Ocean sailor John Chadwick recently gave an illustrated talk to members of Weir Quay Sailing Club and other interested parties at the Bere Alston Bowling Club about the voyage which he and his wife Sue embarked to Tierra Del Fuego in their sailing yacht Dandelion. It was delivered in a most interesting fashion interlaced with humorous anecdotes.
John and Sue left Weir Quay in July 2016, crossed the Bay of Biscay to the northwest corner of Spain, sailed down to Portugal and then on to Madeira and the Canaries.
From La Gomera at the bottom of the Canaries archipelago they made an eight-day passage to the Cape Verde Islands and in October sailed for Brazil.
They spent a good deal of 2017 exploring Brazil’s tropical coastline. As John said: ‘The tempo of the voyage slowed to an “amiable crawl” as we cruised between bays of exquisite aquamarine water overlooked by the greenest hills of Atlantic rain forest.’
John continued that in late 2017 they pushed south and in January 2018 they finally entered the eastern end of the Beagle Channel and sailed west to explore the spectacular ‘Glacier Country’ under the Darwin mountain chain. Sue said: ‘With so many ice flows in the water you never needed to worry about ice for your evening G&T.’
They sailed past Cape Horn, west to east, and spent a week in a spectacular, remote anchorage on Staten Island before heading for Stanley in the Falkland Islands.
They left the Falklands in March 2018 as sailed through the stormy deep South Atlantic north, back up to Brazil and from there the 3,500 miles up to the Caribbean.
They spent two months exploring the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos islands before making their departure for the Azores. They finally picked up their Holes Hole mooring in September 2019.
The talk was brought to life by the great number of beautiful slides and charts which clearly showed the route and how it related to the geography of the Southern Hemisphere. In this way the audience could keep up with this adventurous couple and almost felt that they were on board!
A packed house then gave John and Sue a tremendous ovation for a most interesting and lovely evening.