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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…