SV Coromandel - Welcome to the Website of the Intrepid Circumnavigators! These are the tales of Linda, Andy and Coromandel – sailing around the world, even though we didn’t intend to. We left Prickly Bay, Grenada, on 4 February 2008 and arrived back there on 3 February 2013, thus taking five years over the venture, plus the seven months it took us to reach Grenada from our home port of Blyth in Northumberland. These web pages are updated monthly, so take a look now and again to see where we are and what we’re doing. We are both members of the Ocean Cruising Club, so it’s good meeting other members as we go along and getting information from both other members’ websites and that of the Club. Take a look at www.oceancruisingclub.org. We are also members of the Royal Northumberland Yacht Club in Blyth and the Port Owen Yacht Club in Velddrif, South Africa.
Coromandel 2013 the Caribbean South Africa Dec 2012-Jan 2013 Caribbean 2012 Brazil 2012 St Helena 2012 Namibia 2012 South Africa December 2011-March 2012 Journal Quilts Where have been since 01/06/07	The Intrepid Circumnavigators!
	Welcome to our Home Page, which describes our adventures - and rather more pedestrian activities! - on board our Nicholson 35, Coromandel.  We bought her in April 2006 and spent just over a year getting used to her and getting both her and ourselves ready for some long-term cruising.  Andy and I left our home port of Blyth, just north of Newcastle upon Tyne in Northumberland, on 1 June 2007.  Since then we've sailed just over 45,000 miles, have crossed four oceans and are now on our way towards the Caribbean. We travelled by way of Scotland, the Orkney Islands, Northern Ireland, Eire, and quick dash back to Falmouth then on to La Coruña, Galicia, Portugal, Porto Santo, Madeira, Tenerife and La Gomera before crossing the Atlantic to Barbados. In the West Indies we visited only Barbados, Grenada and Carriacou before heading south to Venezuela, Bonaire and Curaçao, then Panama and the Canal, south to Ecuador and Peru, spending from June 2008 to February 2009 in South America We spent eight wonderful months travelling in Ecuador and Peru, visiting such sights as Machu Picchu and Ingapirca, and cities as far apart as Puno on Lake Titicaca and Otavalo, back north of the equator.  We also visited the high sierras, the dry forest and deserts of the coast and the Amazon rainforest. We then left for our Pacific crossing, making landfall in Fatu Hiva before cruising on across French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, Niue and Tonga, then on to New Zealand. After spending the cyclone season in New Zealand, doing some work on Coromandel and then cruising part of North Island, we sailed to Port Vila on the island of Efate in Vanuatu, where we spent a wonderful month among the islands.  From there we sailed direct to Darwin, having been unable to check in at Thursday Island. At the end of July 2010 we left Darwin for Kupang in West Timor, the first port on our Sail Indonesia Rally and then spent three months cruising these wonderful islands, visiting Alor, Lembata, Flores, Sumbawa, Lombok, Bali, Belitung and a host of little places in between.  We also learned a little Bahasa Indonesia. From there we motored to Danga Bay in Malaysia and visited Singapore before continuing on up the Malacca Straits to Langkawi, stopping at various points on the way.  From Langkawi we went to Ao Chalong on the island of Phuket in Thailand before making our way back southwards to leave Indonesia via the Sunda Strait. We have since visited the small atoll of Cocos Keeling and then made passage across the Indian Ocean to Mauritius, then on to La Réunion, which has been wonderful by way of walking and food, and the delightful feeling of being in France - the locals talk about "the mainland" as if it were the same distance from France as the Isle of Wight is from England. From La Réunion we sailed to Richard's Bay in South Africa, from where we coast-hopped to Port Owen in the Western Cape via Durban, East London, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. The 2012 season took us to Namibia, St Helena, Brazil and finally Trinidad. We arrived in Salvador and spent three weeks in Bahia Marina getting the spreader fixed, then to Itaparica, Maragojipe, San António, Campinho, Caravelas, Vitória, Buzios, Cabo Frio and Rio de Janeiro. From there we returned to Cabo Frio, spent a week in Guarapari waiting for a northerly to blow itself out before continuing to Recife, where we checked out of Brazil for the 2,000 mile passage to the Caribbean, arriving in Chaguaramas, Trinidad, after 17 days of very mixed weather, from calms to 32 knots. After spending some time in Trinidad doing the annual maintenance on Coromandel, we left there on 2 February and arrived in Prickly Bay, Grenada on 3 February. So we had left Grenada on 4 February 2008, sailed west through Panama, across the Pacific in 2009, to Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand in 2010, across the Indian Ocean in 2011, the South Atlantic in 2012, and had arrived back in Grenada on 3 February 2013, thus taking exactly 5 years over our first circumnavigation. Not bad – not bad at all!	Thorfinn