Xoë

Mutineer
Xoë and Roxanne

Like her elder brother, Xoë was born on the island of Antigua, in the Caribbean. She started cruising at twelve weeks of age and made her first Atlantic crossing at six months. By the age of three she had visited 24 countries and overseas territories and had travelled more than 16,000 miles under sail.

From an early age, Xoë showed a strong academic inclination. In parallel with this she became an excellent seafarer, being equally able to cook in a rough seaway or to scamper aloft into the rigging. Despite her abilities, Xoë became increasingly dissatisfied with the life on the ocean wave. Or perhaps it was simply that she outgrew the boat and outgrew her family.

At the age of 17, Xoë jumped ship and made an ocean passage with an erstwhile single-hander, aboard an old gaffer. Following on from this, she travelled to England and spent four years at university in London.

Notwithstanding this ‘clean break’ ashore, it would seem that Xoë’s saltwater baptism and her itinerant upbringing are a strong force within her. While still in England, she met our dear Brazilian friend, Gean, he having sailed all the way up from the southernmost tip of the New World to join us in the Old. Xoë and Gean subsequently helped us with a major refit of Mollymawk, while the boat was in Chile, and they were married at the yacht club in Valdivia, with a company of fellow yotties to wish them well. Their honeymoon was spent in the Chilean Channels; and there, at ‘the end of the world’, they found their own small ship, which they bought and bettered.

Xoë and Gean named their yacht Space Oddity – (“For here am I, floating in a tin can”) – and if you want to, you can follow their adventures and enjoy the beautiful photos which they post, of glaciers and whales and of their seafaring cat and dog.

Click here for a list of articles by Xoë on this website.