It’s interesting how our lives have changed since December. I started out expecting to be able to write more about our travels, more often than I’ve been able to. This life reminds me of our dogs, one malinois and a shepherd / malinois mix, and Maligator Mom’s video.

Where we’ve been

Since December, we:

• Spent Christmas in Fort Pierce with several new friends
• Fort Pierce to Miami, Dinner Key Marina
• Picked up a mooring ball, and flew back home for a bit (more on this later)
• Provisioned for the Bahamas
• Started our Bahamas Adventure the end of January
  • Dinner Key to Alice Town anchorage at Bimini
    • 30+ hours, left in the dead of night with no moon, thankful we have night vision and a good track to exit the reef
    • Learned a lot about the Gulf Stream, mistakes were made that slowed us down
  • Bimini to Mackie Shoal
    • Anchoring in the banks is a bit of a culture shock. You’re in a few feet of water, but it looks like you’re in the middle of an ocean, which you are
  • Mackie Shoal to Joulter Cay, another day hop
  • Joulter Cay to Morgan’s Bluff
    • We were pretty exhausted from the exposed anchorages the past two days of travel, and spent a couple days here
    • Met up with a BWC couple we’d met online, and joined their buddy boats for the next jump
  • Morgan’s Bluff to West Bay Nassau
    • Quick provisioning run, and then immediately left
  • West Bay to Big Major Cay / Staniel Cay
    • This was a really fun night time crossing over the banks
  • Big Major Cay to White Point / Jack’s Bay
  • White Point to Rudder’s Cut Cay – Saw the piano sculpture
  • Rudder’s Cut to George Town (GT)
  • GT to Long Island
  • Long Island to Conception Island
  • Conception Island to GT
  • GT to Norman’s Pond Cay / Lee Stocking
  • Norman’s Pond to Jack’s Bay
  • Jack’s Bay to Little Pipe Creek / Little Pipe Cay
  • Pipe Cay to Compass Cay / Rachel’s Bath
  • Compass Cay to Sandy Cay
  • Sandy Cay to Warderick Wells
  • Warderick Wells to Rudder Cut Cay
  • Rudder Cut Cay to GT

Big Highlights

The biggest was Janeane and I were baptized, confirmed, married, and received first communion on 1/18/2025. We had a lot of changes in our lives in 2023, which helped guide us to being out here a lot sooner than we expected. We’d never considered ourselves religious, as we hadn’t grown up with it, and it was a bit of an unknown. That changed for us this year, and we went through RCIA (the last class before it changed to OCIA) 2023 to 2024, our kids who were a big part of this became Catholic at Easter Vigil 2024, and Janeane and I had to delay our conversion until our annulment was approved. We received the final letter from the tribunal on 1/14, but had already booked our travel plans to be back in Reno, Nevada on 1/18.

Our kids were part of Mass that night as alter servers, and we were joined by a lot of family and friends for the event. Was a very special evening for us, and being able to see friends and family, even doing a makeup dinner to celebrate all the holidays with family made it priceless.

The Bahamas are an amazing place. As you learn a few things to watch out for when planning passages or day hops, it can be a very easy place to learn as you go. Our biggest lesson we learned on our passages down to Fort Pierce, where we got the ratio between time between waves in seconds and wave height in feet mixed up. We ended up doing a night time passage with 8′ waves that were 4 seconds apart, giving a 0.5:1 ratio.

A better way to do it is to have a 3:1 for max comfort and a 2:1 that is still comfortable but on the line of getting rough if conditions change. So we’d need 24 seconds between 8′ waves to be more comfortable. After learning this small tidbit, you can quickly look at the wave / wind combination, and tell if you should go or stay. Most of the sailing here in the Bahamas has had very small waves that make passages super comfortable.

One of the things we’ll be adding to our gear bag is an underwater camera. We’ve missed so many opportunities to capture some of the free diving we’ve done since getting here, and having a camera will help to capture it a bit more next year. Here are a few pics we’ve taken in our time here.

Challenges

The last few months have been very challenging, more so than we were prepared for. I mentioned in Getting Started… how we are the ones that make this life 1000x better and a 1000x harder, along with how jumping from life on land to boat life strips you of the guard rails that made land life so easy.

One other thing that is said is the first year is the hardest because everything is new.

We’ve been struggling with Finances, Boat Projects, and Relationship challenges.

Finances

On the Finances, this one is probably the easiest to understand. We retired in October, and moved to a fixed income. Our mindset didn’t change fast enough from having an income to being on a fixed income, and doing the East Coast shuffle for longer than expected led to us seeing everything on the boat as an emergency that we “had” to spend money to fix. Making it to the Bahamas was a huge step in learning that we can say No to spending money, and as purchases come up, we can have more control over where we want our money to go. Since getting here, we’ve spent very little, which has helped a lot to stay on track with our budget. We spend money on food and fuel, and maybe a mooring ball in state parks from time to time. There’s not a lot of shopping opportunities in the Bahamas, unless you’re in Nassau, which we prefer to avoid. We’ve chosen to motor a bit more than we have to, in order to get to destinations faster when the wind isn’t coming from the desired direction, which has increased fuel costs. We’re still using the generator to charge the batteries, but we’ve gone from 6 hours a day to 1 to 2 hours now that our Victron Quattro is installed, which has cut down on fuel costs.

Boat Projects

Boat Projects are an interesting subject. You could easily focus all of your time at the dock working to get your boat exactly perfect for your travels, and never get out here. Your budget may allow you to do the work faster, or given your finances, you may choose to do the work yourself, which takes more time. We chose to leave the dock on December 1st without a working windlass, inverter, water maker, and dinghy engine.

Family helped us get a new dinghy engine, after a dangerous and difficult situation happened in Fort Pierce that required Boat US to tow the dinghy back to the boat. The windlass was an electrical and user error issue, and once we figured out both, it’s worked quite well the rest of the trip. The inverter took longer to get installed than expected, but once installed, it has really helped us to improve our comfort on the boat.

The water maker turned out to be a much more challenging fix, and not having the ability to make water out here is such a struggle. We have a Cruise RO 30 gph unit with two 40″ membranes. The original install location placed the inlet and strainer in the forward port berth, the membranes / boost pump / filters / control panel under the mast, and the high pressure pump near the stern bathroom on the port side. What ended up being the issue was the distance from the thru hull to the boost pump and the distance from the boost pump to the high pressure pump was too far. The boost pump needed to be closer to the thru hull, to reduce the pulling of water to the boost pump. It turns out these pumps can push water quite well over long distances, but they’re horrible at sucking water into the boat. Our fix was to move the boost pump next to the strainer and thru hull, move the 20 and 5 micron filters into the bilge between the boost pump and high pressure pump, and then connect everything to the high pressure pump. This changed the total length of hose from ~ 30′ to maybe 15′, with the boost pump only 3′ from the thru hull.

By being able to push a lot more water to the high pressure pump, our flow rate increased to 36 gph or a bit more, which helps a lot to fill the tanks fast. This has allowed us to use fresh water for a lot of basic things, like showering regularly, that we took for granted while on land.

We’re finally at a point where all major systems on the boat are functioning well, and we’ve been able to start tackling regular maintenance tasks to help us keep it that way. This is a huge accomplishment for us, and part of the first year struggles that make it so tough.

Relationships

This has by far been the biggest challenge for everyone. As I touched on earlier, we make things 1000x harder on the boat, the first year is the hardest because everything is new, and without the guard rails of land life, you are responsible for fixing everything.

Add in life to the mix, and it gets even more challenging. We sold and gave away most of our belongings. We left our friends and family. We left the comfort of our land life, our security, and our community. We lost loved ones.

It turns out this can all be a bit much. We humans tend to bottle things up, avoid things that are painful, and expect ourselves to be able to handle any situation that comes up, even when we’re exhausted. When we know that’s impossible, we still tend to act like we can do it all, and when we can’t do it all or we’ve ignored it for far too long, it becomes too much to handle.

All of this manifests in different ways.

For those with trauma in their past, there’s a tendency to view everything that goes wrong as justification that they’re a bad, horrible person that can’t do anything right. It leads to a PTSD type of reaction, where when a system on the boat fails, they view that failure as a personal attack against them or justification that the world is out to get them. They no longer see the simple task in front of them as something they can do, and view it instead as an impossible mountain they’ll never be able to summit.

Personalities also play a big part in how we respond to the boat breaking. There are those of us who like things done our way, and prefer to just do it ourselves than risk it being done the wrong way. There are those of us who need to prove our worth to others, which leads them to doing things without help in a dangerous way. I admire solo sailors because they’re truly on their own at times, but if you do have a crew like we have, not asking for help just makes life more difficult for everyone.

The last part has to do with how easy our life was on land, and how much self reliance we’ve lost as a people. On a boat, you’re often in the middle of no where with no access to a marina or technician to fix things for you. When you’re new to this life, it can feel very overwhelming to know that you have to fix something, with zero experience working with that system. Thankfully we have Starlink so we can Google or use YouTube to figure out how to fix things, but it takes time to build that muscle of self reliance.

What does this all mean? Often we’re so pre-occupied by our internal monologue of how bad we are or how difficult life is, that we tend to get in our own way making life rather difficult out here. I’ve watched countless YouTube channels talking about the things that are difficult out here, and then watched how they’re attacked and savaged for being in a place many view as paradise. Oddly, I think we fell into that trap a bit, where we had no point of reference to understand what they were going through, and although we were supportive of them, there was just no way for us to fully understand what they were sharing with us.

And it’s not all bad. Our family is talking more, we’re more supportive of each other as we see the crew struggling, and now that many of the key systems on the boat are reliable and working properly, we have time to relax a bit more. The crew is becoming far more self reliant, they’re learning how to problem solve, and how to work in challenging conditions, safely. We still have a long ways to go, but we’re making progress and that feels really good.