a few new pics..updates coming soon!! Promise!

leaving Nassau harbour

the enormous amount of meat we got from the 50 inch Mahi Mahi Ben pulled in on the way back to Florida! We ate fish for days!

Ben's big fish

Hi everyone!!

So here we are in Florida! We are in the Miami area & yes everything is fine! We are gearing up for a new adventure & will tell you all the plan shortly! Here are a few pictures of our last few weeks in the Bahamas!! Story & plans to come!

Pics

Here are some pictures from the past few weeks. enjoy!

yes, thats my finger in the pig's nose.

Skippy wanted to get them soooooo bad!

My barracuda

Ben & the lizard having a stand off

cute little birds

great hunter

Hi everyone!
We finally made our way to Georgetown & caught up with our Aussie friends Sarah, Hamish, & Jack & are really excited about it! We thought we’d never catch them since they left the states so far ahead of us. We’ve been having a blast & have finally got some real provisioning done with some actual vegetables & fresh fruit, so we are feeling good! It’s unbelievably hard to find real produce here! No one can grow it, because the ground is all coral & limestone & has no nutrients in it. It’s all low lying bushes & an occasional palm tree & sparse scraggly pine trees.
Georgetown is a world all in it’s own. It’s the hub for cruisers in the Bahamas. Some cruisers spend the whole season here alone visiting hardly any other islands. There are nets on the radio every morning announcing the events coming up & the activities offered for the day. We were told by a man in the coffee shop in Oriental North Carolina that Georgetown is like day camp for adults & he was correct! You can choose to do yoga on the beach at 9am, church on Sundays, volleyball, bridge games, Texas hold ‘em tournaments, trivial pursuit in the evening, valentines dances,
Races, cocktail hour on the beach, etc…… it’s so funny! I really do feel like I’m at camp! We have never done any of the activities, because we are so busy doing our own things, but every morning when the radio announcements go on you can hear it echo across the harbor like a loud speaker, because every single boat has it on & even if you don’t you can hear it. Everyone keeps their vhf on channel 68 & it’s really busy all day everyday. People here snoop on other people’s conversations & it’s actually really fun to do so sometimes. We have been known to do it to friends. When you call on it, it feels like your phone is being tapped though. You have to be really careful not to offend anyone, because everyone is listening to your conversation.
The whole group of us from Free @ last, Wind-borne, and Nauti Girl hiked across the island yesterday & the guys went on the hunt for some fish with their spears. They didn’t have too much luck, because the reef was relatively empty of good eating fish & the one big grouper they did see was out of season, so they couldn’t spear it. We all had fun though. There was an 8 foot black tip shark in the water with them towards the end. It was right next to Ben, but he was so concentrated on fishing that he never saw it!
We are heading into town again today to work on the internet for an hour or so, I’m writing this up in the Boat right now & we will paste it into the blog when we get over there. They charge for Internet by the hour here in Georgetown, so we are trying to write things up now to make it cheaper. We have tons & tons of photos to put on & will try to do as many as possible this morning!
After we wrote at Staniel Key last week we went to the island just above it called Big Majors Spot. We found Sarabande there again which was awesome & we also found the “wild” pigs of the island & had a blast with those! These pigs know you are going to feed them, so they swim out to your dinghy as you are coming in & open their mouths so you can toss food in! They get so excited & squeal & swim over each other to get closest to your boat! Skippy touched noses with the biggest one! He was so excited about them he was shaking! He wanted out of the boat really really bad, & we had to hold him down the entire time….Thaat’s why he is in all the pig pictures…we were trying to contain him & feed the pigs while keeping the dinghy from floating away, & also take pictures. Pretty hectic, but fun!
We also had a really nice fire on the beach & cooked dinner with Alicia & Brian. Their dog Louis & Skippy got to hang out. Skippy wasn’t really into sharing his prime space in front of the food cooking on the fire though & was a little snappy at poor Louis most of the night though. Louis didn’t seem to mind. He was thrilled to be on land!
Well, we hope to update you again fairly soon. Hope everything is going well at home & we look forward to hearing from you! We still miss you & can’t wait to see you when we get home!

-Kristen, Ben, & Skippy the wild pig hunter

The Computer lives to see another day!

Hi!!!
Our computer is miraculously working again for the moment! We have been checking e-mails & trying to skype people. Hope you are all doing well back home!
We are in Staniel Cay. We are stuck here until the weather clears up next week. We will be headed to Georgetown to meet up with "Free At Last" so that will be really fun!! Staniel Cay is pretty cool. It's a small laid back island with nice people. We went for a walk to the "grocery store" the other day & it ended up being a small house up someones driveway & there was just a little bit of most of the staples that we needed.
Everyone has a huge interest in Skippy here. It's so funny. We can't walk him anywhere without locals asking us about him. "does he bite?" is the most common question & "is he a snow dog from Alaska?" is the second. Everyone thinks he is a husky... weird. We were coming down the driveway & the little kids playing at the bottom were completely freaked out by him, but wanted to touch him really bad, so after some coaxing they all got to pet him & the smallest little boy who couldn't have been more than 3 or 4 insisted on walking him. ...he didn't get very far before skippy pulled the leash out of his hand & kept on going. THey were really happy though. None of them had seen a dog like him before, let alone walked one!
We were off to find the post office after our grocery adventure & never did. I guess it is a green house on the island & you just go up & knock on the door & the lady takes your mail. I saw three green houses & really didn't want to knock on them all, because I thought it might be rude, so we will hold our mail until Georgetown.
The coolest part of Staniel Cay is something we are waiting to see when it gets sunny out. It is Thunderball cave! It's a cave you swim into & it opens up & there is a huge skylight in the top that makes the water a crazy color apparently. I'm a little nervous about swiming out here though, because yesterday we saw 9 sharks & I caught the worlds largest Barracuda the other day really close to the caves on accident. We will just be extra carefull when jumping in. THe Barracuda was insane!! We can't stop talking about it! We had the fishing lines out finally, because we are out of the no fishing areas in the Park anymore & we were heading around a small rock island to anchor & Bam.. fish on the line, so Ben drove the boat slowly around the rock as I tried my best to reel in this monster who kept taking all my line out as soon as I had reeled any in & Ben ended up having to throw the anchor down right there. The Barracuda would not stop fighting. It was a really good jumper too.I got it to us & we didn't want it in the boat, because of it's razor teeth, so Ben had the gaff hook out there & as the fish was fighting & flailing it's 4 foot self around he managed to yank the hook out. We were releaved! We got some nice pictures of it though.
We caught a few more small fish & kept the one that was actually big enough to eat. It's nice to be catching our own food again!! When we get to Gtown Ben will go spear fishing & get us some big groupers hopefully. We don't want to spear fish here, because we can't imagine swiming around with a bloody fish in the middle of all these sharks. No thank you!

-well, keep on writing comments! We like to read them! Hello April, Kevin, & Kelly! Thanks for writing! It's good to hear from you! :)

-Kristen, Ben, & Skippy

Kristen here,

  So here we are in the Exuma Cays land and sea park. 

   We are at Shroud Cay at the moment. We are having a good time just taking it easy & making our way south. We got in contact with a few of our cruising friends in the last few days & hope to be meeting up with two of them very shortly. We are anchored next to our identical twin & its funny looking out over the anchorage & seeing what appears to be our boat, but with a white dodger rather than our green one. Pretty cool though. We are also anchored next to the very same Seawind 1160 catamaran that we have been pining over since we went on it at the Miami boat show last year. The owners (who we met at the show) saw us ogling their boat with binoculars as we passed it in an anchorage two days ago & called out to us as we dinghyed by yesterday. Small world. 

    We went through a really cool river that is just barely deep enough to maneuver through in some parts yesterday as well. It cuts through the entire island & winds around cutting through the awesome mangroves & coral. We saw lots of fish & even a small shark! We felt like we were on the Amazon or something. We came out on the other side of the island, beached the dink & went off in search of  “camp driftwood” which was said to be “something that you had to see to believe!” We searched high & low & came across the remains of what we believe was the camp. Not really very exciting…. Nothing exciting to see really….. We think it was cleaned up & disbanded recently. Pretty area though. 

   We are going to do a dive today. (I hope we don’t see any more sharks)  I have a serious fear of large fish… For some reason I still like to dive though. Ben bought me a dive knife so I will feel better, even though I’m sure I won’t need it. 

    I really doubt that I will be in the water at all during our stop at the next island on our list: Warderick wells. I’m so excited to see it, but in the guidebook we have it says that there are a few “residents” that we should be aware of, along with a 5’nurse shark making it’s home at the anchorage there is a huge barracuda named Bubba who circles boats looking for food & likes to follow swimmers around looking for a snack occasionally “gnashing his teeth” at people! (I’d also like to mention that the former caretaker of the next island down is said to have bled to death from a barracuda bite!!!) Also residing at the island are “Boo Boo” & “The harbormaster” two lemon sharks. “Keep an eye out for them” it says. “They are magnificent & great to take pictures of…but by all means stay out of the water if in doubt” Ummm, I certainly will. 

    So, the last time we updated you we were in Nassau. We headed out a day or two later after walking around town & heading over to check out Atlantis. Which is by far the coolest (& most expensive) hotel I’ve ever seen. We tied up at the dock & walked around the “village” which was full of quaint little shops, a Starbucks (which charged a dollar more per drink than the one in Nassau), & upscale Boutiques such as Cartier & Louis Vuitton. 

After finding our way through the large casino, we found our way through the maze of lush tropical plants, waterfalls, and wooden bridges to the aquarium. I loved the aquarium!!! We walked through the “underwater Mayan temple” with floor to ceiling windows showing us large sting rays, eagle rays, groupers, lion fish, lobsters, jellyfish, etc….We came out in the end near some impressive fountains with huge rolling marbles & headed up the stairs to some more expensive shops & wound through the maze to find ourselves outside again in another garden like setting under the “bridge suite” Very cool. 

  No one was swimming & the slides were empty, because it was really cold & windy, but it was still really cool! If we can get our camera to download onto the computer we will post pictures. The usb ports are working rather poorly right now. I’m afraid the laptop is heading downhill…. Ben did do a wonderful job installing a new keyboard though, so now we can type without the aid of a stick to poke into the holes that were once keys. I for one am elated!!!

   Life is really pretty good right now. We are finally starting to wind down. The last few days are the first since buying the boat that we have taken time off not to work on it all day. We are enjoying just being on it & sailing it island to island looking for the next cool thing to check out. Life has also gotten a little simpler & a lot cheaper since we have been catching our own food & gotten out of the cities & towns here! In Nassau groceries alone could break us! Small box of pop tarts $6.00, Milk $6.00, Ice $6.00 per bag, apples $1.20 each, small mushy potatoes $.75 each, bag of coffee $13.00, case of beer $50.00! It’s insane!! We came out of the grocery store with a head of cabbage, eggs, boxed milk, and tang! (The cheapest things I could get my hands on!) We went to the bar to use the internet while we were updating the blog last time, got a little distracted by the football game on TV, & without thinking ordered one appetizer to share & a couple drinks & came out with an $80.00 tab!!! We are really glad to be out of there & catching free food! We need to make up for spending all that money! We are putting ourselves on a pretty strict budget from here on out. (at least in the Bahamas anyway) Our friends Jan & Rich are way smarter than us. They sailed to Mexico & skipped the Bahamas, and therefore avoid the money trap! Very tempting!! I think the funniest part of Nassau was the local’s reaction to Skippy. Pretty much everyone was afraid of him, and had no idea what he was, but Ben did get an interesting offer to set him up with a nice female dog companion. We politely declined the offer.

   We are in a park right now though, so officially we are not allowed to fish for anything, so we will have to sail outside the park to get some when weather conditions are right. Skippy has picked up an interesting new hobby. Conch hunting!! Yes, conch. The big pink & yellow shells that make excellent horns and good fritters. We were wading in the water a few days ago at an island that I forgot to mention earlier that was really cool. There were tons of conch shells all over in the water. We were walking around about waist deep trying to find legal sized ones to keep & we were picking them up inspecting them, then placing them back in the water when Skippy decided to join in. He waded out, picked one up, brought it back to shore, and then started a little pile where he sat down & proceeded to chew on one to get the large snail inside!!! So funny!!! We didn’t let him actually chew through the shells to eat them, but he was well on his way to accomplishing that goal. Now when he spots a shell in the water he wades out & barks at it. Strange dog we have!

    He was also having a great time trying to intimidate the large iguanas that also inhabit this island. There are hundreds of them & over the years of tourists & cruisers feeding them they come out of the bushes at you & chase you down expecting food. Ben & I actually got chased up & down the beach by a particularly large specimen who was really feisty!! Ben had his sweater out in front of us like a bullfighter trying to distract it & block us from it, since we read that they do occasionally bite people & we were not into being those people! It was nice to have Skippy with us at this island, because all the iguanas except a really, really huge one who he had a stand off with were afraid of him, so they stayed away for the most part. They were fun to see though. It was especially funny to watch other cruisers arriving at the island for the first time & go running away from the bushes after the iguanas they were trying to take a picture of would suddenly take a leap towards them hoping for some food. Lots of squealing, running, & surprised looks! Good fun! 

    Well, I am going to go suit up for my dive now. Ben is getting antsy! Hope to hear from you all soon. We miss you!! Thanks again for reading & keeping up on us! We do miss you all & are thinking of everyone back home on the mainland a lot! 

Love,

Kristen, Ben & Skippy the great Conch, lizard, and Iguana hunter.

We also caught two tasty fish we are calling stripe on the way to the Exumas…  

We have also had steady 15 knot Easterly to North-easterly winds and sailing has been a dream!!! Nice broad reaches through turquoise waters…

Ben

It’s been a few days since we wrote the last entry above, but we haven’t had Internet access yet, so we will just keep this one running & add onto it until we can post it all at once. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long one by the time it gets on the Internet. We are having more troubles with our computer (big surprise) it turns out the usb ports are pretty much shot & our Internet antenna is not connecting to it like it should be. We aren’t really sure what to do about it, but we can’t really get any contact with the outside world until we get this fixed. There really aren’t many options though. We are in the middle of nowhere after all. We will just keep adding to this blog until we can post it & try to keep you updated when we can.

    Anyhoo…

   We are still in the Exuma Land & Sea Park & by crazy coincidence literally nearly collided with our friends Brian & Alicia on Sarabande!! We were sailing outside the park trying to get some fish & our paths crossed just in front of each other. It was pretty cool & we got some pictures of each other sailing, so when we swap those pics we will post them for you! We all headed in to Warderick Wells. It’s the park’s headquarters & supposed to be a really cool place to check out. I’m looking forward to spending some time with our friends from the boat yard in Oriental. They have already been in the Bahamas for two months, because they made the jump out way up in North Carolina. 

   I think we may go check out a sunken ship today that is the same model as theirs, so that’s pretty sweet. I heard there is a nurse shark living in it, but luckily it is said to be slow & harmless. It’s those pesky lemon sharks & Bubba that we need to watch out for. I can’t believe I’m considering getting in the water here. I remember stating in the last blog that I would never consider it… Oh the power of peer pressure. 

   Thanks for being patient & not giving up on our blog just yet. 

  We will keep you as updated as possible.

     We may have some friends coming out to join us soon, which would be awesome!!! We are looking forward to seeing people from home again!!

Ok, so this may be the last entry for a while…. Our computer went online for a few minutes today & we got a few e-mails out, however it is no longer working, so we may be out of luck from here on out….. I will keep up on writing the blog on Microsoft word just in case I can hop on a computer every once in a while & download it. It’s looking like our computer is on it’s way out the door & we have no way to fix it. We will keep up on the spots though, so check in on that & check the blog to see if we have gotten online every once & a while. 

  I am downloading this on our zip drive & taking it over to Sarabande’s computer to download it there & put it online. They have been really amazing & let us hijack their computer for the day so we could make calls to service reps etc… to try & come up with some solutions to our issues. 

   We still miss you all & hope you are doing well back home. We will try our best to keep in touch. 

-Kristen

oh, P.S. 

  We did go dive down & check out the sunken ship in the North anchorage & we did not see any sharks luckily. It's weird, because it is the same boat as Brian & Alicia's. They took some pictures of it. It was really cool. I feel brave today.. 

   

  

Random pictures

crazy blue water on the left, flat Gulf stream on the right

scary mackeral , and Ben's "Jack"

John's Tuna & Ben's mackeral again

first sight of land & Skippy going for a swim in the Bahamas

last stop in Florida, Lake Sylvia









Ben up the mast

Kristen sewing up the sails

Skippy's favorite spot





our christmas tree this year. ...are we ever going to have a normal one?

we'll put more on when we can.

Nassau at last!

Hey Everyone!!
Yes! We finally made it to the Bahamas! You can see our path by going to our SPOT web map. I posted the address on a previous blog, so go back after you read this & check for the link. Or… http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=09GSAiPTTFXn5LSfvHcSLmWKCn7rGBi9j
First things first though……Sorry we haven’t written lately!! We were under a serious time crunch to get work done & we are now missing 4 major letter keys on our keyboard, so it is really hard to type without a T,I,O,& N!!!!! There are little holes where the keys used to be, but you have to stick something in hem to push the letter, which makes typing really slow & difficult. The P & U are on their way out too, so don’t expect many long blogs after this, it’s just way too hard. Sorry!!
Also, we haven’t written since before Christmas I think, So Ill tell you about that first!
We had a great Christmas despite running out of gas under a bridge & having to hoist the sails & get ourselves down the crazy red/green path that is the ICW to a spot deep enough to anchor, then send Ben a mile or more out in the dink to retrieve gas (which he ended up having to walk like 4 miles with) then we continued our lovely journey to Cocoa where Kristen cooked up a nice dinner & we had eggnog & rums. We went to bed fairly early & opened presents in the morning. (Skippy opened his too!!)
Then we set out for another few days of motoring & made it eventually to Lettuce lake near Ben’s grandpa Reg’s house!! We were excited to get there!! We had a terrible few days previously & still maintain the opinion that Southern Florida is a useless place with terrible people and we hope never to return!!! Seriously!! (except the scuba guy who was extremely helpful & surprisingly friendly)
So… We were in Lettuce Lake & only a canal away from Reg’s house. Very nice. Reg drove us to the post office where four of our packages were waiting for us!! We were soooo excited to open them!!! We received mom’s, Ma & Pa Davidson’s, Doug & Janet’s, and Cy’s!! Thank you all!! We however did not receive Tylers, Jessica’s, Mary’s, or Doug’s packages!! The post office ladies where we sent our mail didn’t want to hold it….even though they are supposed to & sent some of it to the next post office over & some of it back to it’s senders…totally illegal, but arguing was a loosing battle, so we are really, really sorry to those of you who’s packages were sent back!! We were eagerly looking forward to seeing what you sent!! Thank you so much for thinking of us & trying so hard to get your packages all the way over here on time. Once again, we hate Florida, nothing is right here!!
We will see you all in summer though, so we can have Christmas in July!!!J
Anyway, Seeing Reg was nice & Ben’s dad John came in on the first, which was awesome & the three of us spent the next few days working like mad on the boat. Ben went up the mast & they pulled the turbo & reinstalled the new one. We did all of our provisioning & everything else we needed done, then said goodbye to Reg & set off for Lake Sylvia in Fort Lauderdale where we were ready to hit the high seas around 3:00 am.
After the sun came up It was beautiful!! The dreaded Gulf stream was calm & flat. I for one was elated!!! We have been warned & heard the horror stories of the Gulf stream when the winds aren’t just right. We didn’t have enough wind to sail alone, so we motor sailed across. We made it in 12 hours & arrived at 3:00 in the afternoon! Which is awesome, because we were estimating 14 hours!!
Things were looking up since leaving Florida behind!! Not only did we make amazing time in flat, calm seas, but Ben caught a Mahi Mahi!!! It was delicious!! We had it for dinner that night!
The next morning we woke up & headed out in the ocean again after some more work to the boat for an overnighter to the Berry islands. We had a fine crossing and a full moon!! We also had Tuna for dinner, because John caught one on the way!! It was even better than the Mahi!! Our luck was truly looking up!!
We made our destination at around 3:30 in he morning & settled in. We all slept in pretty late & lounged around most of the day. We took the dinghy to shore where the white sand beaches are like nothing you’ve ever seen before!!! It’s like white talcum powder!! I forgot to mention the water too!! You have never seen water like his before!! We can’t stop looking at I!! Its the most outrageous electric blue color!! The visibility Is 100 or more feet too!! Crazy! We went for a swim & headed out for our new anchorage 10 miles away on a new island. We were in a bit of a race to get John to the airport in Nassau by today, so we were traveling quickly, because we left Florida a lot later than expected. We were still having a lot of fun & the guys pulled up another fish that we are calling a Jack, but aren’t really sure about & that one was delicious too!!
We are definitely not going to go hungry anytime soon, because after that we pulled up the biggest & freakiest fish yet…a Spanish mackerel. I was huge & also really tasty!! We have mastered he art of trolling a line, now we have to see how we do with spear fishing!!! I’m very excited!! I think we have to finish eating that 11 lbs of mackerel we have in the fridge first though.
Well, we are off again to get John to another port on New Providence (which is he island Nassau is on) we are currently in West Bay. He will catch his plane in a few hours.
We will try to keep up our blog, but it is becoming increasingly difficult & the Internet is spotty down here!! Keep up on the spots to see where we are!!
We really miss you all & can’t wait to hear from you!!!

-So we tried to head up the island to get John to the marina and in the middle of crashing through waves in the channel, a big fish hit! Ben had put the line out after raising anchor trying for one more. We had to turn back because of the large swell, but not before landing a huge Red Snapper!!! We got John a hitchhike ride to the airport and hope that went well. Anyways, we have to go eat some fish! 5 different fishies in 5 days!!

-Hey agian, it's been a few days since John went home & we haven't been able to get internet , so it's been a few days since I wrote the blog above. Just wanted to say we made it to Nassau & will be headed to the Exumas on Wednesday or Thursday & don't know when we will have access again after that. Please keep writing to us though.

P.S. Doug, I got your message & wanted to say hi!!! We will call soon.

-Krsten, Ben, & Skippy!