The Timeline:

We decided to take a three year trip to Europe sometime in 2001. We found Cénou, our Freydis 46, in the fall of 2003.

We took three months to prepare the boat in the spring of this year (2005) and will dedicate another month in the fall of this year.

Our current plans are to sail to New England for this summer, head to the Caribbean this coming fall and cross to the Mediterranean in the spring of 2006.

During our first summer we hope to visit the Azores and southern Spain. At that point we will decide whether we cross to Sardinia and Corsica and winter in southern France or stay in Spain. Our second summer in the Med will hopefully bring us to Croatia and then Greece. Croatia not being part of the EEC, is a necessary stop to "reset the value added tax clock". The VAT is about 20%

We plan on cruising for no more than three years.

Another part of the timeline is the age of our daughters. They are currently 6 and 9 and we think that the 9 year old, being the very social type, would begin to fight the confines of boat life when she becomes a teenager. Meanwhile the younger one will hopefully remember something of the trip since it will most likely end when she is 9.

The Reasons:

My wife Rike is German, I am French, both of our families are in Europe. We want to introduce our daughters CEline and aNOUck to our cultures, spend time with them that we will all remember, for better or for worst. Not least I want to sail unimpeded for an extended time while Rike wants to travel. Like most couples one was brought to sailing late in life by the other partner.

The Choices:

Coming from an F31 we felt it was important that we gain more room but retain the sailing ability of a well designed multihull. We chose the Freydis because it is a well proven design with many Freydis having circumnavigated without any structural issues. Gifi has demonstrated what the Freydis can do sailing wise. Meanwhile the Freydis is still a comfortable boat with adequate room to move inside the hulls and plenty of room in the main cabin, a secure cockpit and free deck plan.

We chose the Calvert home schooling program because it offers highly structured lesson plans. Not a small consideration for parents that are not educators. In fact we feel home-schooling will be one of the greater challenges until we all develop a rythm.

We have made many other choices of course, from communication to power supply, dinghy, anchoring etc. . . but we feel the time to talk about them is either when they fail or when they have been put to the test and kept going. That is, after all our intent, to give the onlooker a sense of what is useful and not so useful in our experience.

Recent events, the good and the bad:

We were originally going to leave May of 2006, directly across the Atlantic but we decided that we have the boat ready, Rike's career is already on hold because everyone knows we are leaving, and we have cruiser friends who need a place to stay so that they can work on their boat Breskell. So why not now!

The electrical system suffered a blow when our Mastervolt charger inverter failed. Even after being told that the unit had been installed w/o proper breakers Mastervolt took a look at it and replaced the three year old unit on it's second owner, free of charge. They could have taken advantage of our honesty, but were great to deal with in every way. Fast, efficient, and honest. What more could one hope for.

With the boat ready to go we asked the yard to reinstall the SD40 sail drives which had been removed earlier. The mechanic doing the job failed to put enough oil in them. The result was not good, so after three months of getting the boat ready we are back on the hard waiting for our drives to be rebuilt.

It took a little fighting and kicking, but ultimately Georgetown Yacht Basin stepped up and agreed to have the drives rebuilt if they failed within 10 hours. Fail they did, in half that time in fact, and Georgetown honored it's commitment, hauling the boat out, removing the drives and sending them for rebuilt within two days.

We are now June 28, and since May 15 we have used Cénou a total of 16 hours. Eight or so hours going from Georgetown to Annapolis, which was when the first failure occurred and eight hours to go back to Georgetown when the second failure occurred.

So, after not being able to use the boat for half of May and all of June, we are still waiting to have the drives rebuilt. Mack Boring has said the drives were in fact heavily damaged and some of the parts are nowhere to be found so far.

July 11 2005

It looks as if Cénou will be back in the water within seven days. At that point we will replace our four year old and very heavy steel shrouds for a new set of super light Precourt System shrouds, complete with Precourt deadeyes and covered amsteel.

Hopefully everything will work and we will escape the hot and humid Chesapeake by the third week of July and head north with our friends Joe, Christy, Juliana and Cassie on Zia, a Switch 51. No plan or timeline there. We will hopefully meet with Christian and Michelle who live on a 55" schooner built in 1920 named Truant. They will be in southern Maine.

At that point we will meander back south to get back to the Chesapeake by mid-September. Then we will begin the final preparation which will include a new forestay and a new water-maker as well as acquiring spare parts. We will be looking for "weather windows" for the Virgin Islands starting October 15.

Joe & Christy's web site