SPECIAL REPORT
Sailing home from Cape Town to Europe? Don’t miss Chris Tibbs’s Navigation Briefing on page 126
Shipping home costs around £46,000, and requires two months preparation and one month transport
“It’s still a long way to get home,” Carina Hammarlund muses. My partner Weitze van der Laan and I nod. Between us and our home ports in northern Europe it feels like we have to sail half the globe.
In the New Year yachts from all over the world gather in Phuket, Thailand, for the last legs of their circumnavigation. For yachts from northern Europe, there are three options to get back to their home countries. The first is sailing across the Indian Ocean and rounding the Cape of Good Hope before sailing back up the Atlantic. The second is to sail around India and then head up the Red Sea, across the Mediterranean and then home. The third is to ship the yacht home from Thailand and jump on an aeroplane.
Every option has its advantages and disadvantages, and making the right decision depends on a lot of very personal factors. We spoke to cruisers who had chosen different solutions.
SHIPPING HOME
“We ran out of time,” Conny Hammarlund says. “We enjoyed four years of glorious cruising and found ourselves in Thailand, trying to decide which way to go back to was going back on a ship and they would fly.
