Sailing Ohana

I have been wanting to write a “final” blog post about our time with SV Ohana, but I always end up feeling like it is too soon, or I’m not in a great place about it emotionally, or I’m busy, or not sure, or some other excuse would come up. It is daunting to try…

Travel is good for so many things… One big one is that it shows you how much we all take for granted at home. Charter boats in the Virgin Islands get abused. Not all of them, but a lot of them. This year is different from last year in many ways, but one thing definitely…

Our final voyage in the Bahamas was crossing the Great Bahama Bank overnight. It’s a beautiful crossing that we did last season, and the water is less than 20 ft. deep the whole time. We decided to do it overnight so that we could enjoy a day snorkeling on a reef that looked like it…

The name of the island Eleuthera comes from the Greek word for “freedom” so there are a lot of references to freedom there. It is another favorite island for our family. Eleuthera gets more rain and is more mountainous than the rest of the Bahamas, so there is a lot of farming, wildlife, birds, and…

We spent the last day creating this little website (below) for selling the boat. It has 3 pages which include photos and details. We will hopefully have showings lined up when we get back to Florida, and already seem to have some fairly interested buyers from our Kids4Sail contacts and a couple of sailboat groups.…

The most exciting part of Cat Island this season was the trip there. We caught a good sized tuna, and while we were reeling it in, the boys spotted something in the water, in the distance. At first we couldn’t tell what it was, but Jackson quickly identified it as whales! Jackson and Spencer got…

We visited Long Island last season with about 10 other kid boats. This year it was just us, so it was a very different experience. We anchored in the Southernmost bay on the west side of the island after crossing from Crooked to Long and catching a couple of tunas along the way. The anchorage…

When we were in Georgetown earlier this season we met a couple who said their favorite place in the Bahamas was Crooked Island. They spoke of incredible snorkeling, great spearfishing, pristine water, and the nicest people in the whole country. That couple was right. They mentioned a “restaurant” on Crooked, which has been in the…

We landed in Jamaica Bay on the Southern tip of Acklins where we anchored in a totally peaceful bay, all by ourselves. Acklins and Crooked are not well-known, probably because they are a bit out of the way, and have very few amenities. My book describes these islands (and Inagua) like the Outback of the…

We caught a mahi mahi on the passage from Puerto Rico to Great Inagua, which was exciting after such a long time without fish, and we had a delicious dinner at sea that night, and re-filled the freezer with more. But mostly during the passage we laid around and snacked. I was reminded of this…