COSMIC DANCER V is a Sweden Yachts 38. In the past 10 years she has sailed over 35,000 miles and visited 29 different countries ranging from the artic to the tropics. This is her story.

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Cape Caution attracts very deferential treatment in the pilots and sailing guides, a place to be avoided in anything but the very calmest of weather they say. We didn't get a chance to test the veracity of these claims as we had mirror calm conditions for our rounding of the Cape.
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Halfway up its length Vancouver Island is almost joined to the mainland by an umbilical cord of closely interlocked islands with a myriad of narrow channels threading between them. This area, known as The Rapids, forms a natural barrier between 2 of the north west's prime cruising grounds, Desolation Sound to the south and the Broughtons to the north.
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If Captain Vancouver could read our blog he would be quietly chuckling to himself in his grave saying "I told you so!!". Spectacular though the area may be  to us, it is proving a remarkably difficult area to get away from.
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The past week has seen us continue northwards from Vancouver to 2 of the gems of the Pacific North West Coast, Princess Louisa Inlet and Desolation Sound. Princess Louisa Inlet is considered by many to be the "holy grail" of cruising in these parts.
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It would be difficult to better our introduction to Pacific sailing. The sun came out the morning we sailed from Seattle, and apart from a few hours darkness each night, it has stayed out ever since. The Pacific high is well and truly established over the top of us giving us cloudless conditions, azure blue skies, calm seas, and at times even a little wind as an afternoon sea breeze fills in.
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The summer solstice saw Cosmic Dancer unwittingly at the centre of a rather unusual celebration. We woke on Saturday morning to find our yacht surrounded by several hundred naked cyclists busily body painting themselves before setting out on the Fremont Solstice Parade Cycle Ride, an event described by the organisers as an ".
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The time had come. After 10 years of sailing Cosmic Dancer in European and Atlantic waters we decided it was time to dip her keel in the Pacific for the first time! Having spent last season sailing to what prides itself as the Atlantic’s most westerly seagoing port, Duluth in Lake Superior, all that lay between us and the Pacific was a 1,665 mile road journey across Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Washington to Seattle, a mere trifle compared to the 3,000 odd miles we sailed in getting from the outer St Lawrence to Duluth, and an awful lot easier than the alternatives of either a NW passage or a 10,000 mile plus passage via Panama and Hawaii.
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We have now sailed just under 1,200 miles this season, almost all of them in near perfect sailing weather with the wind aft of the beam. We haven't had to reef once and the worst we have had to put up with is some fog along the Nova Scotia coast.
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If the weather statistics are to be believed we are now sailing in the coldest place on the planet, well maybe not literally the coldest, but the only place on the earth where average temperatures are said to be falling, not rising.
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Our progress north has been temporarily halted by a broken radar. Although working when we left Cape Cod, by the time we reached Shelburne, Nova Scotia, all it was capable of displaying was " Error 00xx00 - contact your nearest B&G agent for help" - not the sort of error you wan't to see when in a country that doesn't have a authorised B&G agent.
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