Yachtsman
Cruising logs
Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, Peter has sailed some 70,000 ocean miles, including three Atlantic crossings, one trans-Pacific, eight Tasman/Coral Sea crossings and a voyage from the UK to Australia.
As a result of visiting Africa and many Island nations during his voyages, Peter became concerned with world poverty. Since then, he has taken cataract replacement equipment 200 miles up West Africa's Gambia River for Sightsavers International and has made his ocean-going yacht available for promoting such organisations as The Fred Hollows Foundation and youth poverty-action group The Oaktree Foundation.
He is also very concerned that more awareness is needed for the dire consequences of Climate Change and the dangers of ignoring it.
The First 14,000 Miles (on Google Earth)
Caribbean anchorage in the beautiful Tobago Cays.
April 1993. From the South of France, Loquax sailed east to Corsica, Italy and Greece before crossing the Aegean to Turkey. Being near the end of the summer season in the Mediterranean Sea, it was time to turn the boat around and head for warmer climes of the Caribbean.
After the family flew home from Almerima in Spain, he was joined for his first Atlantic crossing by two friends. Calling briefly at Lanzarotte in the Canary Islands for fuel, water and food, they made the journey of nearly 3000 miles in a shade under three weeks.
In the Caribbean, he and his family explored the reefs and islands of the Windward Islands before they moved north to the Leeward Islands and the Bahama chain. In May '94, it was time to return to England. With only himself and his two older daughters, Ruth (15) and Suzy (12), they re-crossed the Atlantic Ocean by the "fast rough and wet route" going north to pick up the prevailing westerlies before heading east for Flores in the Azores and then on to England.
Plymouth → Brisbane (on Google Earth)
Sunken trawler in Banjul, Gambia, West Africa.
In 1998, Peter began a new voyage — a circumnavigation, to take in the new millennium in Australia.
For the first leg of his journey across the notorious Bay of Biscay, he was joined by his brother, Chas, and daughter Suzy (then 16). They said goodbye to the rest of the family at Brest in Northern France and crossed Biscay in September 1998, bound for The Canary Islands.
In Gran Canaria, his brother returned to his job as a fire-fighter in Plymouth and Peter's wife, Sally, and youngest daughter, Sophie (then aged 13) joined Suzy and him to take the yacht to West Africa for their epic journey up the magnificent Gambia River.
In conjunction with Sightsavers International, Loquax journeyed nearly 200 miles up the River Gambia to take medical supplies and equipment to bush hospitals where local eye-surgeons performed nearly 300 operations on local Gambians blinded by eye-cataracts.
In November 1998, the yacht left West Africa with a crew of 6, including the two girls. In just over two weeks, Loquax was sailing into Bridgetown, Barbados where Sally later rejoined them.
From then until February 1999, the family explored the Tobago Cays, Trinidad, Venezuela, Colombia and Panama before transiting the Panama Canal in its last year of American operation.
From Panama, Loquax headed west to cover over 4,000 miles of ocean in a non-stop passage to the Marquesas Islands — the most remote ocean crossing on earth.
During the Southern Winter of 1999 they crossed nearly 9,000 miles of the South Pacific, visiting places as remote as the Tuamotu archipelago — the Dangerous Archipelago — due to fierce currents and lethal coral atolls.
Calling at The Cook Islands, Tonga, Fiji and Vanuatu, Loquax arrived in Sydney's Port Jackson on the eve of the millennium after nearly 19,000 miles and fourteen months at sea.