December 2017 – Our travels aboard Lady M

A warm Hello from sunny Perth, Western Australia (and a long way from Lady M) to our small band of followers.

It’s currently Saturday afternoon, blue skies and 31 degrees C here in Perth, as the weather continues to warm up as we approach mid-summer. In Adelaide (2,500km away on the other side of Australia) England and Australia are playing the first day of their 2nd Test in the Ashes cricket series, Australia having won the first test which was held in Brisbane.

We wanted to let you know that we have put together a basic plan to kick-off our sailing season in May 2018, heading from Jirnsum to Hannover (Germany) via Groningen and Bremen – about a 500km trip in May and June. Have a look at the route map below, where you will see flags at the main waypoints – and Amsterdam on the extreme left (west) and Berlin extreme right (east). We will then visit Berlin by train from Hannover, before returning to Netherlands in July by a more southern route.

More to follow in the new year . . . .

We will leave you with this view of the Swan River, warm sand and blue sky, and wish you all a safe and most enjoyable Christmas festive season with family and friends, wherever you may be.

View from a riverside café across the Swan River to North Fremantle, where we enjoyed a coffee on our cycle round the river last weekend

We look forward to sharing the next part of our journey with you in 2018, and we hope that 2018 also brings with it a little bit more peace in this troubled world.

A’hoy there! and welcome to our blog

With the prospect of (a slightly) early retirement in 2019, we began searching the internet in 2015 for a suitable motor yacht from which to explore the inland waterways of Europe, as part of our 5 to 10 year retirement plan. Our offer to purchase 'Lady M' was accepted in late 2016 and the transaction was completed in early 2017. The Lady M is our 13.2m SK Kotter - she is a comfortable Dutch-built steel hull aft-cabin motor yacht built in Sneek in 2002 and first launched in 2003. She has two double cabins each with own facilities, so we have room for the occasional visit by family or friends. Our adventure began in late April 2017 when we moved aboard for the first time, discovered how everything works . . . and explored Friesland during May and June. Our retirement plan was to explore the Netherlands for the first couple of seasons (or maybe even three) and then to slowly work our way southwards (and possibly a little eastwards too), eventually ending up at the Mediterranean coast in the south of France - and then . . . . . who knows? Since then, we have fully retired in September 2019, and summer 2024 will be our seventh season on the water, during which we hope to explore the north-west corner of Germany, and as far south as Dortmund, before returning to Jirnsum for winter storage. So, to quote a line from that iconic Australian movie 'The Castle', "this is our story . . . ."

Month: December 2017

Christmas Greetings from a warm and sunny Perth