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After I flew back to the mainland to have my computer looked at, we stayed several weeks out in the Abacos. Greg’s mom flew in for one week and rented a house in Hope Town. Vince secured a job at a local charter company and we waited another week in limbo to see if there might be enough work for Greg, but it didn’t pan out. Around that same time I was in negotiations to take on a new and massive project that would require me to work around the clock for the next six weeks. We decided it was time to head back to Florida.

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Louise arriving by boat.

Louise at the wheel!

“Our” house, to the left.

Charming Hope Town!

Another Hope Town house

Houses in Hope Town

Tahiti Beach, a long bike ride along the island.

Cool sea weed shapes on Tahiti Beach

Louise treats us to ice cream.

I got the blue one.

The special boats they make on Elbow Cay.

Hope Town Lighthouse doors

We got back on March 13th. It was a grueling return. A storm system was projected for the 14th, and since New York was getting hammered with snow, the weather gurus anticipated that yet another would follow on its heels. If we didn’t make it back ASAP we would be left on the West End of the Bahamas for 2-3 weeks. Word on the street was that the only marina on the West End was without internet, or had been a week prior. On the 10th I got the assignment, so getting stuck without internet on the West End was a risk I couldn’t take.

On March 7th we made it around The Whale, which is a point in the Abacos island chain where any vessel that draws more than three feet must exit the inner waters through a relatively narrow opening, and then return through an equally narrow opening. When winds are from the wrong direction these passages are treacherous, so we had been stuck waiting for a week in Treasure Cay, where a caravan of Dream Charter boats piled high with college kids on Spring Break had decided to hang out and torture us old folks with their late-night drunken dinghy  rides. Under better conditions I might not have minded since Treasure Cay’s beach is reputedly one of the best in the world… but not when it’s blowing 30-40 knots!

We knew we had to hurry to make our weather window to get back across the Gulf Stream but we hated having to rush through this area of the Abacos, which is rumored to have great snorkeling, so we plotted a course after the Whale that allowed for quick stops several days in a row.

Greg with his pig friend on No Name

En route to Turtle Key we diverted to No Name Cay where Greg had his picture taken with the wild pigs. Then we sailed wing-on-wing (my favorite sail configuration) right up to the harbor entrance and stayed overnight at Black Sound Marina (Greg chose it because he liked the name) where the facilities were minimal but we paid less than anywhere else on our trip. We left around 9 a.m. the next morning and stopped for snorkeling at Nunjack Cay where nurse sharks and rays crowd the shallow waters along the beach because they get fed by tourists. I had hoped we’d beat the crowds but the Dream Charter boats got there first and several other tourist boats came in after us. I suppose that’s the state of wildlife in the year 2017. As predictable and organized as the dolphin routine at Sea World. It made me feel rather jaded.

That night we stayed at Powell Cay, which I enjoyed a lot more. We took a short trail across the island to the eastern side and walked for an hour or so along the beach, collecting empty conch and sea biscuit shells (a kind of inflated sand dollar). A barge had sunk in the harbor and just before sunset we swam to it and checked out the fish, and startled a super-long-tailed ray. Powell Cay is for sale, by the way, if you’re in the market for an island and have seven mil.

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West side of Powell

Shell hunting on Powell

Water clarity at Powell

Moon over Powell

Blowing the conch horn

Sweet potatoes

The next day after we pulled up anchor we went snorkeling off the northern end and Greg caught a big lobster that I served up for a sushi lunch with these amazing Japanese-style sweet potatoes. Then we sailed on to Allans-Pensacola, a tiny, uninhabited, y-shaped low-lying spit of land near the end of the northern Abacos. It was so quiet. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to dilly-dally. I wish we’d had time to stop at Spanish Cay or go north to even more rarely visited islands.

That day I wrote only one word in my notepad: “lentils”. It took me a minute just now to remember why. We had run out of ice several days prior and were living on lentils and rice. Maybe in July, during my low season, I’ll post some recipes and a series of linked recipes along the lines of “How to eat lentils and rice for three days without it feeling like you’re eating lentils and rice for three days”. I guess it’s easy to romanticize the trip now because here we are, surrounded by water so brown you can’t see down more than a foot – water I would only get in if you paid me and then with the guarantee of an immediate shower. But not everything about it was glamorous.

Lentils, day 1, with Chris’s cranberry ketchup.

  The next day we sailed with the spinnaker up for the second time. The first time had been on our Gulf Stream crossing, just prior to the squall, and because it kinda jinxed us we looked at it with suspicion, but Greg hauled it out set it up and it dramatically increased our speed in the light winds. We passed a ton of boats that day going in the opposite direction. They gave us the thumb’s up and one even radioed to say how good we looked with the shoot up. Greg was on cloud 9. But it was a long day with light and variable winds and we barely made it to Great Sale Cay before dark.

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Leaving Allans-Pensacola.

Under spinnaker

Lentils, day 2, soup and Persian rice salad

This was yet another island where I read there was good snorkeling, but we just didn’t have time to check it out. We tucked in shortly after dinner and woke up accidentally even earlier than planned because of the time change, and we left before 5 a.m. It started off hopeful enough. For a while we had wind and the moon lit up the water until an incredible sunrise split out over the horizon, with no land in sight.

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Sailing by moonlight

Greg waking up

Sunrise at sea

We stopped at Mangrove Cay for lunch and the wind died. Afraid that it might not pipe up again, we pulled down the sails and motored. And motored. For almost twenty-four hours. I hate motoring. Though for once I was glad we were under power when, as we neared the edge of the Bahamas – yep, you guessed it – we hit a squall. This time we were prepared. Greg veered off-course to avoid the center of it. I went down below and took a little video that shows how calm it was and then how, when the squall hit, we actually heeled over even though we had no sails up. Here are some (we think) rather amusing short clips of the experience. It doesn’t look All That!

The wind was behind us as we crossed the Gulf Stream – what little wind there was – so it blew diesel smoke into the cockpit. It was nauseating. I knew it would be a bit stressful to sail across the Gulf Stream at night. A massive Disney cruise ship passed a quarter mile or so behind us. Other large vessels would appear as pinpricks of light on the horizon and then increase in size, sometimes two or three at a time, and we’d have to watch all of them as they appeared to bear down on us from different directions.

When we entered the Port Lucie Inlet, I pulled up a photo of us from the day we left, several months prior. We looked so excited and happy. Now, exhausted and less-than-happy to be back, I took another shot. (We actually don’t look so bad! Though maybe a bit cold…)

We made it!

This is the first day since we got back that I woke up without work to do (though I received a few emails as I wrote this), so I decided an update was long overdue. Especially as a recently received an email from someone asking if we were back… We are, and we are actually still living on the boat. We got a slip outside our old apartment and we’re saving up for a house. We’ve decided this is as good a place as any to drop anchor – especially with the islands and the ocean at our door.

If you’ve followed along on our journey, I hope you found it entertaining. If you’re a visual type, you might find this interesting. It’s a map Greg made by exporting our GPS tracking… complete with amusing notations. We had a blast and can’t wait to go out again. Maybe next time to the Exumas, or Cuba. But definitely not without refrigeration.

On that note, I’ll leave you with this link to my sailing playlist on Spotify. It’s how I get through those days when, as Melville’s Ishmael said, I start feeling the need to knock the hats off people’s heads – because everything in me says it’s high time I put out to sea.

  The home stretch After I flew back to the mainland to have my computer looked at, we stayed several weeks out in the Abacos.

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Stranger Things

The day we left Nassau my computer suffered “an electrical event” – at least, that’s what the guy at the Apple store said. “You mean like in Stranger Things?” I asked him, assuming that an uber geek like him would also picture the flashing multi-colored Christmas lights from the Netflix hit series. He was not amused. In trying to diagnose the problem Greg had taken the back of the machine off and…

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Read or not, here we come

Read or not, here we come

Although skipping ahead means leaving out multiple islands, anchorages and sails, I’m going to bring this tale up to the present date. We are now in a small and sheltered harbor called Treasure Cay. The facilities here, from the marina to the hardware store, are all operated by one resort and the draw is a 5-mile-long beach on the opposite side of the peninsula from where we sit. It’s blowing 20…

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Our last anchorage before Nassau was nestled between two privately-owned cays, and although we knew we could not go ashore, we couldn’t have been more pleased as we pulled up and dropped anchor. The water was a dusty blue and, for a while, placid as a pond. Though we were hoping to have it to ourselves, and the books all said it was barely big enough for one boat, a catamaran had already tucked up tight in the gap to weather the winds predicted for the next day. We didn’t want to make them feel cramped, so we anchored further out between the islands where we were a bit more exposed. There was not much snorkeling to speak of, but we swam around in that crystal-clear 6-foot deep water, happy in our own little paradise. I found two conch – one we decided was underage and threw back and the other we made into conch ceviche.

When we left Great Harbour we knew we there would be no place to stock up on ice again until Nassau, so we calculatedly used up our cheeses and meats until there was no longer anything to keep cold. Then I cleaned out the icebox and, sadly, ended up throwing a large wheel of water-soaked Camembert overboard. As I did a two-foot remora popped its head out from under the boat and nabbed it. I called the rest of the crew to come look. Remoras are those fish that attach themselves to the underbellies of sharks and live off the stray bits. We could only imagine the size of the shark it gave up on in order to follow us. I went back inside and grabbed a bag of cardamom bun dough that never made it to the grill and we watched him leave the shadow of the boat a second time to snap it up.

As we sat in the cockpit, sunbathing and enjoying our view of paradise, someone started swimming over from the catamaran.

“Well there’s an extrovert,” said Chris.

He turned out to be from Alaska, so he and Chris and Gabe threw around a bunch of names of places where they knew people, or spent time. Then we all introduced ourselves. Vince, a former Air Force pilot, was also heading for Nassau, along with his father, aboard a 35-foot Seawind catamaran named Flight Plan (which is how we clued into the pilot thing). He invited us all to come over later for cocktails and to discuss the weather, routes and anchorages. From that day on you could say we became Flight Plan’s remora: we have rarely been further than a few miles away, and he has become our benefactor in more ways than one. 

Our new friends on Flight Plan, anchored across the way.

One of our guidebooks says, “Sometimes an overnight stay in the Berrys becomes unexpectedly extended while you wait out an easterly blow. That always produces a tumultuous sea between Chub and Nassau, owing to the convergence of currents from the Northeast and Northwest Providence Channels and from the Tongue of the Ocean.”

Almost as scripted, the wind picked up and howled all night long. When we woke it had settled down only to 20 knots. If we’d had time to kill, we might not have made the passage. Generally, we don’t like to see more than 20 knots on the high end, especially since the squall. If the predicted high end is 20, then gusts above that are always a possibility. And every book and every cruiser we’ve ever met has warned us that it’s these times, when you have to go, that you get into trouble.

But sail we must. Chris and Gabe had a flight out of Nassau the next day around noon and we had about 35 miles to make – a full day even at a clip. We left the anchorage that morning about 30 minutes before Flight Plan (though they arrived at least an hour earlier) and throughout the day we radioed back and forth, taking pictures of each other’s vessels and getting dockage info.

They were not the best conditions we’ve sailed in, but neither were they the worst. We gauged the seas to be about 4-6 feet on average, tall enough that Flight Plan’s hull regularly disappeared beneath the waves.

I was surprised to see Chris sitting white-knuckled beside the helm, and Gabe went below to lie down for most of the ride. With the wind at our back and two converging seas, steering was a challenge. If we weren’t trying to keep from heading dead downwind to avoid flogging the sails, we were fighting powerful following seas that pushed us first one direction and then another.

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Chris and Gabe, hanging on.

Me, with a wall of sea behind me.

Flight plan, sailing by.

Flight Plan, leaving us in the dust.

“I’m having fun,” I told Chris about a third of the way there, after which she relaxed a bit.

We’d had two days of easy motoring and one day of light sailing as we’d threaded our way through the Berrys and we hadn’t seen seas like this since our tumultuous entrance to Bimini on Day 2. It hit me yet again how this trip was way beyond sailing 101; this was boot camp. As we neared Nassau one or two nine-footers churned under us and when they came out on the other side, it was like staring down from the roof of a building. Chris and I looked at each other, wide-eyed.

I drove the boat into Nassau harbor, just as a massive mail boat plowed out from behind the break wall. Along the starboard side three gargantuan cruise ships were berthed. I had intended to dock the boat, too, but as I turned into the marina, I got flustered, unsure of which slip we were supposed to turn into and scared to death lest I have to back up. But just as I handed the wheel over to Greg I saw Flight Plan and Greg drove the boat in beside them, into the same double-wide slip and Vince and his dad stepped out to help with the lines. Little did we know as we prepared to say our good-byes to Chris and Gabe, we were simultaneously embarking on a new friendship.

Half of the crew of SV Lemonade, departing at Nassau Harbour.

Convergence  Our last anchorage before Nassau was nestled between two privately-owned cays, and although we knew we could not go ashore, we couldn't have been more pleased as we pulled up and dropped anchor.

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From Great Harbour our plan was to head south toward Nassau over a six-day period, stopping at a few secluded anchorages along the way.

If we had halcyon days during the trip, they were spent hopping down the Berry Island chain. “For those who seek unadulterated isolation, the small unfrequented anchorages behind the cays offer a great appeal for those seeking such a unique location,” says one of our guides.

Our first stop was in small bay protected on all sides by a necklace of limestone islands – White’s Cay, Devil’s Cay and Hoffman’s Cay. (Even now, a month later, Greg says this was the best snorkeling of the trip.) At one point we were surrounded by 8-10 eagle rays. If you haven’t seen one, google image search them. These crazy, bat-like creatures seem to peer at you as they glide by, and Greg swears they were circling him to get a better look. We were not successful in getting around to see the blue hole on Hoffman’s Cay, because we lacked a powerful enough dinghy to get through the strong currents at the southern end, but Greg’s newfound love of spearfishing paid off. He caught a 5-6 lb. margate on the reef and I pan-seared it and served it with rice and red curry for lunch.

When we dropped anchor there were only two other boats. By sunset there were four. The next day as we were leaving six other vessels showed up, our friends from Montreal among them.  We waved good-bye as we headed off to the next anchorage – which we had entirely to ourselves.

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Looking off toward Devil’s? Hoffman’s?

Surrounded by islands.

Sunset at Little Harbour.

Alone at Little Harbour There is a note about Little Harbor in our guidebook from 1974. It says: “Ten years earlier when we visited Little Harbor, it could have been called a settlement, for there were several families with dogs and poultry living there, and even some industry – in the form of a fishing shack being crafted by an old gentleman. He worked from a pile of gnarled tree shapes which, if you knew what you were looking for and he did, would saw into rough but sound knees and frames. He is gone now, and so is old Mrs. Lightbourne, the only other inhabitant, when we were there in 1974, was in the hospital in Nassau.”

Today Little Harbour is known among sailors who travel in the Berrys for Flo’s Conch Bar. It’s possible that Flo is old Mrs. Lightbourne’s namesake and that the shacks here were crafted by that old gentleman. The more recent Dozier’s guide says that this settlement is now run by Chester Darville, “virtually a one-man enterprise, along with Lovely, his helper, they comprise the entire population of Little Harbour… Flo’s Place, is a quintessential island bar and restaurant. Mountains of conch shells line the shore at the Tiki Hut dock, and a menagerie of chickens, geese, peacocks, sheep, goats, dogs and cats greet you on the meandering pathways around the colorful bar and restaurant up on the hilltop.”

We had been trying to hail Flo’s Conch Bar on the radio for the last 24 hours, as we were told to do, but had gotten nowhere. After we dropped anchor Greg and I took the dinghy in to see what was up. We found the scene to be a strange recasting of the one in our yellowed guide from the 70s. The place had an air of languor, perhaps from the pink light of the setting sun. Dogs barked and chickens gawked at our arrival, but Flo’s was buttoned up tight and if Chester or Lovely were anywhere around, they were lying low. Greg and I got back in the dinghy and on the way back we meandered around Lizard Cay in water that was barely deeper than our 6-inch draft – we had to lift the engine up and I had to sit on the bow to make it though.

We had anchored in what the old book calls “the vestibule” beside Cabbage Cay and, just like our fore-sailors, “we lay to a strong current and rocked to a substantial swell that came in, only slightly moderated, over the bar.” The swell was so strong that the boat changed and faced different directions at least three times during the night. At one point Chris went on deck after dinner and we heard her exclaim, panicky, “Gabe, your [$$$$] pack raft is gone!” There was no way we would ever find an inflatable like that with those currents and an outgoing tide. Gabe scrambled topside, equally panicked, to discover that because of the horsey current, the raft had gotten stuck on the other side of the boat.

The next morning we headed south again and as we honed in on Nassau, and the conclusion of our time together, I had this feeling that it was happening too fast. All that time spent stationary in Bimini and then Great Harbour and now we were speeding irrevocably through these charmed cays. I wanted to stop, freeze time, freeze the wind, and just explore and play. And we did get a chance to do this, for a half-day, when we arrived at our next anchorage between two islands called Bird Cay and Whale Cay.

Splendor: Our favorite pastime while waiting out the storm.

Unadulterated Isolation From Great Harbour our plan was to head south toward Nassau over a six-day period, stopping at a few secluded anchorages along the way.

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If, like me, you are attracted to the melancholy of places that time has left in its wake, then you might like Great Harbour. Looking back, halted there as we were by the winds, it feels like we were trapped in a kind of still life, cast in the mellow glow of a 70s postcard. We made friends with a young couple from Montreal and toured their boat. We walked across the island to a long, white beach where Chris went skinny-dipping. We borrowed some old bikes from the marina and went looking for ice cream. And on our last day we went up the hill to explore the ruins of the clubhouse. Our Dozier’s 2014 Waterway Guide says:

“A short walk farther east and up the hill brings visitors to the ghostly remains of the Old Sugar Loaf Lodge, built by the Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford. It was their private playground for friends like Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley MacLaine, Lauren Bacall and Angie Dickinson.”

It’s hard to imagine what combination of hard times and bad weather this island must have seen to reduce this clearly once incredible structure to bare bones concrete and stone. Only some ductwork, the stoves in the kitchen and some electrical panels seem to have escaped the hands of scavengers. Though when we wandered up along a concrete walkway suspended over the road, which appeared to have been a lighted path to the clubhouse from the east, we found the custom-wrought stainless steel railing still in tact.

“Musing over what is left of the incredible stone lodge structure,” the Dozier’s guide continues, “one can only hope that someday it will be brought back to its former grandeur.”

The next day we motored four hours around past several islands now owned by cruise ships, and anchored in the sandy bay on Great Harbour’s east side. In the evening we went to shore and had a delicious dinner at a Bahamian-chic boutique hotel pushed back in the dunes called the CarriEarl, which is run by an English couple in their 60s. Then we got back into our dinghy and Chris and Gabe got into their kayaks and we rowed back to Lemonade under a moonless and star-studded sky. The water below us, when you shown your flashlight into it, was only about 6-8 feet deep and the pale blue-green of a swimming pool.

Although I am attracted by the melancholy of forgotten places, part of that attraction is in the potential I see to revive them back to their former grandeur, as it were. “I could see us doing this one day,” I told Greg. “After we’ve done our fair share of adventuring, maybe in our fifties or sixties, we could retire to an island like this, and own a place like that. Maybe even get sponsoring from the Sinatra Foundation to rebuild the lodge. If we hosted musicians, say. We’d make the place an irresistible destination because of the food and music…”

“Anything is possible,” Greg responded. “Make it happen.”

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Golden days If, like me, you are attracted to the melancholy of places that time has left in its wake, then you might like Great Harbour.

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We spent our first day in the northern Berry Islands sleeping, mostly. But late in the day we rallied. Chris and Gabe inflated their pack rafts and we put the engine on the dinghy and trolled over to a limestone rock rising out of the sea bed about 50 yards off. As we pulled up we scared a 4-foot nurse shark scurried away. Greg found a bunch of under-size lobster along the escarpment. You shouldn’t take them if their tails are under three inches long, so we abstained. We tried looking along the shelf on the main island after that, but all we found was a large ray hiding in a sandy patch between swaths of sea grass.

Though lobsterless, as we returned to Lemonade that night, Greg turned to me and said, “I was made for this kind of life.”

The next day, after we’d fully recovered from our night crossing and were beginning to make plans to mosey on down the island chain, we took the dinghy into the harbor to do laundry and use the Wi-Fi.

We have several guidebooks on board – a hardback cruising guide to the Caribbean and the Bahamas from 1976 with a literary flair to the writing has provided interesting insights into the way things used to be; a 2003 Rough Guide is also now quite dated but offers interesting tips from a non-cruiser’s perspective; and a 2014 Dozier’s Waterway Guide which offers the most up-to-date info.

These notes are from the 1976 book:

“A fine, modern marina has been hacked out of the sand and limestone. The entrance from the east is through a man-made cut spanned by a man propelled swing bridge. We understand that it once saw service on the Intracoastal Waterway near Dania, Florida. A more secure spot in a hurricane would be hard to find; at all other times the setting is restful, gracious, and surrounded by the usual resort amenities, including an 18-hole golf course, a clubhouse high on a hill, and villas and condominiums galore. To get to this mecca of instant leisure and luxury…”

First off, the swing bridge is no more. And although Chris and Gabe thought they saw grandeur when they scouted it out in the dark, on our first night here, in the harsh light of day it’s obvious that time has taken its toll on “this mecca of instant leisure and luxury,” from the modern marina to the clubhouse. Though the dockmaster’s office is still standing, the bathrooms are kept clean and the Wi-Fi works well, most of the buildings along the docks look like they were done-in by hurricanes and then humans years ago.

When I first climbed up the ladder to the dock two young men were sitting in mock-Adirondack chairs in front of the harbormaster’s office, coolly observing us behind mirrored pilot’s glasses, with waterproof packs at their feet. One was tall, and nicely dressed in long pants with a blue pin-striped shirt rolled up to the elbows. The other wore khaki shorts and a button-down. For no obvious reason I immediately pegged them as gay. Greg and I immediately started to make conversation with them and quickly learned that their reserve may have been attributable to the fact that they had just completed a crossing of over 140+ miles from Lake Worth.

Only minutes later Paul, the Canadian we’d met on our first night anchored in Bimini, came rolling down the dock like a bowling ball, and exploded into the conversation with all the pent-up energy of someone who’s been at sea for several days. He, too, had just arrived.

Chris befriended a young couple from Montreal who were cruising with their toddler.

“Do you guys have a slip?” he asked.

We told him where we were anchored outside the harbor.

“You know we are supposed to get gusts up to 50 knots on Sunday?”

No, we did not. And we had planned to go around the island on Saturday and anchor in an exposed bay.

Yet again the wind halted our forward momentum. We arranged for a slip and the next day we brought the boat into the harbor. Chris and Gabe hiked the island while I worked and Greg investigated the weather and planned our course of action. That night the marina organized a dinner and all of the cruisers participated. The older retired couples mulled around one end of the tent, while a cluster of us in our 30s and 40s gathered at the corner closest to the bar.

The two guys we’d met on the dock joined us at our table. The tall one turned out to be Latvian, and said he’d been sailing all his life. The other, a Ducati mechanic from the Hudson Valley, had only recently gotten the bug. I asked him about his first long trip, and he told us about a delivery that went haywire when they lost their engine, and all power, and had no GPS nor charts to get them up to Long Island in the dark. I looked at him aghast.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “It was horrible. But at some point in the middle of it all, I realized I’d never felt so alive.”

“I know what you mean,” Chris said, and she told him about getting caught in the squall. “It was fun. You know, after we knew we’d live through it.”

Periodically throughout the trip it has struck me that we really threw Chris and Gabe in the deep end. It was at least a year after I learned to sail before I sailed an all-nighter. Or crossed the Gulf Stream – and that was in a 127-foot boat.

I can’t imagine many people who would spring back from the squall like they did, hang in there for almost two weeks waiting for the winds to change and then sail non-stop through the night without autopilot. You are either suited to the sailing life, like the mechanic, or you’re better off not tempting fate.

And it’s not just the adrenaline-charged moments that separate sailor from landlubber. As my mother responded to one of my early posts, “Let’s see how you feel after a month of living with four people in that floating sardine can!”

Is it tough living with four people in such a small space? Sure. The boat is twice as dirty, from tracked-in sand, and hair and crumbs, and we go through water twice as fast. But it is also twice as fun. We have spent most days fishing, hunting for lobsters, snorkeling and kayaking, and we laugh nonstop. Like Greg, I too was made for this life. And it is hard to imagine having chosen better people both to sail with and be marooned with, yet again.

Oh – and what do you do when you’re stranded on a Bahamian island? Make lots of yummy things to eat…

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Another stand-out: breakfast pizza!

Close-up: Breakfast pizza w/ figs, bacon, cream cheese and honey

The winds kept the fish at bay, so it’s a good thing Chris & Gabe brought Alaskan salmon!

We made sushi two ways: one with mayo and crispy onions on top; and one with wasabi cream cheese and caviar!

Muffuletta sandwiches!

Marooned We spent our first day in the northern Berry Islands sleeping, mostly. But late in the day we rallied.

[coleruth]

So it did not take us 16 hours to get to the Berry Islands. It took almost twice that; 32 hours exactly from the time we pulled up anchor in Nixon’s Harbor but 30 if you figure that we really left from the Bimini Sands Marina where we stopped to get water and ice.

When I uploaded my last post, minutes before my cell coverage died and land disappeared from sight, it was sunny and the winds were light. We ate soba noodle salad that Chris and Gabe had prepped that morning and chilled in the cockpit playing Scrabble.

Then we discussed how the night would proceed, and divided up into watches. I’d never done it this way, but we staggered the watches so that no one would be alone for longer than an hour. The first half hour and the last half hour of each two-hour watch would overlap with the previous and next watch. We did this because, as newbies, Chris and Gabe wanted less time alone. In retrospect I wish we’d paired up in three-hour watches of two people each because the wind piped up around sunset, along with the seas. We were heeled over for the next twelve hours – leaving really only two berths on the low side of the boat on which to sleep.

With the boat on a decent heel, Chris made rice and beans for dinner. I watched on, impressed. She even managed to cut onions amidst the turbulence. Around sunset I took a bunch of pictures and this 3D video.

Then we ate in the dark, then I went below to try and get some sleep. The boat lurched forward and back and swayed side to side, as it does when forging ahead into the wind and seas, and every time a wave smacked against the bow I felt like someone was beating me with a cudgel. I tried to imagine how this would feel once Greg was in the berth with me – because the heel of the boat would certainly force him down on me, unless I tried to sleep on the high side, in which case I would be on top of him. It would be like sleeping in a washing machine with a bowling balI, complete with water, as a stream of seawater came in from the anchor locker whenever a wave came over the bow. What’s more, I could hear every word of conversation from the cockpit. All I could think was: this is not going to work.

About an hour before my watch started I went up into the cockpit in a tizzy.

“We have to anchor at Mackie Shoal,” I declared. Mackie Shoal is a shallow-er area in the middle of the bank where many people stop and wait out the night. The French-Canadians in the anchorage in Bimini told us that was their plan. We decided instead to try and make it to the Berry Islands as quickly as possible, and during daylight hours instead of spending two whole days sailing and risk arriving at night. I no longer liked this plan.

“We can’t anchor at Mackie Shoal,” said Greg. “It’s way off our course. By the time we get there it would be 2 am and then we’d be so tired we would sleep in and then we wouldn’t make it to Great Harbor by nightfall.”

As a rule, we don’t enter strange ports at night.

I knew he was right, but I wanted to sleep and knowing that I couldn’t sleep in our berth, I knew I had a long, sleepless night ahead.

I pulled on my foul weather gear and climbed into the cockpit. I might as well be topside.

Chris and Gabe both went below leaving Greg and I alone in the cockpit for a few hours. Several ships came near us in the night, and Greg shown his light on the sails.

We were bashing into wind and seas, and making only 2 knots when the autopilot quit. Greg figured we must have run out of battery power so we decided to start the engine in order to charge the batteries, and we rolled up the genoa.

We motored for a while, until Greg spotted a red light on the engine control panel that had never been it before. It was the alternator. This was not good. We shut down the engine. We would have to sail. What’s more, the alternator was key to battery supply – which was key to running the autopilot… which we had assured Chris and Gabe that they could rely on to steer the boat, since they still hadn’t really learned to sail.

Later we learned that Chris was a bit nervous about being alone on watch, and Gabe had reassured her, “All you have to do is make sure the autopilot is on course.”

When we turned off the engine, we had only the mainsail out.

“Guess what our speed is?” Greg asked and then answered his own question: “Zero.”

Because of the oncoming seas, we were completely stalled.

So we unrolled the genoa, but only part-way, to a #1 jib, so we wouldn’t find ourselves over-canvassed in the night.

Shortly after this, a bright pink oblong shape appeared on the horizon to port. It looked vaguely like a cruise ship. We watched it, waiting to see if it was getting closer or crossing ahead of us. Greg once again shined his dive light upward to illuminate the sails.

“We should alter course,” he said.

We tacked, and kept watching the strangely shaped vessel until it morphed again and then lifted up off the horizon. It was the moon.

We had a pretty good laugh about this. I wonder how many sailors before us have been fooled by a moonrise.

Greg went down to “sleep” around 11 pm and I stood watch until Gabe came up at midnight.

I told him that the autopilot was down. He seemed a bit nervous but sat down beside me in the cockpit and watched. I told him how I was trying to steer as close to the wind as possible, how to watch the sails to make sure they were full, how to listen for when they flogged, and how to feel the acceleration when he found the sweet spot. Then I handed him the wheel. He erred a few times to one side or the other and I simply pointed, indicating that he should head up or fall off. Within minutes he seemed to get it. I curled up in the cockpit and dozed off to sleep. Several times I awoke to the sound of the sails, or perhaps to something I felt, and I would look up, look at Gabe, and see he was already correcting.

On the long slog down to Key Biscayne, the day Greg and I beat into the wind all day, I remember saying something to him about how I thought that for all its exhaustion, sailing to windward was one of the easiest tacks to learn on. Gabe was living proof. An hour and a half later Chris came up and I overhead Gabe giving her the same advice I’d given him. I didn’t intervene, but sat back and watched Chris take to the helm as naturally and instinctively as Gabe had. It’s hard to explain how rewarding this is to the non-sailor, but there is magic in it. It’s a beautiful thing when you feel for the first time that you’ve harnessed the wind, and when you see someone else get it for the first time, it’s like sharing a secret understanding of how the world works.

Greg came on watch late at 3:30 am, and I immediately headed below to get warm. I was so tired by this point that I slept right through the bucking bronco ride, until my alarm went off at 4:30 am for my next watch.

Gabe and I watched the day break over the ocean and once everyone was up we made coffee, ate leftover rice and beans for breakfast and spent the day sailing along in pleasant winds under a hot sun. I slept some more in the cockpit and Chris and I played Scrabble.

Not long before we arrived at Great Harbor, the winds completely died. I went below and made hot dog buns, and just after we anchored we put them on the grill. We ate what Chris and Gabe allege to be the best hot dogs of their lives, then we all fell asleep with the dishes still in the sink.

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Greg steering with his feet around lunch.

Watch schedule

The seas were the choppiest right around sunrise, as we briefly sailed over deep water.

Morning has broken.

Greg taking a swim to unwrap the dinghy painter from around the prop. (Note: he is touching bottom.)

That’s bottom you’re seeing.

Greg reading the charts before anchoring at Great Harbor.

I see a bad bun rising.

Chris eating the best hot dog of her life.

Sunset at Great Harbor, calm and at anchor.

Sunset at sea on our night sail.

Wishful Thinking So it did not take us 16 hours to get to the Berry Islands. It took almost twice that; 32 hours exactly from the time we pulled up anchor in Nixon’s Harbor but 30 if you figure that we really left from the Bimini Sands Marina where we stopped to get water and ice.

[coleruth]

Sailing east

For almost a week the north winds howled. When the wind blows at 30 knots it seems to follow you everywhere, whipping at your clothes and hair. Wind like that gets in your head; you have to turn the volume up a little higher than usual on the radio and raise your voice to be heard. Gabe told us about friends of theirs who live in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, where 50-knot winds are a daily…

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[coleruth]

Storms swept through the northeast this week keeping people grounded on airport runways and trapping othere’s indoors. We learned that every state in the nation but Florida reported snow. The forecast predicted 25-35 mph winds from Friday night through Tuesday in the Bahamas, so on Friday morning we headed up island to Paradise Beach. The north end of the island has been developed by Hilton into “Resort World,” and the beach Chris’ 2003 guidebook said was great for snorkeling now has a fancy-looking restaurant with giant speakers that pipe out music so loud that you can hear it when your head is underwater even half a mile out.

Later that night the winds ratcheted up as predicted. I had already woken up several times to secure loose lines that were thwapping against the mast, but at 5 am Greg looked out the portholes and then sprang into action. The Frenchman’s boat, the only one spinning on one anchor instead of two, was being dragged backward by the wind. It was only a matter of time before it slipped right back into us.

We had already discussed moving to the Big Game Club, the marina where we’d seen the bull sharks. At least for a few days, until the winds tapered off. We just hadn’t planned to do it in the dark.

Within minutes all four of us were on deck. We once again brought up the anchors like pros, but before we could get the boat secured in the slip, the sky broke open and rain pelleted down on us. Greg drove the boat into the slip and we hopped around securing the docklines and fenders, extremely careful not to slip lest we end up in shark-infested waters.

Then we all stripped down out of our drenched clothing, piling it in a bucket beside the main hatch, and went back to sleep.

When we woke again, after hours of rain, Chris went into town to buy ice and found the streets swollen shin-high with wAyer.

“Unbelievable,” she said when she arrived back at the boat. “Already on this vacation we’ve experienced a squall, anchoring in the driving rain and record flooding.” That night we would be able to add “fire” to the list. As Gabe was making dinner, I sat in the cockpit washing out plastic ziplock bags in a giant bucket of soapy water and absent-mindedly instructed him on how to fill the alcohol stove with fuel. Next thing I knew Chris let out a shriek, “We need to cover it with something!”

I looked down into the boat and saw flames coming out of the back of the stove. I grabbed the bucket, plastic bags and all, and dumped it on the burners. One small flame survived, so I dropped to the deck, loaded up another bucketful and dumped it on the stove too. I was trembling. It woudn’t take much for Lemonade to go up in smoke.

It turned out that no one had shown Gabe how to remove the blue pads that keep the fuel from evaporating out of the burners, so he’d poured the fuel through the top. It had then slid down the blue pads and off the back of the stove. When he thought he was lighting the burner, he was actually lighting uncontained fuel. To be fair, I had done something similar a few days before he and Chris arrived. I had removed the blue pads but poured the fuel down into the burner reservoir while it was still lit. The flame jumped to the cup in my hand and sent me into a panic.

In the end there was no damage. I spent the evening mopping up saltwater from around all of the utensils stored under the stove, we all learned a bit more about the systems on the boat, and we ended up grilling the cauliflower and potatoes – which were delicious.

Saturday was also the day we gor word from the new neighbors back in Florida that our apartment manager was taken off life support. Throughout all our adventures, he has never been far from our thoughts. That night we raided a toast to him, and to life.

Later, when I walked up to take a shower at the Big Game Club, the three-sided boat glided out from une’er a dock. Mystified at how it could have weathered the storm, I watched it weave a meandering course through the slips and out toward the channel and the open sea.

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Bathing beauties.

Snorkeling in deep water.

See those islands behind me? Greg headed off that way.

Sunset at the anchorage.

Lemonade in the slip.

Palm trees in the wind.

Bull shark #1

Chris and Gabe brought salmon from Alaska that they canned themselves and made ceviche for lunch.

Fire and Flood Storms swept through the northeast this week keeping people grounded on airport runways and trapping othere's indoors. 

[coleruth]

For almost a week now we’ve been holed up in Bimini, the closest Bahamian island to the U.S. Feeling a bit battered from the crossing, we decided to rest instead of sailing east, deeper into the Bahamas – even though we knew that we had two days before heavy winds in the forecast would prevent us from leaving for a while.

When we pulled up into the anchorage that first night, we noticed that all of the boats but one had set two anchors out, Bahamian-style. I’ve anchored with a stern and a bow anchor before in the Channel Islands off California, but here you take two anchors that lead off the bow, drop one and let out more scope (chain and rope) than you need. Next you take the other anchor, walk it back outside the rigging to the stern and drop it off the stern. Then you pull in on the bow anchor until you’re snugly positioned between the two.

None of us had ever anchored this way yet we almost pulled it off seamlessly… except that the boat swung during the anchoring process and the anchor rode (aka., line) became caught on the propeller. Within seconds Greg jumped into the water in order to free it.

“You guys make it look easy,” hollered a man from a neighboring boat. He came over to talk later and we learned that he had also been waiting in No Name Harbor, and had sailed over single-handed in the night. He had been at anchor when the squall had blown through, and that it was epic. Imagine: it was epic at anchor.

Pretty proud of my biscuits. Photo credit: Gabe Travis

Since we did not make it in before the custom’s office closed, we were boat-bound that night. The next morning I made biscuits on the grill and Chris made sausage gravy. As we ate breakfast in the sunny cockpit a derelict three-sided boat glided through our anchorage, filled with plastic trash and old coconuts. As if guided by a ghost captain, the current carried it by all the other anchored boats without hitting them, and it continued on up the coast. It felt like a comment on our having survived the storm, but it might have been a harbinger of things to come.

After breakfast we pulled up both anchors and motored over to the closest dock so that customs officers could board us if they so chose. While we waited the dockmaster came to check on us.

“Dee sharks are out,” he told us.

“What sharks?” I asked.

“Dee bull sharks, mon,” he said. “Two of dem. If you dangle dee rope in dee water, dey will come.”

Chris promptly grabbed a dockline and dangled it in the clear blue water. Two eight-foot bull sharks swam out from under the shadow of the docks. Chris and Gabe and I exchanged a look that said: we will not be snorkeling here.

After clearing customs we returned to our anchorage, this time orchestrating the local anchoring technique like pros. Then we spent the rest of the day exploring the island. We hung out for a while at Stuart’s eating conch salad and drinking Bahamian beer. We walked along a stretch of beach bordered by white sand beaches and warm ocean waters on one side – and on the other side by the backyards of dilapidated houses flanked by discarded objects, like an old toilet, trash, construction and fishing debris. Ever the dumpster diver, Greg found two perfect conch shells and a plastic crate.

We walked the two long streets of Alice Town, the Queen’s and the King’s Highway, until we found the library where Chris’ 2003 guidebook said we could find Hemingway’s manuscripts. The library looked more like a crypt. Then we found the remains of the Compleat Angler Hotel where Hemingway had written To Have and Have Not. It was destroyed by a fire in 2006.

All of Alice Town actually looks like it’s seen better days, whether because of the hurricane this fall or perhaps a series of stormy years, with lots of boarded up windows and closed shops. Or perhaps it’s just low season, because the place felt like a ghost town with so few tourists that we even ran into the single-handed sailor, Paul, on the far shore.

“You’re the only person I know here and we’ve already bumped into you,” Chris said to him.

Back on the boat I made corned beef with cabbage and potatoes and carrots, to which we added the end of the sour cream and mustard and we tipped back our bowls like sailors of yore to drink up the warm broth.

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The conch church.

Chopping conch at Stuart’s.

Kids playing on the basketball court near the conch piles.

Conch shell piles outside Stuart’s. Photo credit: Gabe Travis

Piles o’ conch.

It’s still Christmas in Bimini.

Bimini house.

Conch shells as fence guards.

Our crew being drawn toward the ocean.

The Atlantic Ocean, from a safe shore.

Abandoned or mid-construction?

Church on the beach.

The island has more churches than people.

Our first conch shells.

I took this with a long exposure, because there was no light inside the library, barely enough to read book titles.

On the library’s exterior wall.

The remains of the Compleat Angler Hotel.

Ghost Island For almost a week now we’ve been holed up in Bimini, the closest Bahamian island to the U.S.

[coleruth]

Squall

The morning after our crossing I lay awake in bed and thought about how the worst always befalls the unprepared. It should be an aphorism, or a Murphy’s Law. It’s not that we weren’t prepared to cross the Gulf Stream, but after having cruised peacefully along in ten-knot winds, with the seas at our back gently pushing us along, we were not prepared for a squall. Early that morning we awoke in…

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[coleruth]

Bimini-bound

I’m hurriedly trying to publish a few posts and catch you up on what’s been happening because we are leaving for the Bahamas at 4 am tomorrow morning. Greg is snoring beside me after watching a few last YouTube videos about what the crossing will be like. We had a less than ideal day at sea today, transitting from No Name to Pumpkin Key. The wind was on our nose so we were forced to motor the 20+…

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[coleruth]

Finding Sean

Today was a flurry of activity. Greg’s BFF, Mike, came out to the boat with his two boys. Not long after that our friends Chris and Gabe from Alaska arrived. Though they landed in Miami close to midnight the night before, they ended up stayed at a hotel for the night so they were well-rested. It was a day of fun, with the boys jumping off the boat and playing in the water, while Chris and Gabe…

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[coleruth]

After a day in No Name Harbor off Key Biscayne, we learned several new anchoring techniques from the power-boating locals. For the uninitiated, the standard for anchoring is to drop your anchor until it hits bottom and then let out at least seven times that length. You then ideally put your boat in reverse to secure the holding. The idea is to use leverage to dig the anchor in. (For a better overview, see this nice little guide from West Marine.) But here in Miami, they have their own ways of doing things, such as:

1. The Hershey’s Kiss: in this style of anchoring the captain decides where he wants his boat to be, then drops his anchor. Directly on top his anchor he proceeds to drop 50 feet of chain, forming a Hershey’s Kiss-shaped heap on the sea floor.

2. The Forward Drag: we watched one captain showcase this style by first roaming around the harbor with the anchor hanging down the side of his boat at the waterline, so that it was dragging along the surface (and often knocking against the side of his boat). Once he identified his ideal anchoring location – about 20 feet ahead – he dropped the anchor and then proceeded to drive over it. Naturally, his boat then slipped backward twice as far as he anticipated, and we watched as he repeated the maneuver – about five times. Greg eventually asked if he wanted help, noting that he worked for Tow Boat U.S., at which point the captain drove his boat to another area of the harbor where he could practice his technique without onlookers.

3. The Barely There: this is a common technique which merely requires the captain to drop his anchor until it hits bottom. This is a high-maintenance technique, however, requiring the boater to move his boat forward every 20-30 minutes and re-drop the anchor.

Halfway through the day our friends Dennis and Idalie, who live in Sweden but were spending Christmas in Miami, came out to visit us on the boat. They gave me a lift from the Winn-Dixie with ice and groceries, and helped me buy an extra iPhone charger, then joined us for a lunch of sausage stew and bread with more sausage(!). We sat sunbathing in the cockpit, drinking beer as we watched the locals practice the above anchoring techniques. It was lovely and relaxing – until we got a text message from our friends who were supposed to land that evening in order to go sailing with us: a medical emergency forced them to land in Idaho, delaying their flight and their arrival. They would not arrive until the following day.

We said good-bye to Idalie and Dennis and curled up in our bunk to look at the winds and weather prediction, so we could plan our departure to the Bahamas.

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Me in the galley.

Our captain and boatswain.

Me and Idalie getting a ride to the boat.

Dennis and Idalie making Lemonade.

Miami Style After a day in No Name Harbor off Key Biscayne, we learned several new anchoring techniques from the power-boating locals.

[coleruth]

New Year’s Eve was exhausting. While most people were planning what to wear, we were slogging it out against a headwind in 2-4 foot seas.

But the adventure really began early that morning when Greg heard our anchor line rubbing up against the bow. I had just started to make coffee because we knew this would be a long day – our longest yet – with at least 40 miles to go to Key Biscayne. Greg looked out the porthole in the v-berth then suddenly jumped out of bed and started throwing on his clothes. I looked out and saw the stern of another boat about three feet away.

Greg ran up topside and began pulling on out anchor rode (aka. “line”) to try and pull us away from the other boat, but that backfired and instead drew us closer. A groggy man popped his head out of his hatch. Greg told him it was under control and he went back down below.

While a decent wind will keep anchored boats headed back over their anchors nicely in a similar fashion, it had been a windless night and was still dead calm, so the boats in the anchorage were roaming around listlessly over and around their anchors. We noticed the night before that our sailboat (an Endeavor 32) seemed to dance a little differently on her anchor, even in a stiff breeze. I googled this to see if I could find out why or if this was a standard problem, but to no avail. Needless to say, it has made us rather wary while on the hook surrounded by other boats.

Perhaps Greg was waiting for this to happen – I know I was, and I’d slept poorly the last two nights because of it.

Since we were planning on leaving anyway, Greg jumped back into the cockpit and turned on the engine. Still in my pjs, I knew what this meant. I started decanting coffee from the porcelain mugs into the thermoses and changed into my foul weather gear. It was around 55 degrees outside. I came out on deck and found Greg pulling up the last of the anchor chain and I steered us toward the channel. We had planned on getting an early start but now we were underway.

We passed under the bascule bridge again, this time without any traffic, though with a strong incoming tide, and I took this little time-lapse video.

We knew it would be a bit rougher out and I wish I’d had the Go-Pro on and filmed Greg as he hopped around the boat, reefing and then raising the main as four-foot waves slammed against our side. With the reef in, we were soon hitting speeds of up to 8 knots (that’s where we topped off anyway). This allowed us to make great time, but it was intense sailing. To maintain our course and stay as close to the wind as we could, we were constantly battling seas that were knocking us so hard on the port side that sea water was often coming up over the rails.

For Greg the day was stressful for additional reasons. Now that the boat was under a lot of stress, he could hear her making noises we hadn’t heard before. Why were the stays vibrating? Was it normal? What was that thumping sound? Was it something that could break or burst and explode? (It’s a good thing I have him around because, completely focused on how I would make lunch, these issues hardly phased me. In fact, I never made lunch because our alcohol stove was low on fuel and filling it would have required me filling a tiny cup from a former laundry soap container that Greg has now filled with alcohol, and then carefully dumping the alcohol into the stove. While we were heeled over and constantly being tossed by waves. There was just no way this was going to happen. So we snacked through the day instead, and ate our emergency “at sea breakfast” twice: graham crackers with peanut butter and jelly.

The boat was heeled over until we turned the corner at Cape Florida into the Biscayne Channel. Then the wind was at our backs and we rode in with the surf until we thought we were making the turn into the Cape Florida Channel – and, with kiteboarders sanding all around us waist-high in the water, we directly ran aground. With the sail up. Oops.

Greg sheeted the sail in amid-ships, and I put the boat in reverse and we backed out, sand a’swirling all around us. Having actually missed the Cape Florida Channel we had to go the long way around to our anchorage, through haunting Stiltsville, adding about three miles to our day.

Once we realized that the cruise through Stiltsville would lengthen our trip by almost an hour, I went below in the (finally) calm conditions and made us kimchi pancakes for dinner.

At 4:30 pm we arrived, finally, at our anchorage in No Name Harbor, and secured an awesome anchorage amidst the massive power boats that continue to pile up in here from Miami for the holiday weekend. And, despite being woken up briefly at midnight by revelers, we slept like the dead for ten hours.

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Looks can be deceiving – entering the ocean at Boca.

Greg battling the wind and seas.

Hello Miami (far, far away).

Abandoned houses on stilts.

Kimchi pancakes for dinner at 3:30 pm.

Arrival at No Name.

Slogging New Year's Eve was exhausting. While most people were planning what to wear, we were slogging it out against a headwind in 2-4 foot seas.

[coleruth]

FEven before our departure we knew that the winds were projected to change on Friday and bear down from the north. North, as all you who live up there can testify, means cold. This also promised to shake up the seas to between 6-9 feet with winds between 15-30 knots. We decided we would sit this one out. We’d made good time so far, and spending a day in port would enable us to get some extra sleep. I could also get some work in, not to mention catch up on my blog posts.

We just had to be in Miami by January 1st at around 6 pm. Why, you might ask? I don’t think I have actually mentioned this yet, but we are sailing to the Bahamas with another couple. This tiny space that most people can’t imagine as home to two is about to hold four.

Greg used his free day to practice his sextant.

A few months back when I mentioned to my best friend from college that we would be going sailing somewhere this winter, she said she and her husband would love to join us. At least that’s how I remember it going down. I mentioned it to Greg and he was keen on the idea, so we started with some Skype introductions (Greg has never met this couple in person) and, next thing we knew, they were in the mix.

This has naturally had an impact on much of our planning, starting with our departure. It’s another reason Pepé’s accident did not hold us back. We had four days to get to Miami, and while it could be done in three, we left one day for engine problems or, in case of days like today.

It has also impacted things like storage and meal planning. The boat had to be set up to sleep four, so Greg sewed a privacy curtain that you can pull around the berth in the main cabin, and one to close off our V-berth. Keep in mind that our boat only has one cabin – unless you count the head. The head (aka., bathroom) is the only place on the boat you can go into and close an actual door.

Boat art: prints from a 19th century book about marine life.

“It’s small!” I told them on our first Skype call.

“Oh, we live in a yurt. We live in tents for weeks. We can do small,” they told us.

We shall see. Actually, Greg, who knows me pretty well by this point, saw right through me. It wasn’t them I was really worried about. I’m the kind of person who almost always says, “the more, the merrier.” Want to bring an extra person or three to my house for dinner? No problem. But I can also easily feel hemmed in and become almost canine about protecting my space. I’m a writer, after all – and writers need a certain degree of privacy, right?

So early on I gave myself permission to take time away from the group. If I need to, we’ll stop off somewhere and I’ll get a bungalow or a hotel room. This might even be necessary for me to work if I get a substantial assignment. The main thing is, lack of space is not going to get in the way of us all having a great time.

They are also bringing inflatable “pack rafts” and we have two kayaks, and a tent, so some configuration of us might go off on a little overnight expedition. Though beyond the idea of this, we have no set plans.

When it comes to food, we had to pack twice as much. I planned more than half the meals for the month and asked them to plan a similar number so I wouldn’t get stuck making every meal and so they could prepare some of their favorite foods.

A medical chart holder became our game rack – and hides a water stain from a now sealed) leak at the mast. Greg sewed the little bags out of extra sunbrella cloth that he used to make a grill cover and new winch covers.

Today I gave my sister Lindsay a video tour of the boat, with in-depth descriptions of what lies behind each bulkhead and even in the bilge. One compartment contains only nuts. We have a whole basket dedicated to dried fruit. Another compartment has grains and one whole side of the boat is filled with canned goods. As on my tall ships, I have stowed all our eggs below the floor (called a “sole” on a boat) – about 50+ of them from a local goat farm that also keeps chickens. I have special plastic egg cartons, but had to leave them at home because these eggs were too large to fit in them!

I also pickled almost two dozen eggs, since this is a perfect protein with a long-term storage capacity. Beside the pickled eggs I’ve packed a quart of our favorite ancho chili relish, a 2-quart container of pickled red onions, some homemade ketchup (because my friend can’t have MSG, which is in most main-brand ketchup, believe it or not) – and it was about here in my tour that my sister stopped me.

“Is this normal?” she asked.

I thought for a minute. Well, yeah, storing eggs in the bilge is normal. Bringing a lot of eggs and canned goods, that’s normal too. But I don’t know and haven’t read about many sailors or cruisers who have prepped so much in advance. I’ve pickled ginger and green onions, three-bean salad and I made a large batch of pork rillettes. I don’t know many people who do that period.

I think many sailors do like in the blog I referenced the other day where the couple brought 48 bottles of wine. They also brought “26 cans of coconut milk”… I think we have 8, and each one is accounted for in our schedule of meals. There simply was no room for over-packing. Every cabinet is filled to the brim.

So no, this isn’t normal. But tonight, as we ate fish from our freezer that had nicely defrosted over the past few days, pan-fried in breadcrumbs and stuffed into tortillas with a freshly made cabbage slaw, ancho chili salsa and pickled red onions, the reason for all that work was obvious. We may be four adults stuffed into a floating sardine can, but we will be in paradise – and we shall eat like kings and queens.

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Dinner fixings.

Dinner tonight: fish tacos

Greg digging in.

MEAL PLAN Date Breakfasts Lunches Dinners 2 Yoghurt, granola, berries Feta and couscous salad with romaine, candied walnuts, pomegranate, pickled beets and radishes, balsamic glaze Oxtail ragu with ricotta, parm 3 Yoghurt, granola, berries Fattoush + muhammara Greek lemon soup with orzo and arugula 4 Cream cheese, salmon, sprouts, crescent rolls Banh mi with rillettes, pickles, cukes, green onions, cilantro, sauce Bibimbap w/spinach, sriacha, egg, kimchi 5 Biscuits, tomato, Canadian bacon, eggs Tuna/salmon salad roll-ups w/ sprouts or greens Spinach paneer w/ rice, pappadum and mango chutney 6 Apple-jack two ways (w/ eggs & fresh apples early, or dried apples & no eggs later; syrup, PB, or jam on side) Salmon “ceviche” w/ corn chips Carmelized onion pizza with prosciutto & arugula 7 Toad-in-a-hole (skillet toast with jam, and egg fried in middle) Tomato soup & grilled cheese Indian tomato soup w/ basmati rice and chapatis 8 Breakfast quesadillas (w/ pepper-jack and bacon) Marinated garbanzo salad w/ feta and quinoa Sushi rolls w/ canned salmon and fixings 9 Steel Cut Oats w/ raisins, nuts, and maple syrup; or blueberry lemon–x3 Couscous tabouleh (salmon optional) w/ flatbread and tahini dipping sauce Miso bowls w/ rice noodles, sesame seeds, scallions etc (good w/ fish if we had it) 10 Ricotta, fig breakfast pizza with honey Muffeletta sandwiches with mortadella and provolone with giardiniera salad Breaded fish sandwich with slaw and tartar sauce 11 Oatmeal with fresh fruit alt. dried fruit Fish tacos, slaw, black bean salad Corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, mustard 12 Ginger oatmeal with plums Roasted curried cauliflower & Israeli couscous salad Our favorite black beans & rice 13 Dutch baby with apple compote Nachos, chorizo, pickled jalapenos, cheese, blck beans Red lentil dahl with chutney and chapatis 14 Milk & granola Sushi bowls Biscuits & sausage gravy 15 Chorizo grits with eggs 3 salads: 3-bean; carrot; German potato Polenta w/ mushroom red sauce 16 Corned beef hash, eggs Kimchi pancakes , sprouts, radishes Lemony pasta (rice spirals) with garlic, olive oil, capers and greens prn 17 Steel Cut Oats w/ raisins, nuts, and maple syrup; or blueberry lemon–x3 Pasta salad with olives, sun-dried tomatoes and veggies Coconut curry garbanzos w/ brown rice and veggies or seafood 18 Black rice pudding w/ coconut milk School lunch–PBJs with ants on a log and sliced apples with honey Red lentil dahl with chutney and chapatis 19 Apple-jack two ways (w/ eggs & fresh apples early, or dried apples & no eggs later; syrup, PB, or jam on side) Left-overs burritos (after beans & rice nights) Our favorite black beans & rice 20 Blueberry pancakes w/ maple syrup chicken salad / or egg salad with crackers or bread or tortillas or rice cakes with pineapple salsa Lemony pasta (rice spirals) with garlic, olive oil, capers and greens 21 Spicy polenta grits w/ bacon bits or sausage Pasta salad with olives, sun-dried tomatoes and freshies Moroccan couscous 22 Yogurt parfait with granola, or jam & nuts/seeds School lunch–PBJs with ants on a log and sliced apples with honey Ramen with egg, rillettes, bamboo shoots, mustard greens, sweet potato 23 Blueberry pancakes w/ maple syrup Fish dip, pickles, crackers Vegetarian chili topped with cheese, jalapenos 24 Steel Cut Oats w/ raisins, nuts, and maple syrup; or blueberry lemon–x3 Sesame soba noodles w/ ginger cabbage slaw Khao soi with egg noodles, sprouts, bamboo shoots, pickled mustard greens + grilled fish 25 Cardamom buns and fruit salad Quesadillas with black beans and ancho chili relish Thai Choo-chee fish curry w/ rice 26 Cheese grits and maybe we can avocado? Alt. fresh fruit salad, whatever we can find. Panzanella w/ olives, artichokes, roasted red bell peppers, parm Butternut squash pasta with bacon and rosemary and parm (+egg) 27 Pancakes and syrup & peanut butter Brats, kraut, chilli con carne, cheese Paella with fresh fish/lobster 28 Milk & granola (more like an emergency breakfast when we need to get underway and there’s no time to cook) Nori hand-rolls, fish, carrot, sesame, cukes, miso? + caviar (!) Singapore chili lobster + baguettes 29 Rice porrige Rilettes, crackers, tapanade, pickles, cheese, brie w/ fig chutney Andouille sausage, rice and beans w/ plaintain chips 30 Roti canai w/ bananas if we can find them! Poke bowl w/ sushi rice, carrots, ginger, pickled jalapenos Grilled lobster, spoonbread and roasted red potatoes

The Waiting Day FEven before our departure we knew that the winds were projected to change on Friday and bear down from the north.