Round-the-world Circumnavigation

“We never left the Mediterranean intending to sail around the world, it’s something that evolved along the way. From Cyprus we had two choices – either northeast to Syria or south to Egypt but the winds that day favoured sailing south. Once through the Suez Canal then into the Red Sea the adventure just opened up – we continued southwards from Egypt to Sudan and Eritrea, stayed a while in those fascinating countries then got blown further south to Yemen by a bad storm. Our enforced six-month stopover there in Aden making sail repairs, finally turned both of us into intrepid adventurers as well as seasoned sailors, so we decided to continue eastwards across the India Ocean onboard our sometimes temperamental sailing boat Sänna, to see how far we could get…” Dave

Never Turn Back
Our unplanned circumnavigation eastwards has been exceptionally rewarding, an extreme test of both our personal strength and depth of character. Sometimes, it’s been far from easy while other times it has been an indescribable adventure. We’ve experiencing things we shall never forget, memories that will forever be precious in our minds. We have weathered ferocious storms in the Red Sea, in the Indian Ocean, the north and south Pacific, we lived amongst the pirates in Aden, we were held captive at gunpoint by the Yemen army. We found the floating body of a Chinese fisherman in the sea five-hundred miles from land between Australia and New Zealand, we were attacked by grizzly bears in Alaska. There are too many treasured memories to describe in such short paragraphs.

All of these experiences rank alongside some of the most incredible friendships we ever thought possible, friends we’ve made along the way both with local people living their own cultures and with other long-distance sailors. We’ve seen parts of the world few tourists get to see, always making our way under our own endeavours. Our website here is a record of our voyage which, at this time of writing, is now of nine years duration. Both of us are not sure how long this is going to last or if we’ll ever complete our circumnavigation back to England and the Mediterranean – it’s not that important to us anymore because nowadays we’re not on a mission. We lost that kind of incentive long ago – it’s now a lifestyle choice, one which sometimes puts us in conflict with the real world. Perhaps we turned native somewhere along the way.

We’ll continue to sail our way eastwards until something unexpected happens, maybe someday we’ll find the perfect location to put down roots to stay a while. But we have learned one important life-skill along the way, something vital in understanding how life can change forever.

Never turn back, never return to where you left – always take whatever is waiting across the horizon…

Marie Ungless

Alaska, April 2015