June was rapidly approaching (and so was our daughter’s wedding) so we needed to keep moving North to settle in before Hurricane Season began (Insurance requires we be north of Cape Hatteras, NC from July 1-Nov 1). We were headed to Chestertown, MD, but there were lots of places to stop along the way to break up the trip. We left Hilton Head, SC at dawn…
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The sail from Ft. Pierce to St. Augustine (April 30th) was pretty uneventful. It’s a great town with lots of walking/biking paths, but like much of FL and along the East Coast, we are limited in our choice of anchorages and marinas because our mast is 75 ft. high and so we don’t fit under most of the bridges. We were headed to St. Augustine Municipal…
Continue reading ...We were back in CO for about 6 weeks to catch up with work, family, friends and more. Living on the boat is great, but it's also nice to come back home to beautiful Colorado for awhile. However, even when back in CO, the boat is never far from Anthony's thoughts. On this trip home, we created (mostly Anthony) winch covers and a wheel cover to…
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The 500+ NM sail from St. Simpson’s Bay to Cockburn Town (pronounced “Coburn”), on Grand Turk Island took about 54 hours. We arrived right around 5:00 pm on 2/7 (Monday) and anchored next to the cruise ship dock. We “hailed” the Customs office on the VHF about 6 times with no response. Finally, a local came on the VHF and told us where to go so…
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After 5 weeks back in Colorado for the holidays (and some football), we’re back on the boat. After all the activity from the ARC rally, St. Lucia was now very quiet. The marina was only about ½ full. It’s really sad, because many of the locals work on or with boats in some form or another… general boat maintenance, sail repair, engine maintenance, boat cleaning, taxi…
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Race Day dawned with blue skies, light winds and lots of anticipation. We were ready to get on with it! We left the dock at 10:30 and headed out so Paul could learn more about the sail configuration before the 12:30 start. He has lots of experience, especially with catamarans, but each boat is different so this was his “crash course” for Outremers. As the start…
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Aack! One week to go before we cross the Atlantic but at least the “to-do” list is getting smaller. As of today, we have cooked 12 meals (2 per day for 6 days) – lasagna, spaghetti, chicken stew, chili, jambalaya, and chicken tortilla soup. What a lot of shopping and chopping that took! 5 trips and we still don’t have any fresh stuff... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7TBS-PRz9I It’s a…
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When I last wrote, we had a long list of chores to “put the boat to bed” for our time back home: wash the boat, clean the inside, “pickle the watermaker” (add special chemicals to preserve the watermaker so the bacteria doesn’t grow on the membranes), set up desiccants/dehumidifiers to absorb humidity, fill up fuel tanks (again to keep bacteria from growing), clean out fridge/freezer, add…
Continue reading ...After a good night’s sleep, we set out to have a look at this area (La Linea) before moving over to Gibraltar. Why did we need to move at all you ask? Since we were waiting for a spinnaker, we wanted to be on the Gibraltar side to avoid the associated 20% European VAT (value added tax) charge, but the Gibraltar marina didn’t have room for…
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We left LaGrande Motte for an overnight sail (240NM) to Fornells, on the North side of Menorca in the Balearic islands and were accompanied along the way by our friends Anja and Patrick from Anam Cara. I had just become a little more comfortable with some French words and now I had to switch to Spanish…. We had a wonderful, but short, visit with them, including…
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