Had a great sail across the ditch. David Hows is an excellent sailor. The crew where amazing. Appreciate this opportunity to challenge myself. Awen is a very complicated yacht, which required you to be vigilant. Thanks OSE for giving me experiences I will cherish for many years.

Excellent, professional skipper and 1st mate. A great learning experience. Its a shame the Skipper and 1st mate no longer work for OSE. They are worth their weight in gold.

It was a great trip, great company and food. The one suggestion I can make is to program more time at the marine park. Thanks again.

We’ve just finished an incredible seven day catamaran holiday around the Hauraki Gulf, and I honestly couldn’t recommend Warren highly enough. From the outset, he was exceptionally organised, taking care of food planning, provisioning, and even arranging diving gear before we left. It meant we could simply turn up and enjoy the experience without worrying about the logistics. Warren’s knowledge of the Hauraki Gulf is outstanding. We visited so many hidden bays and special spots that we would never have found on our own. His local insight truly made the trip. He gave us the option of either learning to sail or simply sitting back and relaxing. As a keen sailor myself, I jumped at the chance to sharpen my skills and Warren delivered. I genuinely learned things I hadn’t known before, which made the trip even more rewarding. We did venture up to the Poor Knights, which was an amazing experience and somewhere I’d never been before. In hindsight, it is a long sail a full day up and a full day back so if you only have a week, there is more than enough adventure within the Hauraki Gulf itself to fill seven days. With Warren’s knowledge, you really don’t need to go far. It was an absolute pleasure spending the week with him and the people onboard, and I’ll have no hesitation in booking again.

We had an amazing trip for the Hobart to Whangarei passage. Captain David is an excellent skipper and Silver Fern is an amazing vessel. We had a great team for the passage and everyone contributed in meaningful ways. We decided to delay the trip for two days based on the weather forecast. This was a very prudent decision and David did a great job over the whole trip continually assessing and discussing the weather forecast for a safe passage. We had some great days of sailing between Australia and New Zealand. We hit some tricky weather on the last two days, down the east coast of New Zealand, but David made a good plan and we were successful to get through safely. We did several sail plan changes over the passage from full sails through to storm sail settings. The food was plentiful and meal planning for the expedition was superb. I would highly recommend Ocean Sailing Expeditions for anyone seeking meaningful offshore passage and heavy weather training. This particular passage was exactly what I was looking for to gain more offshore experience. In all, we covered just over 1600nm in 9 days. Aloha!