To Motor or not to Motor, that is the question

You are off the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. The moon is setting. It’s five in the morning the wind is 9 knots from the North West and you have plotted your latest position on the paper chart on the nav-table. You have travelled only seven miles…

Reputation is everything

2013 began for me by considering the two big milestones we would need to get past in order to get up to Banderas Bay for hurricane season: the Panama Canal and the Gulf of Tehuantepec. With the first of those being easily achieved, drama-free in…

Red tide at Taboga

Ahhhhh, Taboga. Only 7 little miles from the hustle and bustle of Panama City but it might as well be another world. We like it here immensely, in fact, it wins our prize for the place we’ve liked most in all of Panama. Why? Well, for starters it’s…

The Mouths of the Bull

Sod’s law that after covering nearly 8,000 miles in the last 8 months we would have our worst ever weather just 5 miles from our last major Caribbean destination: Bocas del Toro, Panama. I don’t think our families were particularly concerned about…

‘Tis the season to get moving

It’s May 27th and we’re still in Isla Mujeres, Mexico (see, when I said a few posts back that we needed a break I really meant it!). Trouble is, the earliest that hurricane season has been known to start is May 29th. What with the dragging incident,…

Just a quick note…

So, in the previous post I mentioned meeting all the lovely people in the Isla Mujeres anchorage; firm friends that we hope to stay in touch with and who helped us so much. However, I should point out that it was only after a week and a half that we…

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…

¿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 [...]