Project World Sail Is Born

MANY PEOPLE WOULD CONSIDER quitting your jobs, pulling together every penny you have and buying a tired sailing boat completely bonkers. But here we are, half way across the world from home, sitting on anchor on our beautiful Swan 50 following our dream to circumnavigate the world.

We are JP and Charlotte. Sailors, surfers and adventurers raised with the ocean as our playground. JP grew up surfing, shaping boards and racing boats in Guernsey, and with Charlotte’s dad being a sailboat captain she learnt how to walk on boats before land. JP spent his early 20’s working for Red Bull and Charlotte ran music festivals in the UK before we both decided to work professionally as sailors. It was there that we met, sailing and racing on some of the most prestigious yachts in the world.

But every time we would pull into a new anchorage working on someone else’s boat, we couldn’t help but feel a little envious of our neighbors owning their own boats, running their own schedules and following their own dreams. So that was it. Neither of us remember quite when we made the decision to buy a boat and sail round the world, but all of a sudden it was happening –and the boat search commenced.

We both worked on a boat and sailed her up from the Caribbean to Newport, RI in the spring. Having scoured all boat buying websites around the world, it ended up being Facebook Marketplace of all places that we stumbled across this tired looking 50-foot Swan.

Driving up to see her after work was, if anything, a little underwhelming. Squashed into the back of a boatyard shed, decks covered in dirt and the interior completely ripped up, this boat was far from the vision we had. However, when we started to look a little closer, underneath the layer of dirt we saw a boat that had been beautifully designed to sail offshore, and do it fast. Designed by Germán Frers, one of the most famous yacht designers in the world, we knew we had to do everything we could to give this boat a second chance and get her back in the water where she belonged.

We knew that risking everything to leave the comfort of the norm behind would be a challenge, but we didn’t realize quite how quickly we’d be tested to our limits. Time was against us from the start.

We began work on the boat in June with a plan to get her ocean ready and sail back across the Atlantic before the hurricanes rolled in late August. The worklist covered a whole wall, and the previous owner (who we eventually met) admitted we were doing more to the boat in a couple of months than he had done in 18 years. We did everything ourselves, which meant work days typically stretched from 8am to 4am. It was the kind of busy where even stopping to eat felt like it was getting in the way, and with no running water our showers were with the cold dock hose at the end of the night.

But then in mid-August, albeit a little grubby and a sleep deprived, we launched the boat (renamed JACQEAU) and got her sailing again for the first time in years. Suddenly, all of the hard work, all of the sleepless nights and all of countless things that had gone wrong slipped away. It was the two of us and the boat, gliding across the water, and all the hard work seemed worth it.

But we had to get moving quickly to get back to Europe before the hurricanes hit. We did all the relevant safety checks to sail the Atlantic Ocean and prepped and provisioned the boat for four weeks at sea. Little did we know that we’d only make it a few days.

Buzzards Bay and the Cape Cod Canal were at the start of our journey and are known as being one of the hardest waterways to navigate on the East Coast. After an epic sail out of Newport, we battled the windup Buzzards Bay chop and, with the weather behind us, we arrived at the entrance to the Cape Cod Canal just as the sun was rising. We had timed it perfectly to have no wind and the current ripping us through in the right direction, or so we thought.

Suddenly we heard unusual vibration through the rig. Charlotte took the helm whilst JP went down to look at the engine. Whilst shifting in and out of gear we start to hear an alarming noise and from the cockpit and Charlotte hears shouts from JP to stop immediately. Something was definitely wrong.

There had been a failure in the mechanism that joins the propeller shaft to the engine which bent the shaft and cracked the shaft log (the normally watertight tube through the bottom of the boat). We were taking on water, and struggling to keep up. Our beautiful boat was sinking. On top of that, we had no steerage or engine and were being ripped through this narrow canal with nasty stone walls on either side.

Neither of us had time to panic. JP jumped on the helm and Charlotte hoisted sails to do whatever we could with the little wind out there. Not a single word was spoken between us, but we knew without communicating exactly what each other had to do in that moment.

Thankfully, due to a well thought-out passage plan we knew the radio channel to call and although it felt like an age to us, the Canal Patrol were quick to respond, and we had tow lines on our bow headed to safety. With the help of an emergency pump that got passed over to us, we managed to keep up with the water that was quickly fighting its way into our home and got into some haul-out slings in a local marina.

It was heart-breaking to see Jacqeau pulled out of the water that morning and we couldn’t help but feel slightly like we’d failed in what we set out to do. However, with hindsight we were grateful. Humans are always put to the ultimate test in situations like the one we faced that morning in the Cape Cod Canal, and for us it only showed us what a strong team we make when our lives depend on it. We were thick as thieves before, but now we are ready to take on the world.

After another period in the boatyard, we managed to get a new shaft and have been happily exploring the East Coast of America. In the next year, we will sail down to the Caribbean, do 2 x Atlantic Crossings, West Coast surfing destinations of Europe from Scotland to the Canaries, and the Pacific Ocean. Join us for the ride @projectworldsail.