We finally successfully made it out of Florida and all it’s thunderstorms. We sailed overnight to Charleston without any problems. The trip was a peaceful one, although this was in part because the weather was calm, meaning no wind and few waves. We had to motor the whole way. We were itching to get our sails out again, but this was not the time. Happily though, we had two exciting encounters. First, flying fish decided to attack our boat. Not sure why, or perhaps we were just in their way, but we ended up with 6 flying fish landing on our boat. Then, we had a good long ‘play’ with…

No, no you can’t. We tried, in two ways. We tried to get out of Florida before the storms started to worsen and we also tried to avoid a storm4 directly. Both failed. We are still slowly working our way north and out of Florida, but have had to wait for ‘weather windows’ that would allow us to sail without thunderstorms. Which means that we have tried to mostly stick to short day trips that get us into anchor before the storm hits. From Boca Raton we travelled up the ICW to West Palm Beach. It was a very nice, easy sail. We have to motor up the ICW, so…

We have spent the last week in Florida, in the Fort Lauderdale area. We knew we would be here a few days because we were meeting up with Kevin’s parents to collect the stuff we couldn’t bring on the plane to the boat at the start of the trip, including our much needed new batteries. We also had more boat parts that we were collecting that we had sent to a postal office here. Yes, more boat parts. As I have previously written, we completed a lot of the repair of our boat in Carriacou. Then, we started the process of refitting (or upgrading our boat) on Sint Maarten. However,…

We headed out from Puerto Rico on Saturday afternoon. We figured we were going to do 48 hours to Grand Turk before heading on to San Salvador, Bahamas. However, quickly after setting out on that first day we started to wonder if we might be better going a little further to Mayaguana, Bahamas. As that evening and the next day progressed, we realized that we weren’t going to make it to Grand Turk during daylight. Since it is surrounded by reefs, we didn’t want to make this approach and anchor in the dark. We would be arriving in the dark partly because we had left later than planned, but also…

So our schedule was adjusted slightly – again, a normal part of cruising – but we still made it to Puerto Rico! We left Sint Maarten one day later than planned because the day we were to leave Sint Maarten, the refridgerator guy finally showed up and then needed another day to get our main fridge working. However, we were excited that he was able to fix it at all! We had previously been told to just have it removed and buy a new one. But it is a built-in specialized for the boat so would be difficult to replace. He wasn’t able to get the freezer working (previously it…

We did it! We left Carriacou and got ourselves all the way to Sint Maarten. We had this as our first main destination because we have to have our furling system replaced. The furling system is responsible for furling up and holding the headsail. As I said previously, Kevin had some help to make it work temporarily, but we obviously want a more permanent solution. Especially if we are going to be doing some major passages – like the Atlantic. What an exilerating experience to finally be sailing on our boat. Although, our first day was actually motoring because we hadn’t gotten to the last few things we needed to…