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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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

La Grande Motte: Now that we were safely back in La Grande Motte, we needed to clear in and get started on the “to-do list”.  Stephane was taking the month of August off – and he sorely needed the break- so Rafael was now our main contact.  Once he and Anthony reviewed the list of ~45 items, Rafael began coordinating the repairs and upgrades while we…

At the end of the last post, I promised some details about the passage. What a roller coaster ride it was! This video is from early in the trip and shows us sailing south around the heel of Italy with great wind! Once through the Straits of Messina, we had very little wind and had to motor-sail for about 36 hours. The wind started to fill…