Boat-  "DAZZLER" - 1973 Cheoy Lee Offshore 47
OWNERS - Carey Johnston & Wally Agnew
AREA OF SAILING - South Pacific
E-Mail Johnston  

Dear James, Thanks for keeping the webiste up in such great condition.  We havent have occasion to visit it often as we've been out of internet range for some time. DAZZLER is currently at Pedro Miguel Boat Club in Panama where we are repowering for our return to the Pacific side of the world after 15 years!  DAZZLER made her first transit of the canal in 1987.  It will be great to be back in the Pacific!   Since owning her for the last 17 years we have made many changes but the most striking are probably those made within the last 2 years.  We have added several new pieces of gear and have been very pleased with them.  They include the WINDPILOT Pacific Plus windvane, Simrad/Robertson Autopilot, Spectra Watermaker, Furuno Radar and a new suit of sails that were ordered from Doyle Sails in Barbados.  We cannot say enough good things about all this gear.  We were delightfully surprised to find our Doyle sails (ordered via Soca Sails in Trinidad!) are a perfect fit, well made and have increased DAZZLER's performance to a noticeable degree.  We are in the process of repowering to a Yanmar 4JH3E 55 hp engine here in Panama.  Our trusty Westerbeke 4-107 (our second one!) is still in very good condition and is for sale along with the Borg Warner Transmission and a TON of spares (we are a cruising boat after all).  If interested please send us an email at careyandwally@hotmail.com and we can respond with photo and full particulars.   We are looking forward to leaving Panama after the first of the year and working our way down to Ecuador then off to the Galapagos and Marquesas. 

July 05 Update

Click to enlarge

Since leaving Panama in 2002, with NEW Yanmar 4JH3E (yeah!) we sailed down the West coast of South American and spent about a  month in mainland Ecuador before our passage to the Galapagos. A fine time was had by all and then it was off to the Marquesas. We had a rip-roaring 19 day sail to Hiva Oa and loved every minute of it. Our nearly record breaking day was 220 miles, with some current helping out.

After 2 seasons of cruising the Marquesas, Society and Tuamotus groups of islands we were obliged by Customs in French Polynesia to leave with the boat as the boat is only allowed to stay 12 months out of any 24 month period. Time spent on the hard does not count  towards your 12 months.   Dazzler spent 6 months on the hard during cyclone season. We checked in to the cost of importing the boat so we could stay indefinitely. Unfortunately, boats built outside of the EU are levied a duty that is almost double to boats built in the EU which made it financially impossible for us. So, the question was...where do we go now, we haven't seen everything we want to see yet!

The decision was made to sail north to Hawaii knowing that we could come back to French Polynesia after some R&R stateside. We had another rip-roaring sail north to Honolulu arriving after 17 days arriving in late October 2004. 
We have decided to re-rig while we are here and also to take off the teak decks---the parts that haven't voluntarily come off already! Hopefully we'll be southbound again by May 2006.

This year marks 20 years of ownership for us and Dazzler's 32nd birthday.

We are considering a trip via 747 to Hong Kong and would be interested to talk to others who have visited there.

Aloha,
Carey and Wally

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