Long time, no blog. Nov 24, by Annie


By Annie

We have arrived in the Caribbean!  
Playa Flamenco in Culebra, PR
Since we haven’t blogged in some time, I’ll back up just a bit to explain how we got here.  By late October, we were in the Hampton / Norfolk area in Virginia.  The kids and Daisy and I flew back to Wisconsin at the very end of October, while Rogge geared up and prepped the boat to do the Salty Dawg rally - the passage to the Caribbean across the Atlantic Ocean.  The rally is a group of people who get together to do the passage, not to sail in a pack exactly (since all the boats go different speeds), but there are lectures on the safety, routes and conditions you might encounter, and the organizers stay in touch with all the boats to give advice on weather updates during the passage itself.   

Rogge did the long passage with two friends and two family members.  The passage ended up being about 13 days.  They had some seasickness, and some challenges, but it sounds like it ended on a high note with several days of beautiful down-wind sailing in the trade winds.  I’ll let Rogge write about this further if he chooses since this was his journey.

While the kids and I were in Wisconsin, we spent the bulk of our time in Eau Claire visiting family, but also got to see some friends in Madison, which was great.  We also visited Wingra and caught up with friends and teachers there. Jack and Fox were really happy to get to do regular trick or treating in Eau Claire with their cousins (rather than marina trick or treating which is slim pickings).  We also did a LOT of chores including things like dental visits, flu shots, and vet visits.  On November 18th, Jack, Fox, Daisy, and I said goodbye to Wisconsin and our wool hats, and flew to San Juan to meet back up with the boat and Rogge. 

Returning to the boat was a breath of fresh air for me, since it meant that a) I had made it through the craziness of flying out of O’Hare with a dog and two kids, b) it was magically warm again!, c) I was no longer a nomad living out of suitcases, and d) we were finally in the tropics and now sailing in beautiful crystal clear waters. 

We are now in Culebra, and we are working on assimilating into Caribbean life.  The kids have resumed fishing and are now learning about what can be eaten here.  We are learning how to open and eat coconuts.  And we are rapidly getting used to being salty, since we just don’t have enough fresh water to always rinse after a swim.  Fox especially loves snorkeling, and it’s hard to keep him out of the water.   Daisy is learning how to keep cool, how to watch out for cacti, and how to hunt skinks (medium size lizards).  We all need to work on our Spanish though, which is going to be a great project for boat school.

We saw numerous sea turtles on our first day and have already spotted rays and lobsters as well.  Fox saw a small nurse shark (or maybe lemon shark?).  A remora aggressively tried to attach itself to me – I freaked out about that because I didn’t know what it was, and it just wouldn’t leave me alone, but it turns out they are harmless even if they attach.  We also got to see a spotted eagle ray off of Caya Luis Pena (an island close to Culebra).   We have also done some great body surfing. So far, it has been an awesome first few days here, and seems to have made all the difficult travel worthwhile.

Playa Flamenco on Culebra - this is the only crowded beach around, and really the only beach with more than 10 other people on it at any time.

 More pictures to follow - having slight malfunction with camera syncing at present.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Changes, again. By Annie

Image
Changes, again. We are seven months into one year of travelling.  Whew!  This has been a lot of travelling, although different from normal travel insofar as we travel with our house now, and don't have to pack for each new destination.  After sailing/moving nearly every day between June 2019, and November 2019, once we all made it to the Caribbean, we just wanted to stay in one place for awhile.  We spent about six weeks in Culebra, which we all regarded as our home away from home for that time.  This was interspersed with two one-week trips to St. John (including stops at St. Thomas on the way there and back each time).  This was followed by three weeks in Vieques.  During this time, we also had FOUR week-long visits from various family members - Rogge's mother, my sister and her family, Rogge's father and step-mom, and my mother.  Lots of fun to see family and catch up. As of last week, we are on the mainland of Puerto Rico, moving along the southern coast.  We are m
Read more

Sailing out of NYC, by Jack

Image
posted by Jack Yesterday we sailed out of New York City early in the morning.  It was a eight-hour sail. I pretty much slept through the whole thing except the first and last hours.  It was cool to see the statue of Liberty's front side from a distance.  When we finally finished the passage, we went to a stretch of a huge one hundred mile long beach that is the Jersey shore.  There were huge waves and huge clam shells.  Towards the end of our stay at the beach I saw a dorsal fin sticking up out of the water about 300 feet away.  I started to panic because I thought it was a shark.  When we were about half way in to the beach we looked back and saw four of them gliding out of the water and we realized that they were dolphins.  They continued to jump for a long time.  We don't have any pictures because they were too far away to really capture on camera. Statue of liberty on our way out of the harbor
Read more

The first two days, by Jack

Image
posted by Jack June 24:   It was the first official day of our endeavor.  We left Sturgeon Bay and headed for Green Island.  There is an abandoned light house on the island but when we got there the trail to it was overgrown and covered in poison ivy. Fox found a big fishing lure, and that’s when we started to get interested in fishing. We sailed to Peninsula state park and anchored for the night there. June 25: We all had a good first sleep on the boat (except for a minor drawback of a huge spider in my room). In the morning there were two more spiders, one big one in the bathroom and one in the parents’ room. We headed off for Washington Island, a four-and-a-half-hour sail.  To get there we needed to go through a passage called Port des Morts, French for Death’s Door. When we got there, we took a dinghy ride "from hell" over to Rock Island, a smaller island across from Washington. It was horrible because of the big waves and all the splashing. Rock Island was going
Read more