From Christmas at Green Turtle Cay, New Years at Treasure Cay and a visit to pretty Hope Town Harbour

Christmas at Green Turtle Cay was absolutely wonderful. There is a large cruiser community that comes here every year, some for the whole season, some just for Christmas and New Year. The first event we attend is a local fundraiser for the school, followed by the "Decorated Golf Cart" parade. It never ceases to amaze me, how these things all just somehow come together. Earlier in the day, Warren went to town to get some details, asking numerous local people about what, where and when, and he came back with no more info than he went out to get. So we went together with other cruisers who had been there in years past, and voila, it all just happened. The fundraiser was great, the food eventually appeared and was very tasty, someone collected the money, the school kids sang for the visitors, and after all of that, even Santa showed up. Once it was dark and everyone had their dinner, they proceeded with the parade. The parade consisted of about 6-8 golf carts!!!

We went to two more cruiser specific events on Christmas, and then we set our eyes on the next big step: The oh so feared "Whale Cay Passage". We wanted to get to the southern Abacos for New Years, but to get there, you have to go through the Whale, no way out of that one. On December 27, the weather was calm, and after checking all available resources, we went for it. It's really only a very short passage, but if you go when the "Whale" is in a "Rage", well, not so good. 

We planed on spending New Years at Treasure Cay, and because we know there is another really strong storm coming, we go on a mooring ball. Good thing we did, because the winds were from all directions and very strong. By now you must be thinking, all we ever do is hide from storms. Well, pretty much. But we have usually plenty of nice days in between. And as I am writing this, we have been in Hope Town, and again, we are on a mooring ball. Why? Bloody Storm again, just as bad as the earlier ones we had. 
Another thing that happened here in Hope Town, and we use this not to scare ourselves, but to remind us to be ever so vigilant in planning our passages: two nights ago, a sailboat washed up on the beach here in Hope Town. Two men with two dogs left Puerto Rico (to sail to Florida) on December 26th, got into those horrible storms after New Years,  their boat got disabled, and they ended up here. They are extremely lucky to be alive. They encountered 35' waves, and winds of 50-60 knots. The boat is toast, they lost everything except their lives. 
Our next big step is the passage from the Abacos down to Eleuthera. Chris Parker the weather guru seems to think there is a window this Saturday, so we are preparing. Tomorrow we make our way a bit further south, to stage ourselves near the North Bar cut. From there, if all looks good, we will head down to Royal Island on Eleuthera. 

Fundraiser, Bahamas style! A long line of hungry Cruisers and Bahamians alike, but waiting in line gives everyone ample time to chat and meet new people. The food was tasty, and everyone had a good time.

The school children were singing Christmas Songs for us, I love how the teacher led them in their singing. 

After they finished their concert, Santa showed up!!! He brought sweets for the kids, and they all got their turns saying hello. Like all children around the world, they were excited to see Santa.

These were the winners of the Golf Cart Parade!

Christmas morning in the cockpit. Where better to open presents and eat Christmas cookies!

We even had cruiser "Santa" come by our boat, delivering treats and wishing a Happy Christmas. This is Cam and Jan from Nova Scotia, they have been coming to Green Turtle Cay  for over 20 years, and they are the ones organizing all the social events  around Christmas. Thank you, you made our Christmas special!!!

We moved on to Treasure Cay, after all the hubbub, we needed some down time on the beach, LOL. 

Because it was the calm before the storm, we went fishing in the dinghy, and look what I caught: a really large, and turns out, really tasty, Mutton Snapper. We are in the mooring field at Treasure Cay, a very protected anchorage.

This is beautiful Hope Town. We are on a mooring on the right side of the picture. The dark blue water behind the land is the Atlantic. 

Hope Town is famous for its light house. This is the last existing, Kerosine lit and hand wound operated light house left in the world. It was built in 1864.

A stroll through town, what a beautiful home and yard. The whole town is like that ....

The disabled vessel Ellipsis on Hope Town beach. We spoke with the two sailors, and their story is not a pleasant one. But they are alive!

Cold Fronts, Crossings, and then Paradise - Ft. Pierce to Green Turtle Cay

In order to get to the Bahamas, one has to cross the Gulf Stream. No way around that one.
Timing is everything, and it's serious business. You should never cross the Golf Stream if there is any wind from the north, as the current and the wind will be at each other's throats, and the poor sailor caught in the middle. Figuratively speaking. So we get up every morning at 6:30 am to listen to Chris Parker on the SSB (that's our marine boat radio). He IS the weather guru, and all we hear is cold front coming, cold front coming, cold front coming. (Which translates to: North wind and strong wind) While we wait, we study the charts, discuss our possible route, and work on the boat. We don't have to wait long, we feel we have a "window" coming up, and we make the decision to go. We take off from Ft. Pierce mid afternoon, go out on the ocean but stay close enough to shore not to get into the Stream. (about 3 miles).  Why you ask don't you want to get into the stream? Well, the Gulf Stream runs from south to north, we want to go south and east, if we get into the stream too soon, the current will carry us north, not where we want to go! So we head down towards Lake Worth, and then from there we will turn east and head across the Stream to West End, Bahamas. 
We are nervous and very alert, we only have a couple of hours in daylight, then night comes and we will be in the dark. But we have our instruments, radar and AIS, and we are on watch. Closer to Lake Worth, we come across a few very large container ships, and we keep a close eye on their movements. All goes well, and we are now "in the stream", conditions are definitely a bit more "salty", as sailors say, which means some fair waves, and we get tossed around a bit. Nothing really bad, just more than we think the poor boat should have to endure, but really, the boat can handle it, it's more us that can't. I wear my trusty seasickness wristbands, and chew some ginger gum, and I am good to go. Warren never gets seasick, lucky guy.
We arrive at West End mid morning, exactly as planned. So we clear customs, and spend one night at the marina, safely tied up. What a luxury. The long hot showers at the marina were a treat as well!
We know that a really bad cold front is coming, we certainly had heard plenty about it on the forecast. But as is common, it's the calm before the storm. So we decide to move on, as we did not want to get stuck at the pricey marina for days to come. We studied the charts again, and decided that Great Sale Cay had anchorages for various wind directions, and we could be safe during the big blow. We were not the only boats there during the blow, so that was comforting, but it was a crazy storm. We stayed at Great Sale for 4 nights, to let this thing blow over. Once the coast was clear, we set sail towards Green Turtle Cay, which is where we are now and where we will be spending Christmas. 
Green Turtle Cay is in the Abacos, Bahamas. It is very beautiful and peaceful here. Once that nasty cold front left, we have had nothing but exquisite weather. Hardly any wind, beautiful temperatures. It's great for exploring by dinghy, and the nights are calm so you don't have to worry about your anchor dragging. Warren's been lobstering, but so far, no luck. We've been walking on deserted Atlantic beaches, chatted with other cruisers, read books (or manuals in Warren's case!) and just plain old relaxed. Tomorrow (Dec. 23rd) we will join locals and cruisers to take in the New Plymouth Decorated Golf Cart Parade, on Dec. 24th we will go for a brunch with many other cruisers and on December 25th, we again will join in on a Christmas Beach Pot Luck Event. Pictures for those events will be in my next post.
Wishing you all a very Happy Christmas and a Wonderful New Year!

Starting out on our journey across the Gulf Stream. The Weather looks good, and we are excited (and also a bit nervous)

The "Captain" hard at work. He's got to save his strength for the night watch. He keeps telling me how sensitive his eyes are and that's why he must wear sunglasses. I think it's just so I can't tell if his eyes are open or closed, LOL!

Arrived safely at West End Marina, Bahamas. We are tired from an almost sleepless night, but happy to have arrived. Warren as the captain gets to handle all the paperwork. You can see the Bahamian courtesy flag flapping, which means we are cleared in and good to go.

At Great Sale Cay, awaiting the dreaded Cold Front. You can see the black clouds headed our way. The strongest gust our wind instrument recorded was 34 knots!

The view through our cockpit enclosure. The sound of the wind and rain was deafening.

Apparently, there was a small tornado at Treasure Cay some distance away...

Arrived at Green Turtle Cay. It is so beautiful here, we decide to spend Christmas here.

The town at Green Turtle Cay is called New Plymouth. It is a sleepy, little village, but so pretty. 

Downtown New Plymouth!

After a hard day pounding the pavement in town, we need a bit of RnR at the beach. This beach is on the Atlantic side, on Munjack Cay, next door to Green Turtle. We are all alone...

We also go on discovery trips with the dinghy, here we went up a mangrove river, to look for turtles and eagle rays. We saw tons of them...

Of course, every now and then a bit of work must be done. Here I am treating our woodwork to another coat of varnish.

And....wait for it: another Sunset!!! I can't help it, it's just so beautiful.

CRUISING SEASON 2017-201 - The not so romantic side of cruising life!

CRUISING SEASON 2017-2018

The not so romantic side of cruising life! 

I can’t believe we are starting our second season of cruising. It all still feels so new, and we still have so much to learn, we only just scratched the surface. So I am very excited and looking forward to getting back on board, I am eager to get going. We leave Winnipeg on Oct. 30^th, and our route takes us straight down south, towards Biloxi, where we are picking up 5 new batteries for the boat. We needed new ones, so Warren did some research, he wanted to get this special kind, carbon foam AGM’s. But because they are apparently the cat’s meow, we were not able to get them in Florida, back ordered till December or even later. So he called around and found the last 5 available batteries in Biloxi. Biloxi is not really exactly along the route to Florida, but the detour only added about ½ day driving, and for special batteries, we will do anything!

We arrived in Fort Pierce 4 days later, and wisely had rented a condo for two weeks. Living on the boat, on the hard at Riverside Marina, can be a bit of a challenge. People do it, we even did it for our last week of prep, but if you don’t have to, don’t. The hardest part is the bathroom and shower situation. Enough said.

We already knew before getting there that the boat made it through the hurricane, but still, we were very curious to see for ourselves. We drove straight to the marina, just to take a quick peek, and sure enough, she looked fine. We quickly realized though, that we had a tremendous amount of work ahead of us to get her looking clean and pretty again. For now, we were happy she was in one piece, work could wait until we had a good nights sleep at our condo.

Next day the hard work began. And lasted for a whole month. We worked so hard, but little by little, our Betula came back to life. Now, sitting in her cockpit, and writing this blog entry, I am once again proud of her, as she looks real good.

We even hired help, because Warren quickly realized that we would not be able to get all the jobs done by ourselves. Charlie was a real help, we hired him to first sand the hull and fill in the bad spots, next he buffed the gel coat, and lastly, he painted the burgundy stripe along the waterline. Myself, I started with cleaning the inside of the boat (this took days and days, everything was full of mold from the humidity and all the rain they had during Hurricane Irma). I had to wash and clean everything, thank god for the condo we rented. Every night we hauled laundry baskets full of dirty sheets, towels, sofa covers, and all my dishes, pots and pans, you name it, down the long ladder, into the car and up to the condo. There I spent the evenings using the washer and dryer and dishwasher. Next day we took the stuff back to the boat, up the long ladder, and repeated in the evening with even more loads.

Warren wasn’t sitting idle either, he was busy getting the boats systems back up. Removing and installing the new batteries proved to be a bit much for his back, but he of course just powered through the pain. Then he installed a new solar panel, and many other projects of improvement. Then the sails had to be put back on, that alone took a day. Suffice to say, before we knew it, the two week condo rental was over and we were nowhere near done. We were able to extend the condo by one week, and then spent our last week on the hard. By then the boat started to look like a boat again, and we were actually quite comfortable (minus the shower and bathroom situation – again, enough said!)

We finally were ready and got on the list to be put back in the water. We waited for three day until it was our turn, but once we were in the water and at anchor by the Fort Pierce bridge, we felt like a million bucks. We took a well deserved day "off", to test out our dinghy and motor, and went exploring around Fort Pierce. We also had to get up our courage once more to actually sail the boat, so we picked a nice Sunday to go out on the Atlantic for a "test drive". It spent a beautiful couple of hours sailing, and then went back to our spot at the bridge. We fixed up a few more issues that came up, and then we waited "for a window" to cross the Golf Stream. But more about that in my next posting.

October 30th, 9:00 AM - The car is fully loaded, we are ready to go. We have a long drive ahead, but Warren doesn't mind driving, so he drove most of the way. 

We are eager to take a quick peek at the boat when we arrived at Fort Pierce. All is well, she is just dirty, dirty, dirty. But made it through the Hurricane, so we are happy.

The tarp that had covered our dinghy has been ripped to shreds, that's the only damage we had from the hurricane. The sun also does a number on them, so we would have had to chuck them out anyways. We threw out the one covering the cockpit as well.

The inside of the boat, all OK. Just a mess, we had to store so much from the deck down here, like all the sails, cockpit cushions, bimini frame and covers, fenders, grill, ropes, and much more. Walking around the boat is very difficult for now. 

Here you can see that the bottom has been sanded and the bad spots were filled in and then primed. Now she is ready for her bottom paint, that's my job...

Here I am putting on the first coat of bottom pain, an "ablative" paint. Ablative means that  when you are sailing the boat, the movement makes the paint come off a little bit at the time, so it's hard for barnacles to take hold. Oh, and you are wondering about the fuzzy white slippers??? Well, I had just bought a brand new pair of expensive sandals, and I wasn't going to use those to put on paint, so I went to three stores to look for cheap flip flops, and this is ALL I could find, so there. Charlie almost fell off the scaffolding when he saw me!

Charlie buffing the hull, me painting away. Charlie was a little skeptical at first about me wanting to paint the bottom, but once he saw the bang up job I was doing, he was very happy.

Some not so lucky boat owner. All in all there were a few tipped over boats, but it could all have been way worse.

And another one...

This is the electrical "headquarters" at Riverside Marina. From our boat to this panel was about 5 long electrical cables. We were parked at almost the furthest point of the yard. 

Electricity at Riverside!

When it rained, and it rained quite a bit, these cables are all under water...

Finally, the day we waited for. We are being extracted from our spot, quite an operation!

They started to move boat the afternoon before, and then the day off, it took all day from 8:00 am till 3:00 pm to get us out and into the water!

A quick pose beside the rudder before going into the water. We are very happy with how she looks, the hull is in awesome shape...

Finally, all the boats are out of the way, it's our turn now....

On her way to the water, where boat belong!!!

Yay!!! At anchor in Fort Pierce. Didn't think this day would ever arrive, but it did. 

Now let's go CRUISING!!!

The Three Sailors - Rosa does Bahamas

We picked up my mom in Nassau on March 9th. She arrived fairly late in the day, and it was already dark by the time we got back to the dinghy. She was so excited, as she knew that we were anchoring out and had to take the dinghy to get to the boat. She was still pretty fit, even after the long trip from Switzerland to Nassau. I think she fell in love with the boat as soon as she saw her. She couldn't believe how roomy the inside is, and all the beautiful wood. We were of course excited to show her Betula, and also were looking forward to our trip and showing her the Bahamas. 
We spent the first day exploring Nassau, and she got a gook work out: Down the ladder into the dinghy, out of the dinghy onto the dock, back into the dinghy, up the ladder into the boat, well, you get the idea, lots of in and out. And sometimes with a lot of waves rocking both the boat and the dinghy. We went out for dinner that night, and came back to the boat in the dark again. It was a fun day.

Next day, our trip was really to start. We planned on leaving early, to go across the Yellow Bank to Allen's Cay in the Exumas. This was her first experience at watching us lift anchor and taking off. Well, it didn't go so smoothly. For some reason, the anchor did not want to come up. We had been at that spot before, with no problems, but now, the chain would not budge. I was looking down to see if I could figure out what was going on, and as it was really calm, I was able to see, that there was an upside down sunken boat (NOT on the charts!!!) and that our chain was wrapped around the bow and stuck! What to do??? Well, luckily Warren knew a dive shop not too far away, so he hopped into the dinghy, and zoomed across the harbour in search of dive gear. Sure enough, not to long after, he got back with rented dive gear, suited up and dove down to go check on the situation below. Yep, the chain was definitely wrapped and stuck. He managed to get it all loose, and with a bit of extra luck, was able to get us free. We were sooooo happy! After returning all the gear to the shop, we managed to still leave for the Exumas, and had a wonderful day. 

For the last three weeks, we have been showing her our favourite spots in the Exumas. Sometimes we had lots of wind and had to stay put to wait for calmer weather, and sometimes we had no wind and had to motor. We even had several perfect days when we were able to actually sail! 
Right now we are in Bimini at a marina, with the wind howling, and we are waiting for a weather window to return back to Florida. It looks like tomorrow is going to be that day, but if the wind doesn't calm, we will stay another day in Paradise!

Downtown Nassau, Husband Day Care! But we really need our captain, so I guess we'll keep him a bit longer...

Conch Salad, a signature Bahamian dish, freshly prepared for us, and was it ever good. 

Warren, all suited up to go dive down and inspect the anchor and anchor chain. Never a dull moment when on a sailing adventure ...

Down he goes...

Rosa's first day of "sailing" on Betula. Not a breath of wind, so we motored, but we were treated to a most spectacular day. 

Shroud Cay. We drove up this mangrove river at low tide. Almost got stuck a couple of times, but were able to complete our journey. You can see the roots of the mangroves sticking out...low tide.

Still Shroud Cay. We walked up this little hill, and had a great view of the Atlantic.

On to Warderick Wells. Another of our favourite spots. It's really hard not to like it here...

We even sometimes just relax.... Rosa in the Hammock.

We sailed all the way back to George Town with her. I think the next two pictures explain why.... it's simply beautiful.

 Staniel Cay Marina - the Nurse Sharks. There were many more, I couldn't get them all into one picture.

Dinner in the cockpit...

Underway, on a calm day, with lot's of sunshine. We had to put up towels to give us some shade. Warren is fishing, but we had no luck that day....

A big event was when we came upon a large pod of pilot whales. There were at least 100 of them, split up into smaller groups like the one in the picture below. They were right beside our boat ... 

And later that day, another beautiful sunset...

Now we are in Bimini, waiting for weather to cross the Gulf Stream to go back to Florida. Not a bad spot to wait...

Killing time waiting in Bimini. Happy hour.... We are probably going to kill some more time tonight!

This is a conch mountain! Conch is well loved in the Bahamas, and it shows. How many salads do you think this pile of conch shells would have made??? Many, many...

Good bye from the Three Sailors!!!