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We bought our Amel in 2000 and spent the next 11 years preparing for our retirement cruise - a westward circumnavigation. We are members of the Santa Barbara Sail and Power Squadron and have taken many of the USPS courses. [...] We got in some overnight practice by participating in three Baha Haha Rallies (2004, 2006, 2008) and inbetween made many trips to the Channel Islands near our home in Santa Barbara California. We started our voyage in January 2011.
The first year we sailed from Santa Barbara, California down the westcoast of California, Baja, Mexico, and Central America to Golfito, Costa Rica.
The second year we sailed south from Costa Rica to Panama and Ecuador and then across the Pacific to the Galapagos, many island groups of French Polynesia, ending in Bundaberg, Australia.
The third year we sailed Indonesia (Sail Indonesia Rally), Malaysia (Sail Malaysia Rally), and Thailand. At the end of that season we transported Libertad from Phuket, Thailand to Turkey via Sevenstar Transport freighter.
Our fourth season started in Turkey where Libertad was offloaded and cruised Turkey, Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, east coast of mainland Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, one stop on the French coast, and ended in Barcelona, Spain. At this point our plans changed as we went home to California for family needs and had a seven month hiatus, delaying our crossing of the Atlantic. This, our fifth season started off with a whirlwind land travel trip to some of the major European cities. Back on the boat in Barcelona, we headed for Gibraltar, then onto the Canaries where we crossed the Atlantic January 2016 with Jimmy Cornell's Atlantic Odyssey II.
We took the boat south to Grenada for the hurricane season. We return to Libertad late Dec 2016 to cruise the Caribbean northwest towards the Panama Canal. Getting close to home.
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