Following is a fabulous story from our owners and good friends Gordon and Louise Coates.
They are having a magnificent time and are finding a great balance of cruising and keeping up with family.
Thanks for sharing this with us Gordon and Lou! Your story is so good it is being published in the next edition of the Australian Multihull World magazine, congrats!
My wife Louise and I were fortunate to have the opportunity to sell our Fountaine Pajot orana 44 in australia and upgrade to the new replacement He’lia 44.
Multihull solutions of Mooloolaba are our agent/brokers and facilitated the factory pickup in March of 2013 in La rochelle, France. With the voyage ahead to sail into the Mediterranean for two summer seasons then to cross the Atlantic we installed equipment such as watermaker (aquaBase 12V), Victron inverter, small Fischer Panda 5000i generator, washing machine, 800W of solar and a suite of raymarine navigation equipment including transponding AIS and radar.
Our plan is to balance life between cruising on board The Larrikin with regular trips home to spend time in Australia with our family and friends. In our first year we were away for seven months and then home for seven months.
In that time at home we had another grandson born (we did not want to miss out on that!) and a family wedding to attend. We feel fortunate that we can do both, since we just love the time that we spend cruising but also feel it is important to keep up with the people we love and the special events in theirs and our lives. We will eventually get the boat home to Australia but it may take a few years. We are making it up as we go!
Our 2013 cruising year took us into the Med and during the seven months we visited France, Spain, Portugal, the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, Corsica and the west coast of Italy. It was then a non stop sail to Marmaris, Turkey – a total of just over 4,000nm. We hauled out leaving the boat in the excellent care of Offshore Sailing at Albatross Marina, in Marmaris for seven months and on return in June 2014, we cruised Turkey, Greece, Sicily, Sardinia and back to the Belearics, Gibraltar then Lanzarote in the Canaries to join up with the Cornell Sailing Group organised Atlantic Odyssey.
Read full story here: Helia 44 – The Larrikin Jan 2015