The Grand Plan 

Prologue

It seems a very long time ago when we first started to think about this trip, although in reality we had made no decisions until August 1999. By the time of the Southampton Boat Show in September we had figured out the major items of work required on La Premiere and slowly, fitting out began.
We put our house on the market and Elaine left her job as a Primary School teacher at Christmas, neither of which caused as much anxiety as giving away our cat, Eccles, who now lives with Elaine's sister in Kent. We started to target the end of March as D-Day. A great deal of work and planning later we were ready to go, but where?

The Original Plan

"Our medium term goal for this adventure is to reach the Eastern Mediterranean and cruise Greek and Turkish waters, but that could be three or four years away! Our target for 2000 was to cruise the coasts of Normandy, Brittany, Biscay, Northern Spain and Portugal reaching the South of Spain for winter. Click Here to see a map of year 2000's voyage. We stopped some 64 times until we reached Gibraltar and just planned each hop in turn. We wanted to be somewhere warm for winter, and other than the fact someone in Bilbao advised us to get as far south as Lisbon by September we had not put any constraints on time. Neither of us particularly enjoy long trips or night sailing, with just the two of us these can be hard work, even harder when you realise you are sailing past ancient harbours and quiet anchorages.
In 2001 we hoped to continue up the Mediterranean coast of Spain and The Balearics, Sardinia, Corsica, Italy, the North coast of Sicily and aim for Tunisia for winter. This was all completely flexible and highly likely to change. Our third cruising year would perhaps have taken us up and down the Adriatic, visiting Venice and exploring the beautiful islands off Croatia, (and maybe Albania depending on what we heard nearer the time!) perhaps reaching the Ionian islands of Greece where we may have found somewhere to winter for a while."

What actually happened in 2001 was a snail's pace cruise from Gibralter, via Morocco, the South of Spain, Ibiza, Mallorca, Menorca, Sardinia, Maddelena Islands, Corsica, Elba, Tuscany and then winter in Rome with lots to explore and visit ashore.

In 2002 we changed boats to accomodate our growing family and returned via the South of France and the French Inland Waterways to London to have Poppy in an English speaking hospital.

In 2003 we left London and, bizarrely, headed north towards The Baltic! returning to St Katharines again at the end of the year.

2004 saw us Landlubbing in London, while we manufactured cabin girl number two.

The New Grand Plan for 2005 is to return to the Med, which may be more of a challenge as we now have two cabin girls aboard, a 2 year old and a 4 month old.