Celebrating British sailor Pete Hill and the Cruising Club of America's 2025 Blue Water Medal
by David Schmidt 14 Jan 07:00 NZDT
January 13, 2026
Pete Hill steering Kokachin in a gale, 2022 © Linda Crew-Gee
While we love racing at Sail-World, we also have a soft-spot for cruising, ideally of the adventure-minded variety. Because of this, we always eagerly await word from the Cruising Club of America regarding the recipient of their annual Blue Water Medal. According to the CCA's website, this award, which is the organization's highest honor, "reward[s] meritorious seamanship and adventure upon the sea displayed by amateur sailors of all nationalities." The CCA first presented the Blue Water Medal in 1923, and past winners include Bernard Moitessier, Eric Tabarly, and Sir Francis Chichester.
Last week, the CCA announced that the 2025 Blue Water Medal would be presented to British sailor Pete Hill (75), who has spent the last half century cruising and exploring oceans aboard junk-rigged boats that he has either built or modified to carry this traditional rig.
Hill's voyaging using simple and comparably inexpensive boats and junk rigs began in the mid 1970s, when he and his first wife, Annie, cruised the North Atlantic aboard a James Wharram-designed catamaran. Next came a 34-foot plywood dory that the Hills named Badger, which they sailed as far north as Greenland and arctic Norway, and as far south as South Georgia Island.
Hill and Annie decided to plot different life courses (Annie, it should be noted, won the Blue Water Medal in 2009 with Trevor Robertson), and Hill set his mind to designing and building Chin Moon, a 38-foot junk-rigged catamaran. He then spent half a decade sailing the high latitudes aboard the boat, including rounding Cape Horn.
Hill eventually sold China Moon, converted a Freedom 33 to a junk rig, and—along with Carly, his second wife —cruised Brazil and penned a cruising guide for the Royal Cruising Club Pilotage Foundation.
Next came Oryx, a modified Bernd Kohler-designed KD10, that Hill also powered using twin junk-rigged sticks, and which he and Carly extensively cruised.
Tragedy found the Hills in 2015, when Carly was lost overboard off South Africa.
Hill dealt with this deep loss by embarking to sea alone, crossing the Indian Ocean and eventually making landfalls in Mauritius and Australia.
Hill sold Oryx, and—during the pandemic—built Kokachin, a junk-rigged schooner with Linda Crew-Gee. The two sailed their schooner to the Caribbean before then punching north to Nova Scotia, and then north again around Greenland.
Boats sometimes have a way of re-finding their people, and this proved true with China Moon, which hit the brokerage market in Tasmania a couple years ago. Hill and Crew-Gee put Kokachin into storage in the UK and then spent four months refitting China Moon.
The two sailed China Moon to New Zealand in 2025, but they got pasted by a nasty storm in the Tasman Sea that damaged the boat and forced the couple to hand-steer for some 144 hours.
As of this writing, Hill and Crew-Gee are logging South Pacific miles aboard China Moon, and—one can imagine—celebrating Hill's Blue Water Medal.
We at Sail-World raise our glasses to Hill and his impressive offshore accomplishments aboard his traditional-but-unconventional boats. While we don't plan to swap Bermuda rigs for junk rigs anytime soon, we applaud Hill's willingness to push the boundaries of the possible and prove that one doesn't need a massive war chest to explore the world's oceans and far-flung islands.
May the four winds blow you safely home.
David Schmidt
Sail-World.com North American Editor