As long as I can remember, I’ve never had a problem with changing my mind. Fortunately, Jeff doesn’t have a problem with it either! As a result, we’re not going to Luperon this summer.

Everything is fine. We simply decided that we don’t want to go deeper into the Caribbean. The more we researched sailing to and cruising in the Caribbean, the less the positives outweighed the negatives for us. The Bahamas are relatively close, the water is gorgeous, the air is warm, the Bahamians are friendly, the islands are safe, and the sailing is fantastic (once the winter winds settle down). We really don’t need anything else right now.

Once we decided that we didn’t want to sail to the Caribbean, going to Luperon made less sense for us. I’ve really been disliking the fact that there’s so much we keep missing as we travel north and south, hurrying along to outrun the cold weather or make it to Connecticut before it’s time to turn around again. There’s so much of North Carolina we’d like to explore, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of the Chesapeake or New England beyond Connecticut and Rhode Island.

So what’s our plan? Assuming that fate doesn’t decide to overturn the card table, we are going to stay in the Bahamas until mid-to-late May before making the jump to the Florida/Georgia border, or perhaps the Georgia/South Carolina border. From there we are going to S L O W L Y work our way north, sailing along as much as we can, even if it’s only 10 miles in a day.

The goal is to be back on the ICW by October 1st, so we won’t go any farther north than the Chesapeake this summer. In fact, I won’t be surprised if we don’t make it north of North Carolina. Of course if it’s simply too hot and humid for us we can be in Connecticut with the right weather window in under a week.

Once we start heading south we are going into delivery mode, aiming to get to Georgetown by Thanksgiving. We’ll stay in that region, including the southern Bahamian islands, until late February or early March, at which point we’ll work our way north again through the Bahamas with a plan to cruise in New England in the summer of 2021.

Occasionally on the various cruising forums it feels like some participants are in a competition with others. Like you aren’t really cruising if you never leave the ICW, or if you don’t go to the Caribbean, or to Europe, or around the world. Before we cut the dock lines, I’ll admit that I felt a bit that way myself. But now that we’re out here it’s obvious there are so many different ways to cruise. From blitzing around the world in an organized rally to moving 20 miles every six months. The most important thing is to cruise it in a way that brings you the most satisfaction.

It’s taken us a while to get there, but I think we’re finally starting to figure it out. The East Coast and the Bahamas, not too fast, not too slow. It works for us, and we’ll keep doing it as long as it’s fun – or until we change our minds again!

The wind this year has been relentless – in fact, if last winter had been like this one I honestly don’t know if we would have come back. From what we understand, winter in the Bahamas can be a crap shoot. Cold fronts regularly move down into this region, and it’s a given that the farther north you are the windier it will be. Some winters if you are far enough south (for example, Georgetown in the Exumas), the fronts won’t reach you, Other years there is no escape. This is one of those years.

What does that mean? It means that since we arrived we have typically had about a day and a half of decent weather and five days of winds in the 20’s. A front blows through but instead of the wind relaxing after it passes, ridges cause high wind to stick around for days. Repeat week after week.

A few people have said “Screw it” and gone back to Florida. I’ll be honest, it’s crossed our mind once or twice. Others have debated throwing in the towel all together and selling their boat, realizing that full-time cruising isn’t what they thought and hoped it would be. What about us? We decided to move down to George Town to get better weather protection and revisit it with a critical eye.

Continue reading “Experimenting with George Town.” →

We had read many posts about how expensive groceries are in the Bahamas, so when we left last year we made sure we had three months of non-perishable food and other household goods.  We realize that people eat everywhere, but we wanted to be prepared until we could see the availability and prices for ourselves.

By the end of our first winter there we knew that, yes, some items are incredibly expensive.  Snack food in particular was very pricy.  For example, a small package of Dove chocolates were $10, a normal size bag of potato chips was $5 or more, and a box of brownie mix was $5.  Some items were from foreign countries but subsidized, so they were cheaper than comparable U.S. products.  We ended up buying Nabisco Club Social crackers from Peru (which we referred to as Peruvian crackers) which we prefer over Ritz, and I love the Hill Biscuit chocolate cream cookies from the U.K.  At $2/sleeve, what’s not to like?

Continue reading “How do we provision for the Bahamas?” →