The family crew of the 13 metre Bruce Roberts steel ketch Danu from Galway Bay hope to start their long Transatlantic voyage home from Antigua this weekend. The oceanic circuit cruise started nearly eleven months ago when Marine Institute scientist Vera Quinlan, her husband Peter Owens and their children Lilian (12) and Ruari (10) departed southward from Kinvara last June.
In a very competent and complete venture, they’ve savoured the total Atlantic experience on the ocean, and on both sides of it too, with detailed inland expeditions ashore – sometimes far inland – and a decidedly unusual Christmas spent up a river in South America in the heart of a dense tropical forest.
Here comes the sun…..Danu’s crew as they took their departure from Ireland at the end of June 2019, with Lilian and Ruari (foreground), and their parents Peter Owens and Vera Quinlan. Photo Vera Quinlan
The reward for all this sometimes very muddy exploration was the glorious sailing northward up the islands of the Caribbean across sparkling seas, and though the increasing spread of the Covid-19 restrictions has made passage planning more complex, they have managed to modify their cruise to accommodate the new situation.
Thus when a four week lockdown was imposed, they’d got themselves to Barbuda which, as Vera reports, “is not a bad place to be stuck…..”. Since then they’ve made the 30 mile passage to Antigua where they’ve been in isolation while re-stocking the ship for the Transatlantic voyage back towards Ireland. It’s a passage which is just under 4,000 miles in all, though they hope to have a short break in the Azores if the pandemic situation has sufficiently resolved itself by that time.
Children of the sea – Danu’s junior crew of Ruari and Lilian are with their parents in facing into a 4,000-mile voyage. Photo: Vera Quinlan
