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
Royal Island, Eleuthera
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
On the move again
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
George Town
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
Mayaguana to Georgetown, Great Exuma
We received Chris Parker’s weather forecast by sailmail yesterday evening and listened to his forecast this morning on SSB. He has been telling us of a tropical wave off the coast of Venezuela. In his forecast last night, it seems it could cross Cuba and he reckoned there is a 30 percent chance it could develop into a tropical depression. In any case, we can expect squalls throughout most of.. Read More
Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic to Mayaguana, Bahamas
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
Part arrived!
Today was a good day. Thanks to several inquiries by the marina on our behalf, we found out that the package we had been waiting for would be delivered around noon today. So we worked on a few minor tasks around the boat in the morning, eagerly listening to channel 68 on the VHF radio in case the marina wanted to reach us. Finally around 1PM we heard that the.. Read More
Part arrived!
Today was a good day. Thanks to several inquiries by the marina on our behalf, we found out that the package we had been waiting for would be delivered around noon today. So we worked on a few minor tasks around the boat in the morning, eagerly listening to channel 68 on the VHF radio in case the marina wanted to reach us. Finally around 1PM we heard that the.. Read More
Anticipated arrival of replacement part
Yesterday was spent pulling our aft cabin apart in anticipation that the replacement autohelm part would arrive today, which it sadly did not. While not particularly difficult to do, the process of being able to access the autopilot linear drive was laborious as it involved draining and removing the hot water heater which sits on the white shelf above the quadrant (shown in picture #2). However, to remove the water.. Read More
Food and Drink in the DR
Having replaced seals on head #2 yesterday, we felt we had earned yet another day off. OK, I know that many folks still in the workforce or studying hard to enter it are thinking that it is a bit of a stretch but regardless, we had some more fun today. Having read about the differences in rums, we felt it only right to go and visit a distillery to see.. Read More