February 10, 2016
Ship shape and Bristol fashion
I have never been a neat freak, nor was I very messy in my land-lubber life. However, living on board a boat does teach you the advantages to being that bit tidier. But it’s a lesson that you only learn by getting it spectacularly wrong to [...]
July 26, 2012
Holiday-ish
Ish, our Texan stowaway, left us yesterday but I thought I should add a note in her honour as, thanks to her shutterbug tendancies, we have a whole stack of fantastic photos on the surroundings page. I am still without my little camera thanks to…
May 16, 2012
Mexican sojourn
The crossing from Cienfuegos, Cuba, to Isla Mujeres, Mexico, took us 3 and a half days and was a fairly straightforward and non-eventful passage. Since our trip from the BVI’s to Cuba, James and I are a lot more comfortable doing longer passages…
April 25, 2012
What a drag…
I love our anchor. We’ve anchored in so many places, so many times, that the two of us have a very good, quick system in place for dropping the hook. We always check how well we are set and log our GPS position and have never really had any major…
April 19, 2012
Thunderbolts, lightning, very very frightening
It is 3:30am and we are both awake. There are storms coming in from Florida and there have been warnings of them all week as a cold front stretches from Miami all the way to North East Honduras. There is talk of 40knot winds, high seas, heavy rain,…
April 12, 2012
The kindness of cruising strangers
In order to separate the flesh of a fresh conch from its bone it is important to make a hole in its shell one ring in from the outside at an angle the same as 2 o’clock on a clock’s face – Valois taught us that. Similarly, when laying a second…
April 11, 2012
Clandestine mangos in the mangroves
Now that it is April we can relish the fact that its mango season. However, we don’t get our mangos from the shop or the market… no, now we get them in darkness in the bushes. Welcome to Cuba, communist land where no man owns what he works for. Here…
April 5, 2012
The slobbering explosives dog, the drugs bust, the salsa-dancing thieves and other notes on Cuban bureaucracy…
I’d just nodded off and am jolted awake by the incessant thumping of the officer’s fingers pounding the computer keys as he continues to write up our statement. It’s 5am and James and I are still at the police station, having escaped the drugs…
March 30, 2012
¿Puede indicarme el camino a Cuba?
So, after talking about it and planning it for some time, our big jump over to Cuba is finally happening. We’re leaving Friday morning and should have a week at sea in order to arrive in Santiago de Cuba. It’s our first big journey as [...]
February 7, 2012
All change
We sailed from Portsmouth, Dominica, to Terre d’en Haut on the Îles des Saintes on February 6th. This is where we parted ways with Lisanna and Paul, our crewmates since December 1st, who are flying onto Cuba before heading back to real life. This…