Hi everyone, my name is Rick. Born on the 8^th of June 1986 and raised a city boy in the Netherlands, in the beautiful old city of Maastricht all the way in the south of our little country. Although the Netherlands have a rich sailing history, the river Maas, which gives the city its name, is the closest stretch of water and is not at all sailed. So how does a guy like me end up sailing around the world? I’ll try to give you a little peek into my life before sailing and how this strange ambition came to be.

I was raised in a family of 4. My mother is a history teacher, my father a project manager for the local water company, my younger brother is working in art, writing and curating expositions. I think I inherited a natural curiosity about the world mainly from my mother and a love for technical stuff and sailing from my father. How my brother fits in... I have no idea but although we are completely different we have been very close all our life. We are both very skilled at sniffing out a good party though.

Our first helmsman Remco is one of my best mates and has been since we were 14 years old and ended up in high school together. In these early days we used to take my father´s 33 foot steel boat into the North Sea, on short daytrips, weekends away to Belgium or the islands in the North of Holland. Here is where the seed was planted. The North sea is not a place for the faint of heart but we both wanted to go further and further. The more we read about people making big passages, or watching their video blogs on Youtube, the more excited we got and the more this little seed grew out to what would be an actual plan to do it about 10 years later.

For as long as I remember I’ve been fascinated with machinery and the sea, the vastness of it and the power it can have. So it was not very odd that I became an engineer and took a job in the offshore oilfields. Starting out scrubbing decks and quickly working my way up to Barge Engineer, which is sort of the marine supervisor on an offshore drilling unit. Here I developed a deeper understanding of the sea and got a lot of experience technically and just daily things a sailor also does, like monitoring weather or calculating tides.

At some point in my life I felt I was ready to stop dreaming and take steps towards a serious attempt at circumnavigating. I was in a position that would financially support this and I had plenty of spare time to work on preparing a boat for the high seas. So I made the decision and set the goals. I gave myself 5 years to accomplish this, and 4.5 years later I threw off the mooring lines and watched my home disappear behind the horizon.

People often tell me they have dreams that are hard to realize, and they are right otherwise they wouldn’t be dreams. It takes hard work, blood, sweat and tears. But I’d like to think life is like sailing, even when the winds are against you, progress can be made!

Hi everyone ! I was born in the north of the Netherlands in Groningen on 22 September 1985. When i was 12 we moved all the way south to Maastricht. Thats where i met Rick and we've been best of mates ever since. Allthough i've been sailing all my live, starting out in an optimist and sailing the lakes in the middle of the Netherlands in traditional wooden boats, it wasn't until Ricks dad bought a 33 foot steel sailboat, that we really started to dream about maybe sail around the world at some point. We started sailing daytrips and vacationtrips on the Northsea, which we liked so much we started reading and watching the experiences of other people. With the help of some adventurous genes we decided this is something we would go for !

A couple of years later when Rick was allready working at sea the dream of sailing around the world became more serious when he bought the Foxy Lady in 2013. Meanwhile i was still trying to finish my Applied Physics bachelor degree and trying to figure out how to save up some money to finance a trip like this. In my spare time i tried to help whenever i could to make the Foxy Lady a worthy cruiser to circumnavigate. When i finished my studies i got a job as  junior researcher at Nanotechnology department at the University of Applied Sciences in Enschede where i also did my graduation thesis. This opportunity almost fitted perfectly with our shared plans of sailing around the world, since it was a position for two years. Allthough i wasn't able to join Rick right from the start in July 2016, my contract was until december of last year + i needed that time to save money, i finally joined in Portugal on 19 december 2016 and have been sailing ever since. Enjoy our site and social media and hopefully we can inspire you to make an adventurous trip like this someday soon aswell !