Posts Tagged ‘kiteboarding’

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.

T8 in Guadeloupe – loving the unexpected

Friday, April 8th, 2011

There must be a way to kill a conch nicely....???

 

Gilles caught a conch
Tim, Michelle & Gilles on Petite Terre
Gilles coming in after a boat launch

Our T8 guests contacted us a few months back, and to be honest, we were a little bit surprised they wanted to come on our boat. For a very simple reason: they ( a couple) were accomplished kiters, but they wanted to take their newborn baby on board. We thought – NEWBORN = HELP!!!! 

We came up with all kinds of reasons why we (childless, as of yet… so no direct experience) felt that having a baby onboard would be a bad idea. Well! Guess what! We were overruled. Big time. Tim (the baby) had a great time. So did his parents, shall I mention, or is that obvious? Not quite sure if it was all down to the parenting skills of Gilles (former snowboarding world champion) and his wife Michelle (snowboarding physiotherapist) or just something that happens to all newborn babies when they board a catamaran. Whatever. They loved it. Let’s hope it happens again, without further analysis, and leave it at that :-)  

Slight itinerary amendments

Friday, January 14th, 2011

We’ve just changed our itinerary ever so slightly for a very good reason which we will announce shortly… Meanwhile, what you need to know is that we’ve added an Antigua/Barbuda trip to give you another chance to ride and learn with Marc Rowley of Blast Kiteboarding. It’ll run from March 6 to March 13. As a result we’ve had to take out one of our Guadeloupe trips but hey, you can’t have it all.

Click here to go to our bookings page to secure your cabin.

Stay tuned for more news in the coming days!

Gwada trip part 3 – some random stuff

Friday, December 24th, 2010

Forecast = no wind, so we went surfing instead.

And here’s a further report on Guadeloupe. After our first windy day in Le Gosier, the rest of the  itinerary was adapted to  catch the waves in the most beautiful spots. And those we did find…  Here are some tidbits! 

Dec 11 was Will Bennet’s birthday. We celebrated in style, on anchor in St Francois.
Petite Terre iguana. They are everywhere and no, they do not bite (we think).
Petite Terre. Marine park, not a kitespot for this reason, but surfing is fine…

Stoked for the Guadeloupe trip

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

Alright, a quick update: we got here yesterday after a 24-hour sail from St Lucia through pretty rough seas and big waves (if only we’d been able to kite hehe…). Now we’ve been busy preparing everything… Tonight our first guest Matt Sexton is due to join us, and tomorrow the rest of the crew, featuring UK wavemaster Will Bennet and top kitechick Celine Collaud on behalf of Kitesurf Magazine. Really looking forward to getting this going! The forecast is looking pretty good and we are totally ready… Stay tuned for more updates and pictures.

Last hours in the boatyard

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

So I thought I would take some pictures from angles that aren’t normally accessible…

 

(some of our) boards at rest.

 
 

the view from below the waterline

Last but not least – this one is of the teak deck being finished. The cockpit is a bombsite!

Zenith Ocean Voyages in the Kiteboarder magazine

Thursday, November 25th, 2010

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

So here’s the link to the December issue of the Kiteboarder. There’s an article about us – a Backwoods feature about the Tobago Cays – which you can also read in the Media section of the website. The issue also features a lovely news item about us as well as a crazy-lookin’ full page ad… check it out!

http://www.thekiteboarder.com/2010/11/december-2010/

The story so far…

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

I suppose a proper blog should start from the beginning. The beginning was over a year ago… Ged and I were sitting in a beach bar in Spain last summer, sipping (yeah, right) our cold beers, whining about the lack of wind… and then it dawned on us: let’s buy a boat and follow the wind!

It required some thought of course… we went to Cumbuco, Brazil for two months and kited to our heart’s content. Great place, shame about the crowds at Cauipe lagoon. The idea of buying a catamaran made more and more sense.

We met Oli,  and immediately felt he’d be the perfect candidate for joining us on our venture as kite instructor.

Next stop was Florida, where we eventually found a boat we were interested in… except it was lying in Singapore! So off we go to Singapore… an interesting trip and experience, but the boat was not in great shape and we had our first taste of broker BS… After trying, unsuccessfully, to get the boat fixed in Thailand, we went back to Europe and started our search from scratch.

We migrated to El Medano, Tenerife – wonderful and magical place – and spent hours online making a few more offers on used catamarans until we finally realized that for our purposes it had to be a new boat – ‘a boat whose provenance we know’ (more broker BS). And that’s what happened – we ordered a brand-new Fountaine Pajot Orana 44 from the factory in La Rochelle, France and had a great purchasing experience, thanks to Carl of MI Cats UK.

We took delivery in May of this year and proceeded to cross the Atlantic. It took us over 3 weeks because we had to take a southern route in order to avoid any adverse weather – it was the start of hurricane season. All went smoothly and we arrived safely in Grenada (Caribbean) on July 8, 2010. The rest is history, as they say – we’ve spent the last few months preparing for our expedition, checking out kitespots, taking pictures and chillin’ – it’s been good.

We’ve also done a bit more work on the boat – the stern deck is in the process of being teaked, plus we’ve added storage space for boards and kites and we’re having an antenna installed to ensure wifi connections from basically anywhere (slight exaggeration – within a 5 mile range from land… but anyway).

Things are going very well. We’ve secured a major sponsor (who we can’t mention yet but it’s not hard to guess who it might be… take a peek at the website), we’re getting bookings and are really stoked to get this going. Our first trip is the End-of-Year trip (Dec. 23- Jan.2 – some cabins still available), but we do have a special media/waveriding trip coming up in a few weeks, featuring Billy Parker, Matt Sexton and Alex Fox – more about this to follow shortly.

The pics to follow are of the Atlantic Crossing… a strange and epic experience.

The beer supplies for the trip… and no, we didn’t drink it all!

You try living on a boat in the middle of the ocean for three and a half weeks with the same five people!

Another sunset…

Landfall, at last! Grenada in the distance, early morning of July 8, 2010.