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About Us

Belle Casares (born Belle Wylie Holahan) spent the first half of her childhood skiing, dancing, and playing soccer in Aspen, Colorado. Her parents moved to Cambridge, MA when she was a sophmore at Middlesex school in Concord, MA. She received a BA in English Literature from Vassar College and then moved to New York City. During the eight years that she lived in New York, she enjoyed working in all types of jobs, from collecting cover charge for a club in the East Village, editing at Saveur Magazine, to managing a restaurant in SOHO. While studying documentary film at the New School, she started working for an interesting nonprofit organization called Endeavor that promoted entrepreneurship in emerging markets. There she met Wences Casares, an entrepreneur from Patagonia, Argentina. He basically swept her off her feet. Soon after that Wences got lucky and sold his internet company at the peak of the internet boom in 2000. Suddenly that romantic dream of sailing around the world became a possibility. They got married in Miami, Florida in 2002. A year and a half later, Diogenes Casares was born and days after Dio’s first birthday, they set sail on Simpatica with the hopes of circumnavigating. One year later, after cruising one third of the globe, Theodore Casares was born in Auckland, New Zealand. The little Kiwi. They finished their circumnavigation in Miami in February 2007, almost three years after departing. They are currently living in Woodside, CA, expecting their third baby.

During the two years prior to our departure, we spent a lot of time dreaming, doing research and planning. We felt very lucky to find so many of the answers to our questions as well as answers to questions we had not even imagined yet, on the Internet. Reading other cruisers stories really inspired us as well as ensured us that we were not completely crazy for attempting such a quest. For various reasons we did not make our website publicly available while we were sailing, but now that our trip is over we wanted to be able to offer any information that might be helpful to others and return the favor that so many cruisers gave us by making all of our logs, journals, and pictures available on this blog. We will try to answer all the questions sent to the blog as soon as we can.

Wences Casares
wences@simpaticasail.com
twitter.com/wences
facebook.com/wcasares

Belle Casares
belle@simpaticasail.com
facebook.com/bellewcasares