Time for a Reset – Jolly Harbor, Antigua, December 15, 2023

So lately all Ron has done is work on the boat since it seems as if everything is broken. Here’s one example, we paid someone to climb the mast for us only to find out that the spare wind sensor we had…was also broken. Well, now we get to buy a new one of those, in addition to a depth gage since ours is already 14+ years old and replace both of those…again. Not to mention the laundry list of other projects Ron has been constantly working on. At least we got the streaming light successfully replaced.

We had both been missing being home for Christmas and originally didn’t commit to being home. Well, we were going to attempt to make it to St. Marten to fly out but based on the huge north swell we have going on with 12ft seas, we decided to change our tickets and fly out directly from Jolly Harbor. This means we had two very tight layovers and went through security & Immigration 3 times but made all three flights to get home in one day. On the last leg, everyone was loaded on the plane when the captain came on and announced there was a mystery error code that they needed to fix and sadly they were not able to, so we all offloaded the plane and loaded everyone on a new one (at least they had one!). We made it to my sister’s where we were crashing for the next couple of weeks about 2:00am.

She was heading down to see my parents and we were cat sitting for the first week! The kitties were good and easy, so it was a non-event for us to manage them. They were gone the first week and then all the kids were spending Christmas together. We made a big turkey again, made a big hunt for their Christmas gifts, and a good time was had by all. We also had a chance to see all of them individually throughout the two weeks, so we got a good fill of family life again. The only downside is Ron and I both got a nice chest cold I can only assume from the airplane but at least that wasn’t COVID. We have one more week, post-Christmas, to enjoy the cold and cloudy Ohio before heading back and deciding what our continued sailing journey looks like. One suitcase full of spare parts is also going to accompany us down to the islands to help with our updates.