About Us
We are Carl and Joanna Greenwood, an English couple from a little village in Suffolk called Waldringfield on the banks of the river Deben.
We have started this website predominantly for us and for our friends and family who are interested in our travels. More of a way to document what we have seen and done and organise the copious amounts of photos and videos we will take. For any of you who stumble across this page, feel free to have a read through but be warned. We are new to this!
The sailing community is a sharing one, an encouraging one and so far we have loved being part of it. In that spirit, if there is any questions or comments you would like to leave us please feel free to drop us a line in the 'Contact Us' section.
Having discovered a love of sailing about 10 years ago when we first chartered a 34 foot yacht in Greece, we started to think about buying our own boat. The dream started out as a 10 year old monohull, Carl would retire and I would take a sabbatical from work to spend a season in the Mediterranean. A two week charter on a catamaran in the British Virgin Islands started to change our minds about multihulls. And the length of time we might want to do this. We could have stayed onboard for months. In fairness, Carl’s true heart lay in a centre-cockpit monohull but the sheer amount of living space you get with a cat (and the fact that I had made it a condition of living on the water!) brought him round. We also felt it was a more palatable option for our friends and family who had not sailed before. We wanted to share the experience with them.
We set about coming up with a solution to make it happen. The solution presented itself as a job opportunity for us both in the United Arab Emirates which would give us a fantastic chance to experience the Middle East and the variety of cultures that lived there. The plan was three years. We wanted to save some money for the boat but also explore the region and take some trips to far-flung places that weren’t so far-flung any more. As with many other people across the globe, the pandemic altered plans and life ground to a halt. We were lucky in that our work in the energy industry still carried on regardless. So much so we were confined to the site to limit infection and continue its commissioning. Tough and exhausting times, but we had something to strive for. No travel, no restaurants, no bars equals no spending…at all. Also a healthy dose of 'Life is too short' meant that three years got shortened to two and here we are, the proud owners of a Lagoon 42 catamaran called Rockhopper.