Around the World (Various Routes)

A Morning Somewhere in the Pacific, About 900 Miles from Anywhere

When Jess from our BugBitten team stepped off a plane in the Marquesas after flying out to meet a friend's boat, she expected to feel impressed. What she didn't expect was the particular quality of the silence. Not the absence of noise — there was wind, always wind, and the creak of the rigging and the slap of swell against fibreglass — but the absence of the background hum that modern life generates without you ever noticing. No notifications. No traffic. No ambient urgency. Just the boat, the water, and 3,000 nautical miles of open ocean already behind the crew who'd sailed her there from Panama.

That boat had been at sea for twenty-two days on that single passage. The crew of three had stood watches in rotation, eaten meals out of a gimballed galley, repaired a failed autopilot in lumpy seas at two in the morning, and arrived — tanned, slightly feral, and entirely certain that nothing in their previous lives had been as real as those three weeks. One of them had been a project manager in Melbourne. One had been a secondary school teacher in Glasgow. The skipper had spent fifteen years building up to this. All three agreed: the circumnavigation had reorganised something fundamental in how they understood what a day was for.

This piece is not going to persuade you to buy a boat and sail around the world. It is, however, going to give you the most honest account we can of what a blue water circumnavigation actually involves — the routes, the realities, the joys, the considerable irritations, and the things you genuinely need to know before you commit a year or more of your life (and a substantial amount of your savings) to closing that loop.

What a Circumnavigation Actually Is

Before anything else, let's be clear on the definition, because it gets fuzzy quickly in yachting circles. A true circumnavigation means departing from a point, crossing every line of longitude, and returning to the same point — with at least one antipodal pair of points visited along the way, per the most commonly accepted criteria. In practice, for bluewater sailors on recreational vessels, this means following one of a handful of established routes that take advantage of the planet's prevailing wind systems.

The classic trade wind route runs roughly west from Europe or the Canaries, across the Atlantic, through the Caribbean, down through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific toward the Marquesas and then Fiji, around to Australia or New Zealand, north through the Indian Ocean, around South Africa's Cape Town or up through the Red Sea and Suez Canal, and back into the Mediterranean and Atlantic. That is the circuit that the majority of circumnavigating yachts follow, and for very good reason: it works with the wind rather than against it.

The wind is not an abstract consideration. On a 45-foot sailboat in open ocean, the difference between a following sea with 20 knots of breeze and a hard beat into 30 knots on the nose is the difference between joyful and genuinely difficult. Route planning around the trade winds is not laziness — it is basic efficiency. The northeast Atlantic trades, the southeast trades of the South Pacific, the roaring forties if you're doing a southern route — these are the engines of the voyage.

The World Cruising Club's Atlantic (Round the World Routes) programme, particularly the ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) departure from Las Palmas in Gran Canaria each November, gives less experienced bluewater sailors a structured entry into the first major passage. Safety briefings, weather routing services, daily radio scheds, and the company of 200-plus other boats making the same crossing simultaneously. It is not the adventurous lone-wolf version of ocean sailing, but it is an extremely sensible way to make your first Atlantic crossing without feeling entirely on your own if something goes wrong.

How the Routes Feel, Ocean by Ocean

No two oceans feel the same, and any sailor who tells you otherwise has been at sea so long they've forgotten the differences. Each leg of a circumnavigation has its own character, its own particular demands, and its own rewards.

The Atlantic Crossing

The Atlantic crossing — specifically the downwind trade wind route from the Canaries to Barbados or St Lucia, around 2,700 nautical miles — is the most genuinely pleasant of the major passages for most sailors. The northeast trades arrive reliably in late November and December, blow at 15 to 25 knots on the quarter, and the swell settles into a long, regular rhythm that even seasick-prone crew can eventually find their feet in. Fishing lines trail off the stern. Books get read. Night watches under a full canopy of stars in mid-Atlantic are, without exaggeration, among the more extraordinary things a person can experience.

The Caribbean section that follows is more complex — beautiful anchorages, difficult bureaucracy in some island states, and the constant management of hurricane season timing. You transit Panama somewhere between February and May, depending on your pace, and you do not linger.

The Pacific: The Big One

The Pacific is where the voyage gets serious. The passage from the Marquesas back to Panama — which you'd be sailing in reverse, departing Panama for the Marquesas — runs roughly 3,000 nautical miles with no option to stop. There is nothing in between. You leave, and you arrive, and in between you manage whatever the Pacific decides to offer you. It is generally manageable on the southern route, following the southeast trades, but it demands self-sufficiency of a kind that the Atlantic crossing doesn't fully prepare you for. Gear failures at sea are not an emergency you radio for help with — they are a problem you solve yourself, at sea, possibly at night, possibly in uncomfortable conditions.

The Marquesas themselves are extraordinary — jagged volcanic peaks, wild horses on hillsides, a scale of landscape that makes you feel appropriately small. The Pacific island chain thereafter — Tuamotus, Tahiti, Tonga, Fiji — represents some of the finest cruising ground on the planet, and many circumnavigators spend far longer here than their original schedule allowed. Budget for that. It happens to almost everyone.

The Indian Ocean

The Indian Ocean corridor is where vigilance becomes mandatory. Cyclone season in the southern Indian Ocean runs roughly November through April, which means timing your arrival in Australian or South African waters matters considerably. North of Madagascar and through the Gulf of Aden, piracy remains a genuine concern — not theoretical, not historical, but current and real. The majority of cruisers transiting this corridor do so in convoy, often coordinated through the network of cruiser radio nets, and the passage demands careful attention to routing and risk assessment in a way that the Pacific does not.

Cape Town, at the bottom of Africa, is one of the great provisioning stops of the circumnavigation — excellent chandleries, wonderful food, reasonable prices by global standards, and a yachting community that genuinely understands what offshore passage-making involves.

What You Actually Do Every Day

This might be the most useful section for people who are drawn to the idea of circumnavigating but haven't done significant offshore sailing. What does a week at sea actually look like?

Watch systems are the backbone of life underway. A crew of three typically runs three-hour watches — one person on, one resting, one available. You eat, sleep, and exist in rotation. Meals are simple: pressure cookers work well in a seaway, and you learn very quickly which foods are practical and which ones make a mess of the galley at fifteen degrees of heel. Provisioning before major passages is a serious logistical exercise — you want at minimum three times what you think you'll need, because weather can extend passages, and being short of food or water at sea is not a situation you want to engineer.

Maintenance is constant. Saltwater is corrosive, UV is relentless, and mechanical systems on a boat at sea work harder than they ever do in a marina. Expect to repair things. Expect to improvise. Carry spare parts for everything that matters: impellers, belts, fuses, blocks, shackles, sail repair tape, wire, electrical connectors. The sailors who get into serious trouble offshore are often those who deferred maintenance or carried insufficient spares rather than those who encountered genuinely unforeseeable conditions.

The UNESCO World Heritage List includes anchorages and island groups that circumnavigating sailors pass through — the Marquesas archipelago, the lagoons of New Caledonia, Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean — and it's worth cross-referencing your planned route against what you might be sailing past. Some of the most remarkable places on earth are only accessible by private yacht.

Navigation is now largely electronic — chartplotters, AIS, weather routing software — but paper charts and the knowledge to use them remain essential. Electronics fail. Paper doesn't. Any skipper planning a circumnavigation who isn't comfortable with celestial navigation, or at minimum with using a sextant for sun sights, is carrying more risk than necessary.

When to Go (and When Not to)

Timing a circumnavigation is a puzzle with multiple interdependent pieces, and getting it wrong can strand you in the wrong ocean during the wrong season.

The classic departure window from Europe or the Canaries is October to December. This puts you in the Caribbean for January to March, through Panama in March to April, across the Pacific with the appropriate season, in the South Pacific for the Australian winter, and around to Cape Town or the Indian Ocean before the cyclone season closes off your options.

Go if:

• You're departing the Canaries in November, following the ARC or ARC+ fleet
• You have twelve to twenty-four months allocated — not twelve months absolute minimum
• Your boat has a working watermaker, reliable self-steering, and you have tested both at sea
• You have offshore experience: at minimum a couple of extended offshore passages, preferably including at least one multi-day overnight run

Don't go if:

• You're planning to learn to sail on the way — this is a recurring and expensive mistake
• You've given yourself a fixed deadline to be back
• Your budget doesn't include a 40% contingency for repairs, agent fees, and unexpected delays
• Hurricane season catches you without a plan

The UNESCO World Heritage Centre maintains updated information on heritage-listed marine areas, some of which carry specific anchoring regulations and permit requirements — worth checking for the Pacific island groups specifically, where environmental protection rules vary considerably between nations.

You can find more planning context and route discussion for the Atlantic legs and beyond at our more places in Global Oceans section on BugBitten.

How to Get There and the Key Stops Along the Way

"Getting there" means different things on a circumnavigation depending on where you are in the process. If you're crewing on someone else's boat, the pipeline runs through crew-finding sites and marina noticeboard postings — Las Palmas in Gran Canaria and Mindelo in Cape Verde are fertile ground in October and November, full of skippers quietly desperate for reliable crew. If you're delivering your own vessel, the preparation stage deserves at least six months and ideally twelve.

Key Provisioning and Refit Stops

• Las Palmas, Gran Canaria: The classic departure point. Excellent chandleries, good haul-out facilities, a substantial English-speaking cruising community in October and November.
• Rodney Bay, St Lucia: The standard Atlantic landfall. Well-equipped marina, good provisioning, straightforward clearance.
• Panama City / Balboa: The Canal transit requires an agent and patience. Budget several days and a small fleet of line handlers (four required, often sourced from other cruisers).
• Nuku Hiva, Marquesas: First Pacific landfall for most. Limited provisioning — stock up in Panama — but extraordinary scenery and a legitimate sense of achievement.
• Suva, Fiji: Major reprovisioning point. Good chandlery, provisioning, and a large cruising community.
• Cape Town, South Africa: Arguably the best provisioning stop of the whole circuit. Royal Cape Yacht Club is welcoming and well-positioned.
• The Azores: The final major stop before returning to Europe. Outstanding sailing, good facilities, and the feeling of almost-home that makes everyone simultaneously relieved and sad.

The Not-So-Good Bits

BugBitten doesn't do promotional gloss, so here is what the brochure version consistently leaves out.

It is expensive. Budget figures bandied about in cruising forums are almost invariably low. A realistic figure for a modestly frugal circumnavigation on a well-found 45-foot boat, including all maintenance, provisioning, fees, flights to and from, and the inevitable unplanned repairs, runs to AU$70,000–$120,000 per year or more depending on the vessel and the crew's lifestyle. Agent fees in some Pacific island nations are remarkably high relative to the service provided.

Relationships are tested severely. Living in 50 feet of space with one or two other people for a year-plus, under periodic stress, in hot climates, with limited privacy, reveals things about people — including yourself — that comfortable land life keeps well buried. The divorce rate among circumnavigating couples is statistically notable. This is not a reason not to go; it is a reason to think about it clearly beforehand.

Bureaucracy is relentless. Zarpe documents, cruising permits, port clearance paperwork, customs declarations, biosecurity inspections, agent fees that are mandatory whether you want an agent or not — the administrative overhead of moving a vessel between jurisdictions is considerable and wearying. Some Pacific nations are particularly demanding.

Things break at sea, at night, in bad conditions. This is not a scare story — it is the nature of the activity. A circumnavigation will test every system on your boat and several systems you didn't know you had. The sailors who handle this well are those who prepared for it; the ones who don't are those who hoped it wouldn't happen to them.

Loneliness is real. Even with crew, even with the radio nets and the cruiser community, even with the phosphorescence in the wake and the Southern Cross overhead — there are passages where the ocean is very large and you are very small, and the familiar world is very far away. Most people find this expands them. Some find it undoes them. Know which you are before you go.

Final Word from the BugBitten Team

The sailors who have completed circumnavigations and come back to talk to us — and there have been several, over the years of BugBitten's coverage of offshore sailing — share a particular quality. It's not smugness, though that exists too. It's more like recalibration. They have spent a year or more in a world where the stakes were physical and immediate, where the horizon was the limit of knowledge, and where competence was measured in actual outcomes rather than performance metrics. Most of them found that going back to ordinary life required a kind of translation effort.

That is not a reason to circumnavigate. It's not a reason not to, either. It is simply what the voyage tends to do.

If you're considering it seriously, the practical advice is this: do your offshore miles first. Get uncomfortable on a long passage before you commit to several of them back to back. Crew on other people's boats — through the ARC, through delivery passages, through any opportunity you can find. Read the cruising guides. Talk to people who have done it recently, not people whose circumnavigation was fifteen years ago when the world was different. Then, if you still want to go, go properly: with the right boat, the right preparation, the right budget, and the right amount of time.

The Pacific is still there. The trades still blow. The stars in mid-ocean are still extraordinary. The opportunity is real — it just requires you to be equally real about what it demands in return.