Foxy

Here's a little bit about our home!

'Foxglove' is a Freya 39.  The 39 is meant to be her length in feet although she is actually a bit longer - about 44 feet to be precise - but as you pay per foot in a marina, lets just leave it at that shall we?

The Freya 39 is a heavy displacement, long keel, cutter rigged yacht. Here she is out of the water...

The original 'Freya' (below) was designed by an 'Australian' named Halvorsen for the Sydney Hobart Race in the 1960s and, until recently, was the only yacht to have won the race three times.  She was bought by the original owners of Foxglove, Well known cruisers, Roy and Tee Jennings, who later sold her only to build their own!

Freya is now sitting in Beqia in the Caribbean where she is in excellent condition and spends her time sailing for fun and admiring the view!

Foxglove was built in 1980 by one of Freya's original racing crew named Jim Gannon who has a boatyard in San Francisco.  Jim built the hull for Roy and Tee who fitted out the rest with their own hands at home... at the top of a hill in San Francisco.  When you see what a superb job they made, you will understand how proud we are to have her as our home.  We have some photos which we will add soon but they are in the Caribbean at the mo!

As a cruising yacht Foxglove has circumnavigated ...and some!  She is extremely strong and has a surprising turn of speed when sailed well.  Her best time across the atlantic - which she has crossed many times - is 19 days.  Not bad for an old girl.  She has been around both capes and lived to tell the tale. 

For the more technical of you, Foxglove has a canoe stern (pointy back end) which helps her in rough following seas.  She is rigged as a cutter with a Mainsail a Jib and a Staysail.  She also has a Ghoster - a very lightweight genoa - permanently rigged on a furler on the bowsprit.

To help us manoever, we have a Yanmar 3JH4 engine - and to steer, we have wheel steering, a raymarine electronic autopilot called Britney (Britney Steers - thanks Steamy Windows) and an Aries Windvane who doesn't have a name at the moment.

Apart from the engine, we generate our electrical power using solar panels, a wind generator called Wendy  (We use it Wen-De Wind Blows) and a towing generator when we are offshore - also no name yet!

We have MF, HF and VHF radios and an old satellite phone to keep in touch.  Chances are that the blog you are reading was sent to our website using the HF radio and a special 'Pactor' modem.

 

Finally, we have some electronic navigation instruments including a GPS based chartplotter (to help us know where we are) ...a radar (to help us know where other things are) and a device called AIS which helps us see which big ships are about and what they are up to!

For food, we cook most of our food on a Dickenson diesel stove, although we have a small gas stove to help us when we just want a quick snack.

We carry about 450 litres of water (One of our water tanks out for a clean below) which we suppliment with a very small Katadyn watermaker and about 600 litres of diesel - enough for quite a few days of motoring!

For sleeping in port, we have a large double in the forepeak (the pointy end of the boat) and when at sea we sleep in good sea berths which are very important for an offshore yacht - as you can see, Spiderman approves.

To keep us safe at anchor we carry a 45lb CQR anchor (guess what that stands for) and about 100m of 3/8" steel chain.  To keep us safe at sea, we have a Viking self righting liferaft, a Mc Murdo Epirb safety beacon and a Simrad SART radar locator beacon.  We normally wear crewsaver lifejackets and a host of other little safety goodies such as a Gerber EZ out knife.

For fun, we have dive gear and a Bauer Junior II compressor and our 'car' named Steve - our Carib Dinghy and Tohatsu 9.8 outboard.

When buying a boat, the best bit of advice given to us was to "buy something that you would be proud to sail into anchor with"  Great advice, and we are!