribes on Pentacoste Island tie vines to their ankles and jump from…
Multihull Central in cooperation with the Royal Prince Alfred Yacht Club, are pleased to present a special FREE information seminar “My SEAbbatical: Cruising and Diving in South East Asia” by Andrew Grace at 3pm on Saturday the 29th of April in the Pittwater Room of the RPA Yacht Club in Mitala Street, Newport, in conjunction with the Pittwater Sail Expo. Andrew Grace took delivery of his new Seawind 1160 LITE catamaran “Pali Pali” in Vietnam two years ago and has been cruising South East Asia ever since. As Andrew is a very experienced technical diver, he and his wife sailed to some of the most remote and spectacular dives sites in South East Asia and captured their adventures in a series of YouTube videos with spectacular vision both under and above the water. A total of 33 videos document their adventure on their YouTube…
YouTube sensation Riley and Elayna of ‘Sailing La Vagabonde’ have just landed a wonderful deal with legendary French catamaran manufacturer, Outremer Yachting, to extend their cruising adventures onboard a new Outremer 45 involving a historic sponsorship deal confirming the power of social media. “We are fans since the beginning and felt their honest and human values meets ours and they might be great ambassadors for Outremer. They had issues finding a loan for their boat, so we stepped in helping them getting a lease” explain Xavier Desmarest, CEO of Outremer. With over two hundred thousand subscribers to their YouTube channel and numerous episodes with well over one million views, La Vagabond leads the growing global trend of intrepid sailors documenting their adventures in incredible locations while on seabbatical, allowing thousands to sample what life is like at sea from the comfort of their homes…
