|
Home
Up
| |
[ The 1st 14,000 miles ] [ Another 19,000 miles ] [ And Cape Horn ]
 |
In 1998, Peter began his current voyage - a circumnavigation, to take in the
new millennium in Australia.
For the first leg of his journey across the notorious Bay of Biscay, he was
joined by his brother, Chas, and daughter Suzy (then 16). They said goodbye to
the rest of the family at Brest in Northern France and crossed Biscay in
September 1998, bound for The Canary Islands.
In Gran Canaria, his brother returned to his job as a fire-fighter in
Plymouth and Peter's wife, Sally, and youngest daughter, Sophie (then aged
13) joined Suzy and him to take the yacht to West Africa for their epic
journey up the magnificent Gambia river.
|
In
conjunction with Sightsavers International, Loquax journeyed nearly 200 miles up
the Gambia to take medical supplies and equipment to bush hospitals where local
eye-surgeons performed nearly 300 operations on local Gambians blinded by
eye-cataracts.
In November 1998, the yacht left West Africa with a crew of 6, including the
two girls. In just over two weeks, Loquax was sailing into Bridgetown,
Barbados where Sally, who'd had commitments back home, rejoined them. From
then till February 1999, the family explored the Tobago Cays, Trinidad,
Venezuela, Colombia and Panama before transiting the Panama Canal in its last
year of American operation.
From Panama, Loquax headed West to cover over 4,000 miles of ocean in a
non-stop passage to the Marquesas Islands. This route takes sailors
further from land than it is possible to go anywhere else on earth.
During the Southern Winter of 1999 they crossed nearly 9,000 miles of the
South Pacific, visiting places as remote as the Tuamotu archipelago, otherwise
known as the Dangerous Archipelago, because of the strong currents and dangerous
coral atolls that are strewn over hundreds of square miles of ocean at this
point.
Calling at The Cook Islands, Tonga, Fiji and Vanuatu, Loquax arrived in
Sydney's Port Jackson on the eve of the millennium after nearly 19,000 miles and
fourteen months at sea.
|