About |svpolaris

The beginning

Kate and Jim were living in London when a 'crazy pipe dream' turned into an obsession... how to live on a sailboat full-time and travel the world. Fed up with traversing airports every week for work and frightened by the prospect of a never-ending mundane routine for life, they decided to change everything.

They focused all their efforts on transitioning to becoming full time boat owners. With Jim's years of sailing experience, he would teach Kate how to sail onboard their own future boat.

After over a year of preparation including in-depth research, practical and theoretical training courses, test sails, a bareboat charter and boat shows. They bought Polaris, a second-hand Catana 47, performance sailing catamaran and set off on the sabbatical of a lifetime -to sail around the world in three years.

Seven years later- and that sabbatical has morphed into an all-consuming, more fulfilling way of life with no end in sight. Remote work helps keep them afloat and their work-life balance is seriously well-proportioned.

The circumnavigation so far

Starting in France in 2018 at the Catana boatyard, their journey has taken them east through the Mediterranean as far as Greece, back west to the Canaries, Cape Verdes and across the Atlantic Ocean. They sailed up and down the eastern Caribbean getting 'stuck' in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines for a year during Covid 2020. Fully vaccinated they continued through the Dutch Antilles and on to Colombia, the San Blas islands and Panama. They transited the Panama Canal in March 2022 when the gates of the final lock creaked open to reveal the Pacific Ocean, an unforgettable moment in the life of any sailor.

An uneventful passage to the Galapagos islands was followed by the longest passage of their lives to French Polynesia. After one magnificent year there, half of which was spent in some of the most isolated, pristine coral atolls in the world, they made the difficult decision to press on and explore some more of Polynesia and the South Pacific. They reached Samoa after a tricky passage with all sorts of weather followed by Tonga and then Fiji.

Perhaps the most challenging legs of their journey so far took them to Vanuatu -on what Kate still describes as the worst passage she can remember, then onward to New Caledonia in a bid to outrun a category five cyclone. They crossed the entire Pacific Ocean when they arrived at Bundaberg, Australia in October 2023.

For the next eleven months they sailed the East coast of Australia; as far south as Sydney, as far east as the remote Lord Howe Island and Middleton Reef and then all the way to Far North Queensland followed by the Northern Territory to their final Australian port of call, Darwin.

Over 30,000 nautical miles into their circumnavigation, Kate and Jim are currently enjoying the enormous and varied cruising archipelagos of Indonesia, working their way gradually west across the Indian ocean.