Lin & Larry Pardey

Awarded to Lin Pardey (a member since 1977) and her husband Larry Pardey (non-member), for their 50+ years of ocean cruising, two engineless circumnavigations, and many inspirational books and DVDs.

Among the world’s best-known and most experienced cruising sailors, having covered more than 200,000 miles at sea, the Pardeys have inspired countless thousands of sailors to go cruising as a lifestyle. By the time they met in 1965, Larry was already an experienced blue-water sailor, but it was a new world for Lin. They were aged 26 and 21 respectively. Almost immediately they set to work building their engineless 24ft 7in cutter 'Seraffyn' of mahogany on oak with teak decks to a design by Lyle Hess, launching her in October 1968. The Pardeys left with two guiding principles: They would keep going “as long as it’s fun”, and they would “go small, go simple, go now.”

Over the following 11 years they sailed her some 45,000 miles on a slow east-about circumnavigation which included a detour to the Baltic, three years in the Mediterranean, and across the Indian and Pacific Oceans back to her home port of Newport Beach, California.

'Taleisin' was commissioned from the same designer in 1977 and built by Larry and Lin halfway up a mountainside in California. Launched in October 1983, she is 29ft 6in on deck and of teak planking over black locust frames with bronze floors and hanging knees. Again her deck is of solid teak. Immensely strong, Lin described her some years ago as a ‘seagoing tractor’ – though a remarkably fast one.

Following a number of Pacific passages while putting shoreside roots down in New Zealand, they set off to circumnavigate west-about via South Africa, northern Europe, the US East Coast, and then south to round Cape Horn and through the Beagle Channel – some 80,000 miles in all, again without an engine or sophisticated electronics.