After losing our rig, we were picked up by the Chilean Navy and Anasazi Girl was towed to Puerto Wiliams. Our family crew were alive and well, but we found ourselves shipwrecked on the remote Island of Navarino where there were zero marine services, much less a replacement wing mast for Anasazi Girl. (Dismasting Story - HERE)
It was on this tiny Chilean island at the tip of South America & the south side of the Beagle Channel that Anasazi Girl sat side-tied to Antarctic & Cape Horn expedition boats at the Armada's Micalvi Yacht Club while we tried to find a solution for sailing out of there.
A used aluminum rig was built & modified for Anasazi Girl by Buzz Ballenger at Ballenger Spars in Watsonville, California. It was ready to ship by December 2014. Used Class 40 sails, line & hardware were donated to us by Michael Hennessey of Dragon Ocean Racing.
We were short funds to pay the remaining balance due on the mast & the transport costs required to ship the mast & two pallets to Navarino Island.
Anasazi Girl sat frozen for three winter seasons in an inlet off the Beagle Channel called Seno Lauta. We lived aboard & experienced both the stress of being chained to the dock with a broken boat as well as the magic & beauty of being in the pristine enviroment of the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve.During this time we applied for temporary residency in Chile and formed a Chilean LLC called Anasazi Ltda. We were between Puerto Williams and Punta Arenas working out of our virtual offices and dreaming about sailing again with our family.
In February 2016 we paid off the mast. Another six months passed before we fully organized the funds & sorted out the logistics of shipping the mast down to Chile.
In October 2016 the mast arrived in central Chile, it was then sent by ground transport to Punta Arenas. We shipped the replacement rig the last 300 nm from the Straits of Magellan through the fjords to the Beagle Channel to Puerto Williams. In December 2016, two years and nine months after we were dismasted, we finally re-rigged Anasazi Girl on Isla Navarino with assistance from the Armada de Chile.
We finished our circumnavigation on the boat as a family when we crossed our own line from 2011 on our paper chart off the Brazilian coast of Recife in April 2017.
We feel so much gratitude to everyone who sent words of support & encouragement, made a donation, or sent work our way during our days of being shipwrecked. We couldn't have accomplished this goal without you.
After replacing the mast & circumnavigating with the family, we were broke but happy. We went back to work & Anasazi Girl was de-commissioned and stored on the land for just over a year in Grenada.
During this time, we lived/worked/& sailed on another boat (a Chuck Paine Bougainvillea 62') for almost ten months. James managed a refit of the 62' boat & we delivered the vessel as a family from Grenada south to Uruguay, where she was sold to a new owner.
We then spent three months in Chile & Argentina before we returned to relaunch Anasazi Girl in June 2018. We lived aboard in Grenada until November 2018, when we returned to Chile for the birth of our 5th child. At this point, both voyaging and living aboard Anasazi Girl seemed like a true impossibility. Not only lacking space, but also the capacity to carry enough food or water to make a passage for 7!
In February 2019, we returned to the boat and lived aboard (like sardines) until July 2019, when we finally found a new sailing vessel in Amsterdam that we could continue to make voyages on. We dec-commissioned Anasazi Girl and she is now on the land and for sale in Trinidad, West Indies.
We are currently sailing & living on our new boat Thunderbird, a Peter Bosgraaf 15m cruising trimaran.
Number 5! Oh, the best at last. Stay you all save and sound, on the waters and all grounds. - Is it possible, to expand a ship by a further floor? LOL
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