Hope's and Howard's Sailing Adventures

The weather was favorable for departing Port Canaveral on Saturday, even though we were tempted to stay longer and enjoy the good camaraderie there. Anyway, we had a really lovely, relaxing easy sail on a broad reach with winds around 10-12 knots almost all the way to St. Augustine. We knew we wanted to time our arrival at St Augustine to catch the beginning of the flood tide through the.. Read More

Still here in Old Bahama Bay Marina, waiting for more settled weather to cross the Gulf Stream. There are some thunderstorms coming off the US coast that we would rather not encounter, especially at night in the Gulf Stream. So, we have had an opportunity to explore our surroundings a little. Yesterday we took advantage of the bikes we could borrow from the marina/ resort and had some fun on.. Read More

Another day of motor-sailing and avoiding rain squalls wherever possible. We encountered more shipping than we had so far in our travels from the BVI. I guess the Northeast and Northwest Providence Channels around the Abacos are major shipping routes from the Gulf of Mexico and Florida. It is very comforting to be able to identify the ships using AIS, which also tells us their speed, heading, nearest approach to.. Read More

The latter part of our passage to Royal Island turned out to be wet and windy and involved donning our foul weather gear …. more like warm Irish weather than the Bahamas! As forecast, the rain squalls weren’t too severe and had there were no thunderstorms so we were quite happy that both we and the boat could handle it without any problem. We have now designated the engine room.. Read More

Having listened to the forecast this morning, we decided to get on the move again. While there may still be some squally weather in our region of the central Bahamas, no thunderstorms are expected. It is still mostly overcast but we have seen some sun and a few dark clouds here and there. In fact, we tracked one of the smaller dark clouds on the radar earlier on today and.. Read More

After the initial bit of excitement, the remainder of our trip to George Town was straightforward. There was a beautiful full moon all night long that illuminated the sail and clouds, almost as if it were daylight. I even thought about checking to see if the solar panels were generating any amps…. but of course that would be expecting a bit too much. We ended up keeping the engine on.. Read More

After moving the boat across the marina to the fuel dock in the afternoon to not only top up our fuel tanks but also to double-check that there were no issues with the engine, we paid our bill, checked out with the officials and finally left Puerto Plata at 5pm on Friday, just ahead of the thunderstorms that we could see behind us for quite a long time. We weren’t.. Read More