Welcome

PUFFIN (macareux en Français) is the name of our Outremer 4X sailing catamaran. She is currently being constructed by Outremer Yachting in La Grande Motte, France. Puffin will be our third cruising catamaran and our second Outremer.

Our previous boat Wildling was an Outremer 5X, which we owned and sailed for 3 years in the Mediterranean sea. We loved Wildling and our original plan was to sail her back home to Brisbane, Australia. Unfortunately it didn’t work out for us to be able to do the long voyage from France to Australia, and since our son Gavin has now gone off to university, and our daughter Lindsay is in her final years of high school and will soon be following him, we had to determine if the 5X was still the right boat for Robin and I to have in Australia as we get older.

The 5X is a 59 foot, performance cruising catamaran, and requires an agile, experienced crew to handle in all conditions. It’s a simple boat to sail, but everything is large and can be physically demanding. Since it is difficult and expensive to have the boat delivered to Australia, we decided that for just the two of us, a smaller boat that each of us could handle solo (in case one of us is incapacitated), was a better choice.

The 4X is 48 feet long and has half the sail area. It’s certainly not as spacious as the 5X, but like all Outremer catamarans it’s well designed, very safe and still a high performance, offshore cruising boat.

Puffin will be ready in August 2019, and after sea trials we will be loading her onto a cargo ship in Palma, Mallorca for transport to her new home in Brisbane.

If you have visited our previous Sail Wildling blog, you are already familiar with the type of information I will be posting here, which is focused on the technical aspects of owning, maintaining and sailing our catamaran. I will describe our unfiltered experience with our 4X, good, bad and otherwise.

My goal with this site is to share what I learn with other sailors so they can avoid making some of my mistakes, and to pay back the generous community of fellow multihull sailors that have shared so much of their time, experience and wisdom with me over the years.

As we did on the Wildling website, we will provide a link to Robin’s Instagram feed, which will be more about our life aboard and the places we visit.