A BRIEF HISTORY

We're the kind of family who love walking along the beach making plans for the future. For many years it was our time to dream of impossible adventures, seemingly well outside our reach and when we saw a yacht on the horizon all we could do was to wish for a miracle.

So after many years of dinghy sailing and the family finances looking dismal we made our first move to "see the world". The change we could afford was for me to take a job in Papua New Guinea, on secondment from my Government telecommunications job in Australia. This was to change all our lives. It lead to a truly global outlook for all our children and it lead us to Taiwan and our first cruising yacht, Dulcinea

In the 9 years we owned her, she served duty as a liveaboard home, a passagemaker and a magic carpet on which we saw the world. From the first sail out of Hong Kong harbour as confident novices to our arrival back in Sydney after a circumnavigation 6 years later as wiser and humbled novices we gradually learned what we wanted to do with our lives. Our experiences on that journey lead to a collection of ideas on the cruising life that became the seed for our concepts of our ideal cruising yacht, of our version of long-term living aboard and to the ultimate devotion to the cause - the task of building illywhacker, our floating home.