Getting into bluewater cruising: ‘I wanted to see the world… and I just kept going’

You can get into bluewater cruising from a standing start and experience things no other travellers do. Catherine Lawson and David Bristow talk to four couples who prove it.

All the luckiest kids I know spent their childhoods messing about in boats. They had water-loving parents and garages filled with glassfibre toys, and sailed their dinghies and raced with the wind across bays and lakes at every chance they had. Some grew up and bought boats of their own, while others – like me – were grown before the sea called our names.

There are lots of ways that people get into bluewater cruising, at all ages and stages of life. Some of us begin in the classroom, taking lessons with seasoned instructors, while others find the sea the best teacher and do their learning on increasingly daring passages. From Greece to Cape Town and across south-east Asia, these four crews share how they came to live on the sea.

Bluewater Cruising – Learning By Doing

Marie, Vernon and Eli Deck
Crowther Windspeed 39 • Trade Runner • Indonesia

Vernon Deck is a gutsy sailor, a renowned snowsports photographer and a down-to-earth New Zealander whose ‘Sailing Learning By Doing’ YouTube channel entertains more than 34,000 subscribers every week. Viewers tune in because he tells it like it is, and together with his partner Marie (and new baby Eli), showcases the cruising life in all its guises – the good and the bad.

Vernon calls himself “a passionate observer and a seeker of adventure”, but it’s his remarkable self-taught expertise and eagerness to have a go in the first place that has set him apart from the rest.

“I’d never sailed a day before I bought my boat, and I thought I’d just teach myself. I went out with my brother in the Broadwater on the Gold Coast (Australia), pulled out the whole genoa in 30-knot winds, nearly rolled the boat over and thought ‘That’s not how you do it’,” he says.

He’d bought a forgiving, solid glassfibre S&S design and he joined club sessions, watched expert sailors, and learnt as fast as he could. “I wasn’t proud of the fact I had no clue, actually I was ashamed of it,” he says. But he was also impatient, so he pushed himself and set out to sea. “The only way to learn fast is to go out there and give it a crack.”

Three years of single-handed adventures later he upgraded to the lighter, faster Schiehallion, a John Sayer-designed 37-footer, custom built for the Melbourne to Osaka single-handed race. Deck sailed Schiehallion to Eastern Indonesia, then flew to France, where he fell in love with Marie. He persuaded her to leave Europe for the first time and join him in remote Raja Ampat.

“I was interested in Raja Ampat, but not really the sailing part,” says Marie, who hated the childhood sailing classes her grandmother sent her to, and had no experience of living aboard.

“In the beginning I just had to accept the role of being the one who was learning,” she says, “I enjoyed it because Raja Ampat is not really a place you sail. We were using the engine most of the time, there was no rough weather and the snorkelling was amazing.”

Five years on, Marie is now capable of handling their new boat, a 39ft Crowther Windspeed catamaran called Trade Runner, but it’s the freedom of her lifestyle she thrives on.

The idea of skipping the formal sailing lessons and setting to sea sooner appeals to the impatient, young sailor in many of us, but as Vernon admits, the lessons never stop. “I’m still learning heaps. I still need to learn, but I’ve just always preferred to teach myself,” he says.

The Family Passagemakers

Kim and Dave Lewis
Lagoon 450 • Brave • Tanzania

For the Lewises, their circumnavigation began with a faraway dream that had nothing at all to do with the sea. Busy New Zealand business owners with a growing family of youngsters, Kim and Dave Lewis were burnt-out and dreaming of escaping to a life in France.

UK passports initially allowed easy entry into French provincial life, but when Brexit scuppered those plans, they decided to sail there instead. The tiny glitch was that they didn’t own a yacht, and had never even sailed offshore. So they consulted a seasoned delivery skipper who told them “Go for it”, and soon after started crewing in local evening races and began searching for a boat.

When you decide to sail from New Zealand, there’s no question of learning along the way. By law, no-one leaves the country until they have proved themselves and their boats seaworthy, so Kim and Dave studied for RYA certifications and upped their offshore sailing hours to comply.

Kim crewed offshore for the first time on a 40-footer sailing from New Zealand to Tonga, while Dave flew to Fiji and crewed for a leg back home. Two years after setting their goal, they moved their four kids onto a Lagoon 450F and sailed away into the Pacific. For Zeffi (10), Prea (9), Chad (7) and Reef (3), it was the start of an adventure that would show them the world.

“Everyone we spoke to was fairly positive,” says Dave.

“They kept saying, ‘Wow, you’re so brave’,” says Kim. The name stuck and that was what they decided to call their boat. “We told ourselves we’d just see everything we could on the way around and a whole new world of opportunity opened up.”

Six years later they’ve sailed more than 31,500 miles through the Pacific, south-east Asia, and across the Indian Ocean to Tanzania. Yet despite having sailed halfway around the world, these seasoned sailors don’t consider themselves experts.

“Without realising it, we’ve become quite good travellers using a sailboat,” says Dave, laughing that the kids see their Lagoon almost like a family car.
While the older kids do helm shifts, their hearts are just not in it. “They are more interested in where we are going than how we get there. The sailing is just a means to an end,” says Kim.

As for the boat, both are happy with their ‘floating apartment’.

“It won’t go quite as fast as some boats or point high to the wind, but we’re on a big, safe boat that will get us to the next anchorage,” Dave says.

With more than 20,000 miles left before they complete their big trip, Kim and Dave have only a rough plan of what the next few years will hold. But with one teen at boarding school in New Zealand and another leaving the boat soon, Kim admits she’s already focussed on delivering Brave back home.

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The Passionate Sailors

Sandy and Scott Trevethan
Seawind 1160 • Sea Moon • Indonesia

I’ve known a few natural-born sailors in my time and, while she came late to it, Sandy Trevethan is definitely one of them. She enthuses about the kinds of rugged sea states and storms that would have most other cruisers cowering in their cockpits, and when Sandy laughs and says it was pretty hairy, you get the feeling that it really was.

As a divorced mother of two grown-up boys, Sandy learnt to sail on her boyfriend Scott’s 34ft Lock Crowther Pocket Cruiser, appropriately named Tenacity. In a rapid baptism of fire, she spent her first night at sea in 25-knot winds at the start of a week-long Southern Ocean sojourn from Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne. The boat wasn’t ready and things kept breaking, but Sandy was in her element.

A more daring adventure followed across Australia’s notorious Bass Strait to Deal Island before Sandy and Scott pointed Tenacity north for island time on the Great Barrier Reef. The autopilot broke in 4-5m seas and they had to hand steer in 30-knot winds. But when the sun rose, the dolphins arrived and everything seemed okay. Sandy told Scott: “Let’s keep going, but we’ll need a bigger boat.”

They found their dream vessel, a new Seawind 1160 called Sea Moon, which the couple recently sailed from Australia’s Thursday Island to Eastern Indonesia. Then they started their planned five-year-long cruise through south-east Asia.

Fresh from her first 700-mile passage beyond Australia, Sandy admits: “It’s been a crazy three years.” Before she took the plunge to live aboard – and marry Scott – she’d spent almost 50 years with her feet firmly on land.

“It’s a big deal for me psychologically to get into the water,” she says. “I thought I could never live on a boat, but then you meet the right person…”
Although she has had no formal sailing instruction, Sandy is driven to push herself. “I had years of hearing ‘You can’t do this’, and sometimes you’ve got to say ‘I can!’”

She credits Scott’s adventurous ambitions and time spent at the helm of his rudimentary old Crowther catamaran with paving the way for success.

“We’d be doing overnight passages, three hours on, three hours off, hand steering and never leaving the helm, and that experience really set me up as a new sailor to just roll with what you’ve got and make it work,” she says.

“When things go wrong, it teaches you how to cope, and that’s when we are at our best. Now we’ve got this great new boat, we feel like we’re living in a luxury apartment.”

The Circumnavigator

Baha Pelin and Kym Kierman
Tayana 48 Deck Saloon • Tutkum • Greece

Baha Pelin’s childhood was peppered with just enough boating adventures to get him hooked. The family had a summer house with a little motorboat to toy with and, in his teenage years in Arlington, Massachusetts, Pelin enjoyed dinghy sailing with Boys’ Club of America.

Straight out of college, he spent US$4,000 on a 25-year-old yacht, took a Coast Guard Auxiliary night course, and started sailing around the North Atlantic. A few boats and one mid-life crisis later, he flew to the Annapolis Boat Show, ordered a 2007 Tayana 48 to be shipped to Portugal, and started sailing Tutkum around the world.

He’s had amazing crew along the way, but the one who mattered most was fellow American Kym Kierman.

“I’ve always been a simple-life person, but I had zero idea of what the cruising lifestyle was about,” she says. “I’d never been on a sailboat until I met Baha.”
Yet a lifetime of outdoors adventures allowed Kym to take to sailing with ease, and the couple spent two years cruising from Australia to Eastern Indonesia and Thailand before shipping Tutkum around the Cape of Good Hope to the Mediterranean.

“In the beginning Baha told me what to do and I’d do it; I had no problem with that.” She says she thrived on the challenges of sailing and living off Eastern Indonesia’s remote, idyllic islands.

“The constant decision-making, the crazy night sails, the wind and the lightning; that’s the stuff people might hate but I didn’t mind it, it’s all part of the adventure.”

But she adds: “I anticipated it to be a lot more luxurious. I’d be saying to Baha, ‘Oh my God, now what’s broken? Now what’s leaking? How do people find this fun? All we’re doing is fixing things!’ That part was really hard.”

Now the couple is cruising in the Med, exploring Greece and Turkey where Tutkum’s circumnavigation first began.

“We are constantly surrounded by boats, but it’s far more lonely,” says Kym, who misses the easy friendships made in Indonesia’s more remote sailing grounds.
“Here in the Med there are very few cruisers and so many charter boats. In Eastern Indonesia you pretty much knew everyone, and when you dropped the anchor, everyone got together.”

Having come full-circle with Tutkum, Baha is reflective too, but says he’s still captivated by where a boat can take him.“My goal was never to circumnavigate. I wanted to go see the world, to explore, and I just kept going,” he says.

Always keen to change the pace, Kym and Baha are planning an extended break ashore. They have dreams of an African RV adventure before returning to sail Greece, Italy and maybe Montenegro or Morocco.

“The boat as a means to explore cool places is more important to me than the actual sailing,” says Kym. “Sailing is fun and exciting, but when we get to port, it’s like ‘Let’s get off, let’s go’.”

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