Atlantic Sailor

Welcome to Les Weatheritt’s site for ocean crossing and Caribbean sailing based on his experiences in Petronella, one of the Joshua ketch designs made famous by Bernard Moitessier

 

An ocean crossing is a life-enhancing adventure. If you have an itch to sail an ocean, it is never too soon to set out. Life won't be easy. There will be ridicule and complaints from family and friends, storms and frustrating calms at sea, but at the end you will have a sense of achievement that is yours alone and will last forever.

This is an account of three sailing boat journeys told through three books:

*      crossing the Atlantic from Europe to the Caribbean via the Atlantic islands and west Africa

*      sailing through the Caribbean island chain

*      crossing the Atlantic from west to east, and spending a year in the Azores en route.

I began sailing as a deckhand on a two masted schooner in the Caribbean. Since then I have sailed my own boats on the Atlantic coasts of Britain and Europe from Sweden to Spain and into the eastern Mediterranean. At the tender age of 47, after many years as a research economist, I finally ran away to sea. Now I have sailed the Atlantic in both directions, spend eight years cruising the Caribbean, had an idyllic year in the Azores and am now exploring southern Spain and Portugal.

Sailing is the most satisfying life I know and this is some of the most satisfying sailing I can imagine.

My sailing books are written to help others fulfil their dreams and encourage you to go sailing.

Les and Gloria in Chaguaramas, Trinidad. Photo by Hanna Thompson

 

You will need to read many books before setting out on your Atlantic crossing. You may read them for fun, long before the seed germinates or the plans get firmer. The Hiscocks and the Smeetons, the Pardeys and Cornells, Webb Chiles and Hal Roth, Bernard Moitessier, the unmatched and sublime H W Tilman, the romantic John Caldwell, the accident prone Tristram Jones, and of course Joshua Slocum, the great Nova Scotian who led the way. 

 

What I wanted most when planning my first ocean crossing was the story of an ordinary Joe who went offshore and still managed to come back, who would suffer the frights and discomforts that land-lubbers regard as intolerable and yet still know that there was nowhere else he or she would rather be and nothing else they would rather be doing, and that land-lubbers are wrong, wrong, wrong. I didn’t find those books for either my first or my second crossings, so I wrote them.

 

You will hear the stories of ordinary Joes in harbours like Falmouth or Corunna, Lisbon or Dakar, in countries like Trinidad or Antigua, Martinique or the Virgins, in Bermuda or the Azores. It is easy to meet these long distance cruising people when you are on a long distance cruising yacht of your own. It gets easier to bump into these people the further you go. When you throw your line ashore in Bayona or Funchal, Port of Spain or Horta after weeks at sea you will be accepted into a new family, of people who know what you have done without ever needing to ask why, who respect what you have done without passing judgment on your sanity, who regard crossing oceans in small boats as both a commonplace and a privileged way of life. But to get you that far, you may need the gentle push that my books are written to give you.

Please get in touch with your comments or questions at any time. I will answer, but it may not be immediately. After all, I have some sailing to do.

joshuapetronella@yahoo.co.uk

If you need to translate any of this into another language, use this link: www.babelfish.altavista.com

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