Ice adventures awarded
Diverse cruising adventures and expeditions have been honoured in the Royal Cruising Club and Ocean Cruising Club annual awards.
The Royal Cruising Club’s famous Tilman Medal, for an outstanding voyage in high latitudes, was awarded to Sebastien Roubinet and his two teammates for their remarkable expedition to Ellesmere Island in a 23ft inflatable catamaran. The Nagalaqa expedition set off from Banks Island, in the Arctic archipelago of Canada, at the end of June 2022 and spent three months covering more than 1,500 miles of Arctic sea and ice without assistance, before ending their voyage in Greenland's Nares Strait in late October.
The voyage combined sailing close to the coastline or along narrow cracks of sea water, with the crew also pushing, pulling, and sledding on the catamaran over ice for the remaining sections.
The Ocean Cruising Club awards honoured family cruisers Jon and Megan Schwartz, together with their teenage sons Ronan (15) and Daxton (13) for a four-year trip aboard their Boreal 47 Zephyros.
The Schwartz family received the OCC’S highest honour, the Barton Cup, for the voyage which began with a transatlantic in late 2018, then a Panama Canal transit in 2019. The family sailed to the Galapagos, Ecuador, and down to Easter Island, before heading east to Chile. They explored Patagonia for over a year, then headed across the Drake Channel for their first trip to Antarctica, returned to Chile, then sailed back to Antarctica, up to Cape Horn and on to the south Atlantic, with long passages to the Falklands, St Helena and Ascension Islands. They concluded their multi-year circumnavigation of South America in the Caribbean.
OCC Commodore Simon Currin said: “We thoroughly admire the Schwartz family for their seamanship, as well as for their low key approach to their adventures, rare in today's challenging times.”