Posts Tagged ‘flat water’

The 2012 schedule is here! Here’s the short version…

Saturday, July 16th, 2011

Our program for the December 2011 – July 2012 season is now ready!

Here are the links to the all-new Destinations and Rates and Dates pages.

We’re still working on the Booking Enquiries page… if you’d like to book, please click here! We’d recommend booking early to get the most choice. Also, if you book before 1 October 2011, you’ll get a discount of USD 150 per person.

Looking forward to riding with you onboard Meercat!

Ged & Susy and the Zenith Ocean Voyages crew

WHAT’S NEW FOR SEASON 2 AT ZENITH OCEAN VOYAGES – Dec 2011 – July 2012

For our second season here at Zenith Ocean Voyages, we’ve decided to do things a little bit differently as far as our scheduling is concerned. Here are the highlights, in a nutshell:

Our calendar

  • In short, it’s all about flexibility and custom trips.
  • Depending on the time of year, we’ll be in one of four different cruising grounds. Some of these represent the best of what we experienced in 2011, some are brand-new adventurous explorations.
  • Within each cruising ground, YOU CHOOSE YOUR DATES.
  • Within each cruising ground, you can choose your itinerary – although we will advise you on how to make the most of your trip based on the intended length, your starting and ending point, etc.
  • YOU CHOOSE THE LENGTH OF YOUR TRIP. In principle, for a minimum of 7 days (guess what though… we are flexible).
  • We are still working on our new booking enquiry page. While we finalise it, all links to that page have been temporarily redirected to our Contact page.
  • First come first serve – the earlier you book, the more choices you will have. Once a trip is booked by at least 1 person, we will publish the dates so that others can join and we will indicate it’s no longer available once all cabins are filled.
  • The Special End-of-Year trip is somewhat different. YOU CHOOSE not only the dates and the length, but the cruising ground as well! The only limitations are December 20, 2011 as the earliest possible starting date and January 2, 2012 as the latest possible end date.

 

 Our rates

  • … are still all inclusive – just get yourself to the boat and we’ll take care of the rest!
  • The package comes with our unique our much-praised personal kitefilm of your trip. To take a look at the videos from Season 1, check out http://vimeo.com/channels/191285
  • If you’re traveling on your own, or if you’d like a cabin all to yourself, please contact us to find out about our special single-occupancy offers.
  • Bookings made before 1 October 2011 will receive a discount of USD 150 per person.
  • If you would like a custom trip that’s not quite 7 days or 10 days long, no worries. You will be charged on a pro-rata basis up to the 11th day. From then onwards, the daily price drops to USD 300 pp/day.

Trips in Summer 2011

We are currently in the ABCs. If you’d like to come onboard, please contact us, indicating your preferred dates. We are flexible and our 2011 rates will apply.

From a guest’s perspective…

Monday, June 6th, 2011

A recent guest of ours, Chris, wrote a very rich and detailed review of his experience onboard Meercat on the Zenith Ocean Voyages T11 trip in the Grenadines.

The review is published on the German forum at www.oase.com and has lots of pictures too. If you can read German, or if you don’t and just want to look at the nice pics, click here. For an English translation (done by Susy as faithfully as she could…), click here.

Thanks Chris, much appreciated :-)

Grenadines trips – fly to Grenada!

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

The Grenadines are a wonderful place to kite (there’s waves, flat water and nobody there!) – partly because they are pretty remote. A lot of people have asked us about flight schedules and it can get somewhat complicated. To make things easier for you guys, we’ve now added the option of flying into Grenada and we pick you up and drop you off there. We have to get organized to do this, so the earlier you book, the more flexible we can be.

With this option, you get a multi-island, multi-country trip!

This is in addition to our “regular” pick-up points, which are Union Island and Canouan Island in the Grenadines (reachable from Barbados), or the island of Carriacou, which is part of Grenada (reachable by ferry or plane from Grenada).

Another week of epicness in Antigua and Barbuda (Part One)

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

Nate and Florian heading for superyacht domination

sunset surfboard, with Cecilia and Hans
Nate doin’ his thing on 11-mile beach, Barbuda.
Dominique the brownie monster
Hans’ comment after this session: “Not one of my worst days.”

What an excellent 8 days… first Barbuda, then Antigua, with our guests Cecilia and Hans from Norway, as well as two great riders, Dominique Granger and Florian Daubos, and Nate Appel the videographer – who also kites and likes to jump over dinghies. Marc Rowley was there as well of course, and he kept on riding despite injuring his foot – what a man!

Dominique managed to snorkel out of the escape hatch and Florian kited in a bikini, to the dismay of everyone present.

The wind blew hard every day and very conveniently stopped blowing today as we came into port.

We didn’t do a whole lot apart from kite, sleep, eat, drink a few beers and laugh our heads off. It was great.

More pics to be posted tomorrow… thanks to Marc for some of these!

The guys at 40 knots, Green Island, Antigua

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

Green Island between-session chillin'

We finished our T3 trip yesterday and before we tell you all about it, we wanted to dedicate a quick post to our friends at the 40 knots Kiteboarding School in Green Island, Antigua. We hung out with Chris and Max every day while we were at Green Island and they were great! They gave us very useful tips on local kitespots and conditions and were just generally good fun to be with. Looking forward to doing it again, fellas… see you in a couple of days.

T3 on-the-road report

Monday, January 24th, 2011

After a 6-hour sail, Barbuda in sight!

Zac’s freshly caught tuna, under ice
Our T3 fruit selection

Still chillin’ in Barbuda. This is our second day here – it’s been blissfully windy and Rob’s about to do a downwinder halfway to our next anchorage. Yesterday Zac caught a small tuna (that’s what’s in the blue bowl, covered with ice, in the picture), which was delicious both as sashimi for lunch and tataki-style for dinner (along with mahi-mahi with papaya salsa and coriander-green chile pesto).

I had a nice little session on the 12-m Park today… This spot is stunning. Let’s see what Spanish Point has to offer….

Barbuda Bliss

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

 

On the does-not-suck-o-meter, Barbuda rates 96… or thereabouts! We got here at lunchtime today and were blown away – literally and figuratively.   

The water surface flowed like smoke while the passing of the clouds above revealed an eerie mesh of turquoise, sapphire, moving into deep black. This place is both weird and wonderful, an intersection between pure untouched nature and a backdrop to a sci-fi movie from another world.   

Hugging the coast just 100m to the lee we navigated Meercat inside the reef, monitoring the wind meter for the best spot. Barbuda is a pancake 20 NM due north from Antigua and is open to the trades racing across the Atlantic. A short fence lining a sand bar just 1.5m high showed us 20kts +. Kiting close to the beach in off shore winds we felt an acceleration zone over the molten blue water. While boosting into uncertainty with the sun scorching the horizon, we were reminded that we kite for days like these. We were the only kiters on Barbuda’s 11mile beach.