Day 3 – Dolphins and thunderstorms

The past 24 hours have been generally good – we’re sailing fast (7.8 knots at the moment on a broad reach), and we’ve made 149 miles in the last day.  We had our first company in a day as well, as a large US Coast Guard cutter just went past us. Last night, our evening settled in

Day 5 – On the Gulfstream Express

Howdy from somewhere north of Bermuda. Today has brought the arrival of the Gulfstream current and a number of changes come along with it. The best part is we have had a 2-2.5 knot push all morning and that combined with a 15 knot sw’ly is giving us a speed over ground consistently over 10 knots!  For

Day 2 – the Delaware sent her biting flies with us!

We transited the C&D canal in the evening and made it to the Delaware Bay’s narrow, busy shipping lanes at dark.  Our new AIS receiver showed locations, speeds, directions and destinations of the shipping traffic, which was great. We also had favorable current for most of our time in the bay, which meant that when

Day 1 – Leaving Annapolis

> We managed to cross the last few things off the list and pulled away from the dock, relieved to be on our way. The weather has been Texas-hot, with a bit more humidity and many more mosquitoes. We only had a dozen or so super challenges, ranging from a minor crisis trying to chase

The Final Countdown!

It’s almost the end of June and that means we are shoving off in less than a week.  The original goal was to leave Annapolis Tuesday evening, BUT Chris has been in Annapolis since last Tuesday and she has been working so hard and been so successful at getting our long, long list of to

Back in the saddle again…

The Travel lift saddle that is.  Yesterday was launch day again and hopefully we’ll be in the water for a long time this time.  Chris arrived in Philadelphia on Monday, collected all of our goodies from her Mom’s in New Jersey and moved onto the boat Tuesday morning. It’s only been 2.5 days, but the

Tempering the tantrums

Norman, a 55th Security Forces Squadron military working dog, waits to be unleashed and go after his target during training April 17. The Offutt K-9 unit performs regular training to maximize the dogs effectiveness in the field. (U.S. Air Force Photo by Josh Plueger)

I leave for the states on Monday, but we’ve been hard at work in Madrid…trying to micromanage some contractor work on the boat.  Neither one of us likes being micromanaged, but we’re trying to wrap our heads around how a project that was anticipated to take 2 hours has now ballooned into a project that

Inspiring thoughts…

One of my long-time friends, Sara and her husband (and two little girls) are off sailing the south seas – they’re actually in the Tuamotus at the moment, in the South Pacific.  I knew Sara from high school, as we were in many of the same classes together.  Fast forward some years later after high

T-minus one month to blast off!

Side note: If you can read this blog post then we were successful at testing out posting via the XGate email service that we will be using in conjunction with an Iridium 9555 satellite phone. We just passed the one month to go mark for our planned departure from Annapolis. I thought it was interesting

Stormy Weather

One of the things we get asked constantly by non-sailors and even some sailors is “what about storms?” or more specifically “what about hurricanes?” It hasn’t helped matters that for the first time in recorded history both the Eastern Pacific and the Atlantic had their first named storms of the year before June 1st. While

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