Sailing fixit hubby here, sorry it has been a while as I have been busy.   Wow, what a year!  Let us do a quick recap!  Sell everything, quit our jobs, buy a boat, sail to the Bahamas, see incredible things, get our ass kicked a few(dozen) times by weather, horribly miss family, meet incredible friends. fix a lot of things along the way, then come home.   That really describes the last 6 months of our life.  If you have followed along in the blog, you had a front row seat to the good times and the bad.    The combination of those two extremes is what we like to call “The Price Tag”.   The incredible days at Tahiti beach do not come without the crappy weather to get there.   The crystal-clear water of the Exuma Land and Sea park, do not come without the 10 days of enduring shitty weather at Royal Island.   Some of our cruiser friends have nicknamed it “Hotel California”.  You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave.  In many ways they were spot on!  Incredible views, crystal clear water but a 360-degree razor rock shore which made it impossible to leave the boat.  Now that we are back several people have asked was it worth it?   Sally and I have asked ourselves this as well.   To be honest, during the last 6 months we have only talked about selling the boat a half dozen times.  Ironically most of these coming from me, and not Sally.   Being pushed out of your comfort zone is not easy and comfortable, but also the only way to grow in life.   As it turns out Sally is better than I am at this.  Who knew!   

Back to the Price Tag.  The equation of good and bad is pretty equal in the grand scheme of things until you add the amount of incredible people we have meant along the way.   When you factor in those people the good greatly outweighs the bad.   In this already long post, I want to call out a few cruisers that made this season incredible.     

Let us start with Solo Sailor Ben.   We meant Ben at a “dingy drift” in Hope Town on Xmas Eve.   Basically, a dingy drift is where you meet up in your dingy at the center of the bay, with drinks and food.  We all tie our boats together and drift across the anchorage having a great time, until we run out of beer or anchorage space.   Ben is a solo sailor and also a bit older than us.    To give you some background, he sails his boat from Annapolis MD to the Bahamas by himself, most of it offshore.   This means for at least 5 days he did not really sleep, and if he does it is for 10 minutes at a time, knowing in the back of his mind he could get run over by a cargo ship at the next sleep break.   Oh, did I mention Ben is in his mid 70’s?   Ben is hard core.  I want to be him when I grow up!   Ben taught us a lot in the early days and is a lifelong friend!    Side note.  We came back to our boat one afternoon to find a case of beer sitting on the back of our boat.  Beer is like gold in the Bahamas, Hard to find and when you find it, it is expensive.   Ben left it for us because he thought we ran out.    

Next up is Sheet Music.   Sheet Music’s crew is Mike, Lisa and Chipper.  What a great couple for adventure, not to mention the coolest cruiser dog we have ever meant.   Incredible days at the Land and Sea Park picking up plastic, snorkeling, and playing cards in the evening.  What incredible times.   We had to part ways after those days only to be reunited in Long Island later in the voyage.  I am forever grateful to them for going out of their way to bring us an inverter which I somehow blew up one morning.  

Lees’On Life is next on the forever friends list.   We meant Jeff and Karen in Green Turtle Cay towards the end of our voyage.   Perhaps at the height of our most stressful period since we had boat issues at this time.   Not only did they help us secure a mooring in an overly crowded mooring field, but they were also a breath of fresh air we needed in that anchorage.   They were staging with us for the crossing back and we shared the trip back from the Abacos to St Augustine.  They stuck with us for the most stressful point of our trip back.  When left with the choice of getting back, they slowed down to stay with us to make sure we made it back to the states.  In doing so they prolonged the shitty crossing back to help us.  Incredible people we are blessed to meet.   

To save the most impactful for last it is Caribbean Dream.   Not even sure how to describe Wayne and Brenda.   We meant shortly after Hope Town on the crossing to Royal Island and were together until we made it back to St Augustine.  Basically, 4 out of the 5 months.     Brenda taught us how to make incredible “Brenda Bread”, and Wayne every morning endured the weather routers web cast to ensure we had the best options on the next passage.    We shared how much we missed family, how shitty the weather was, and how good the rum tasted.  Lifelong friends! 

If you are still here reading, let me say this one last thing.    Don’t discount the people you meet in life.   Sometimes they are the ones that make it incredible.   Sally and I never gave that idea a second thought.  This past year it taught us perhaps we should.