I've been an altar boy, run a little rock restaurant and polished big luxury yachts within an inch of their lives as a deckhand in my beautiful home country of Italy. At the beginning of January 2014, I decided it was time to up my game and moved to study at Club Yachting in the Canary Islands to qualify as a Yachtmaster.

 

A few exams and a lot of celebrations later, I was a qualified Yachtmaster Offshore, with a sailor girl on my arm, with whom I shared the same passion for sailing, teaching and laughing. And for good coffee (you can take the boy out of Italy...) Together we qualified as RYA Cruising Instructors, delivered yachts across the Mediterranean and parts of the Atlantic, and worked alongside each other in Tenerife.

 

Annie and I make a good team and we will be proving this in our next destination of the Southern Hemisphere. Watch this space while we take command of the large cat, sail across the Indian Ocean and I try to keep Annie's "Eeeks" under control...