Sailing Ohana

It was time to head south. The time came sooner than we had hoped, but we had such a good weather window that it made sense. We had promised ourselves that we would leave as soon as a window came up, or if the weather didn’t cooperate, we would start gradually working our way down,…

Sometimes people think that living on a sailboat is a full-time vacation. That is incorrect. It is definitely a break from “regular life”, but most days it is a lot of work. Stopping at Emerald Bay Marina felt a little like an actual vacation. We went to a restaurant where the boys frolicked in the…

The Vasel family flew to Great Exuma on Superbowl Sunday and we met them at the taxi drop off next to Exuma Market. It was a joyful reunion. We were so excited to have them aboard! We started off with dinner at the Peace and Plenty Hotel, since it would be our last bit of…

We knew we had to sail to Georgetown asap because the winds were picking up and we needed to get there to reprovision, clean up, and meet our friends from home, the Vasel family, who visited us last year. It ended up being a really rough passage, when the perfectly nice day got interrupted with…

Weather and wind on our Predict Wind app looked good to move from Farmer’s to Lee Stocking today, and maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. All I know is that we did make the move, and today sucked regardless of the weather. I woke up feeling pretty “meh”, and from there things just fell into…

A short sail away from Black Point is Little Farmer’s Cay. They have an annual First Friday of February Festival at Farmer’s, aka 5F’s, which had not been held since COVID, so everyone was really excited about it. We arrived at the anchorage just in time to watch the Cruisers’ Race from our boat. Our…

We were surprised to see that the anchorage at Black Point was really crowded when we arrived. We learned later that everyone was there for the grand reopening of Lorraine’s Cafe. Lorraine’s is right on the water with a dinghy dock, and is a favorite spot for cruisers to get conch, grouper, and Lorraine’s famous…

We were told by some other cruisers that Bitter Guana is one of their favorite islands, so we decided to check it out. Other than a mess of pink endangered iguanas, there are no other inhabitants. It was perhaps my favorite anchorage so far, because of its striking white cliffs and pristine water. There were…

Staniel was the first island we visited since checking in that has a marina, a community, and a couple of tiny markets. This was the also first anchorage where we were among a relativity large number of boats, so we assumed we’d start to see more kid boats. There are rarely any charter sailboats in…

We were excited about these islands because we skipped them last year, due to weather. We anchored off of Compass Cay where there is a short hike to a spot called “Rachel’s Bubbles”. It is a pool on the Northeast end of the island that gets big waves washing over one of the walls from…