About

Planning: A “trip” like this isn’t done over a weekend. We have been planning for about 2 years. How did we get an idea like this? Andreas was unemployed and was spending the days looking for jobs on the Internet. Somehow I started to read on a website about a Swedish couple with not much sailing experience who did a circumnavigation. Now Andreas wanted to do something similar.

Next brief was to convince Karin, which wasn’t much of a problem.  We started to look at Catamarans (40-46ft) on the Internet, which seemed nice with its comfort. To afford such boat we had to build it our self. Building kit seemed like a good option and we found out designs from Schionning seemed to be the ones fitting us best. We did some money and time calculation. A 42 ft Catamaran would have cost about 150 000 – 200 000 USD to build and another 60 000 USD for our circumnavigation. We estimated it would take about 5-6 years of saving. We were thinking of building the boat in Australia where there you find much competence about catamarans. Time calculation told us it would take about a year with intensive boat building. 

6 months after the first thoughts had been born Andreas went to Oslo (Norway) to get a job. In Oslo It’s very easy to get a job and it is also better paid than in Sweden. Of course, it’s more expensive to live in Oslo, which what-so-ever is one of the most expensive cities in the world. But if you don’t get a lot of expenses you can save quite a lot. Many Swedish people go to Norway in a period to get a job and make some savings. Most of these people works about 1 year and then leave.  Andreas got a job at DHL after a couple of days of job applying. The boat plans continued but after some time we started to rethink. Maybe building our own catamaran was a little bit to heavy, and mostly it would take such a long time before we would be starting our circumnavigation. New calculations were done all the time.

We released the thoughts about catamarans and went over to “the other side”, monohulls. After some reading steel boats seemed safe if you would hit a floating container or a sleeping whale. We started to look at a 53ft Bruce Roberts steel boat. The boat was not finished in the interior. More calculations. Tried to get loans but ran in to obstacles cause it wasn’t sold by an authorized boat broker. We had to let go of that plan… We were still looking for unfinished steel boats, but smaller (35-40ft). We found some and got in contact with the sellers. But we never got any closer than that. We looked for boats all over the world. But again, in the end we released those plans.   

Now we started to look at boats in plastic/GPR, size about 38ft. Such boats there are a lot of in Florida and a departure from there would have been nice. We looked at Morgan 38 and Tartan 37 etc. Again, we did new plans. It seemed complicated buying a boat in USA. Which flag should we carry? We have one flag in our passport and another on the vessel. Maybe reregistrated in the BVI. But no, we did some new plans instead.  From the beginning till now the time calculation have been one of the factors we have been cutting in to, just to go sooner. And of course it means compromising in smaller and cheaper boat. 32ft boats seemed now like a nice option. Many people have been sailed around the world in such boats. Some better than other. We looked at Swedish boats; Hellbery Rassy 31, Laurin 32 and Allegro 33. Some of the boats we were interested in we were close to buy but not fast enough.  

We were now frustrated and started to look at smaller boats, Allegro 27 and Laurin 28. Never we have been closer to buy our first boat, an Allegro 27. The pre-payment (10%) we would transfer one day but Karin could not do it until the next day cause she was away. That day I found another Allegro 27, but with more equipment, newer and stronger diesel and closer to Oslo. Again someone was faster and bought the boat 2 hours before we were had planned to see it. We had had such a bad luck the whole time.  A couple of days later Karin was surfing boats on the Swedish market and found a 31 ft catamaran in Panama City. It was Swedish owner and the boat was registrated as a Swedish vessel, which we thought, made it easier. We decided to buy it and made a contract.  It’s kind of funny; we ended up with a catamaran just what we started the whole planning with, but of course smaller.  And oh I forgot. The time calculation from 2010-2011 to 10th of September 2007. (3-4 years earlier than we first estimated) Why did we choose to go earlier and smaller? Many have done it before and we think many is right when they are saying, “go now or never” or “go small go now”