About

Mina2 is an Oyster 485 cutter rigged yacht owned since 2003 by Tim Barker of London, England. Mina2 and he (along with the Downstairs Skipper, Maria, and a wonderful bunch of their friends) have travelled from the Arctic to the Antarctic and many places in between. Join them on their adventures …

Read more about the boat and her Skippers

The purpose of this website is not only as a blogsite for Mina2, but to consolidate all the journals, logs , photos and videos of our travels, and to provide fellow cruising sailors with pilotage information that may be helpful in planning their own adventures. To this end we have included zoomable track charts of all our cruises together with specific pilotage information to the extent that it has thus far been compiled. We will be adding to and updating this data as and when time allows

Guidance notes on getting the most out of this website:

Journals and blogs of all our previous cruises can be found under “Cruise Journals”. Click on which journal you want to read and it will be downloaded as a PDF file which you can then save and read at your leisure.

For fellow sailors who are looking for a bit more detail, all my track charts are in “Pilotage Info” / “Track Charts“. These charts are in the form of Google Maps and you can pan and zoom any of them to drill down to the detail. Where possible, the exact anchorage positions can be identified.  Sadly, putting the cursor over my anchorage point will not give you a lat/long. See below for a workaround.  N.B. The tracks on these charts are representative and should NOT be used for navigation purposes.

Additional pilotage information can be found in “Pilotage Info” / “Pilotage Information”. Some of these still require completion / editing, but it’s a start and I will be updating and adding to this information as and when.

Identifying lat/long positions of anchorages. You will find many of the journals have the lat/longs of anchorages in the body of the text. If you want to identify a lat/long from the Google Map charts, click on “View larger map” on the bottom left of the chart and you will open up the chart in Google Maps. Then right click on any position of the chart and click on “What’s Here?”. The lat/long will be displayed in decimal degrees in a box on the left hand side. Not ideal, but it gets you there.

If you wish to be advised when new blogs are posted click on the “Follow the Mina2 blog by Email” box in the side bar to the right

For your interest and entertainment, the website also includes a photo gallery for each cruise, and some videos.