David’s Voyage Blog

Location: Greenwich Bay, Rhode Island
Coordinates: 41° 40.216′ N  71° 25.964′ W

As the remnants of Hurricane Irene track across New England, we are very thankful aboard Three@Sea that we weathered the storm safely. We are still at anchor in Greenwich Bay, and the winds are dying down: now about 20 knots with gusts in the 30s. Our experience with the storm was not as severe as we expected and prepared for, which is just the way you want it. We experienced sustained winds in the 40-knot range, with maximum gusts in the 60-knot range. Don’t get me wrong — winds in that range are no picnic — but it doesn’t compare to hurricane-force winds. Here is some video footage that we took during the storm:

As we look back at the experience, we realize that the hardest part was making decisions in the face of uncertainty. Some of the questions we had to answer for ourselves were:

• Should we haul the boat out of the water and put it on blocks?
• If we stay in the water, should we stay in the marina or move out to anchor?
• If we move out to anchor, where should we go that will give us adequate protection from the storm?
• Should we deploy one anchor or two, and how should they be deployed?
• Once we have the boat securely anchored, should we stay aboard or evacuate?

We had to answer these questions carefully and deliberately, and we had to get comfortable that whatever happened during the storm, we would not second-guess (or regret) our decisions. After studying the storm carefully using multiple sources, evaluating our situation at the marina, and assessing the capabilities of our ship, we decided to move out of the marina and anchor during the storm. We’re glad we did, and probably just as important, had the storm delivered the hurricane-force winds that were possible we think we would have weathered it just as safely.

We chose an anchorage in the southwest corner of Greenwich Bay, which is near our marina. The storm was going to pass to the west of us, which meant we would experience east winds, clocking to strong south winds, followed by west winds. The anchorage had good overall protection from all of these directions, and it had a mud-over-clay bottom, which would be good holding for the anchors. We deployed two anchors at about 30-degrees from one another: the stronger anchor set for south winds, and the second anchor set for more southeast winds. We set the anchors hard by backing down on them, and we had high confidence that the anchors would hold, so our main concern was breakage. We put long nylon snubbers on each rode to provide good elasticity, and also to provide redundancy. We also attached rugged chafe protection to all possible wear points. Earlier this summer I had received Earl Hinz’s “The Complete Book of Anchoring and Mooring” for my birthday, and I had read it cover-to-cover. The information I learned from this book was invaluable for this situation, and I highly recommend it to anybody who plans to spend more than a few nights swinging on a hook.

Once the anchors were set we went about securing the boat. We removed everything from the outside that would either increase our wind profile, or might not stand up to hurricane-force winds. It took us a full two days to strip and secure the outside of the boat — antennas, grill, dingy, kayak, fenders, flags, etc. — and another half day to secure the inside for the expected tossing and rolling. We felt we were ready for whatever came our way.

On Saturday afternoon we made our final decision: should we stay on the boat or evacuate? This was the most difficult decision we made, and we had made a hotel reservation in case we decided to evacuate. We spoke with each of the six boats anchored around us, all experienced captains or cruisers, and all were staying aboard during the storm. We spoke with the sheriff, police, and harbormaster, each of whom stopped by our boat to see if we planned to stay aboard, and all expressed confidence that we were in a good spot to weather the storm. And, most important, we consulted multiple weather sources to assess the storm’s potential at our location. Finally, given what we knew at the time, we decided to stay aboard. This was a very personal decision based on a variety of factors, and we would make the same decision again given similar circumstances.

As we look at Hurricane Irene in the rear-view mirror, we feel fortunate to have been spared her worst. We know there is significant destruction and hardship being experienced by people up and down the coast, and our thoughts are with them as they pick up the pieces. We learned a lot in preparation for the storm, and in experiencing it first hand, both of which will serve us well in our ongoing voyage.

The August issue of Astronomy magazine hits the newsstands today, and it includes an interesting article by a new freelance writer named Ayla Besemer. That’s right: Our own Ayla is a published author, and she couldn’t be more excited!

The article is titled, Why Teens Should Care About Astronomy, and Ayla was inspired to write it when she realized many of her peers did not share her passion for the stars. Ayla has always been naturally interested in astronomy, and that interest has blossomed during our nautical travels. I suppose this was inevitable when we so often find ourselves in remote anchorages on moonless nights: the stargazing is pretty incredible! After reading an earlier article in Astronomy about teens’ lack of interest in astronomy in the digital age, she sent an e-mail to the editor with some suggestions. One thing led to another, and soon Ayla was signing her first writing contract.

While we can’t reprint the article here, you can peek inside the current issue on the Astronomy web site. There is also a nice video preview of the issue presented by editor David Eicher. If you’re tempted to buy the magazine, you can usually find Astronomy at Border’s, Barnes & Noble, or other well-stocked newsstands. If you read the article, please send Ayla a note telling her what you thought — as a young, aspiring, freelance writer, she will appreciate feedback from her audience.

Well done, Ayla! We’re very proud of you and your accomplishment!

Locagion: Nantucket Island, Massachusetts
Coordinates: 41° 17.168′ N  70° 04.776′ W

When we decided to spend the summer in Rhode Island we committed to ourselves that we would try to do as much weekend and week-long cruising as we did this winter in Puerto Rico. Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Long Island (New York) each have wonderful weekend cruising destinations, and we’re looking forward to exploring as many of them as we can.

This weekend we decided to kick off the season with a cruise to Nantucket Island, where we will stay this week, and then cruise back to Rhode Island next weekend. I am fortunate enough to have a job that (when I’m not traveling) allows me to work from anywhere, as long as I have good Internet and good cellular phone coverage. Nantucket fits that description, so I’ll be working in Nantucket Island harbor this week — sweet!

Our voyage over here, however, was not as relaxing as we had envisioned it. This time of year there is a lot of fog in Rhode Island Sound and Nantucket Sound, and we had our hands full yesterday and today as we made the 82-mile journey. Yesterday we cruised from East Greenwich to Cuttyhunk Island at the mouth of Buzzard’s Bay, and today we completed the cruise to Nantucket Island, going around Martha’s Vinyard on the way.

For much of yesterday and most of today we had less than 1/4-mile visibility. That means that by the time we can see a boat we are already within about 10-12 boat-lengths of it. And that may sound like a lot, but when two many-ton boats are cruising towards each other in the soup, it’s NOTHING! Our radar and AIS systems are invaluable in these conditions, and we are often on the radio coordinating our position with the other vessels. Out of the dozens of boats we passed in the fog, we had only three close encounters:

• Yesterday, as we were crossing the entrance to Narragansett bay, a high-speed ferry from who-knows-where came barreling up the channel at 25 knots, surprising us on our starboard beam. We were doing a good job watching for contacts ahead of us, but not as good a job watching for contacts from the side. A last-minute turn on our part kept us several hundred feet apart, but it was unnerving.
• Today, while traversing Nantucket Sound with the many fishing boats trawling around, it wasn’t always clear which direction a boat was moving. Fortunately they were moving pretty slowly because they were dragging nets, but we had to avoid them upon sight. To be clear, we were tracking them on our radar (none of the fishing boats have AIS), but as they got within a half mile we had to open the doors and watch for them to emerge from the fog. Ayla and Kathryn were both champion spotters! This happened to us twice, and both times the fishing boat was heading straight toward us! I suspect they knew they would clear us at the stern, but it’s still uncomfortable.

As we swing lazily on our anchor here in Nantucket Island harbor, we are grateful that we had an uneventful transit. We are looking forward to going into town tomorrow to explore. In the mean time, I couldn’t resist penning the following:

There once was a man in Nantucket,
Who cruised there on his Nordhavn bucket,
He encountered much fog,
Which made it a slog,
But as trips go, he was still glad he took-it.

Let’s keep the comments clean, folks.  Enjoy the Memorial Day weekend!

Location: East Greenwich, Rhode Island
Coordinates: 41° 41.113′ N  71° 26.789′ W

After twelve days underway and 2026 nautical miles, we arrived safely in East Greenwich, Rhode Island yesterday afternoon. When we left Fajardo, Puerto Rico on Thursday, May 5 we didn’t know how far we would be able to go before the weather would stop us, but Mother Nature was quite accommodating, and we were able to reach our intended destination without stopping. It was definitely a voyage for our record books, and one that we will never forget. Here are some facts and milestones for the transit:

• Distance Traveled: 2026 nautical miles
• Transit Time: 11 days, 22 hours (286 hours)
• Fuel Consumed: ~810 gallons (2.5 mpg / 2.8 gph)
• Average Speed: 7.1 knots
• Maximum Speed: 11.2 knots (in the Gulf Stream near Florida)
• Minimum Speed: 3.8 knots (banging into head seas, tidal flow, and 25 knot wind near Long Island, New York)
• Largest Seas: 12-14′ swells (in Gulf Stream off the Carolina coast)
• Worst Seas: 5-7′ wind waves on the nose (off Long Island)
• Best Seas: Glassy flat calm (Exuma Sound in The Bahamas)
• Deepest Water: 26,000 feet (Puerto Rico Trench, north of Puerto Rico)
• Shallowest Water: 10 feet (Highborne Cut, The Bahamas)
• Highest Temperature: 90°F (Florida)
• Lowest Temperature: 58°F (Rhode Island)
• Scariest Moment: Crackling electronics, followed by simultaneous lightening bolt/thunder crack. Close call!
• Coolest Moment: Submarine surfacing 1/2 mile off our port side.
• Consumed 36 oranges, 3 pounds of carrots, and 4 pints of ice cream
• Began under an almost new moon; finished under a full moon.

Our boat and her systems performed flawlessly for the entire journey. This kind of voyage is a testament to the vision and workmanship of the folks at Nordhavn (not to mention Northern Lights, Trac, Furuno, and other systems providers). These boats are rock-solid platforms for extended blue-water cruising, and we are so happy to call her our home.

Kathryn’s provisioning was unbelievable, giving us outstanding meals and snacks every day, regardless of the conditions. When it was calm, we were able to grill; When it was rough, Kathryn had pre-prepared meals ready to microwave. We were never at the end of our supplies, or our tolerance for the journey — we could have kept going.

Having “trained” with a voyage like this, we look forward to the opportunity to cross the Atlantic or Pacific sometime in the next couple of years. We know we have the ship to do it, and we’re now convinced that we can do it. All we need are the time and money, which we are diligently working on.

Thanks for following along!

Location: Cape Hatteras, North Carolina
Coordinates: 35° 17.26′ N  75° 21.78′ W

We just rounded Cape Hatteras, which is the second big milestone for our voyage (the first being getting back to the Florida coast). The weather is looking good for us to continue at least up to New York, so we’re steaming ahead. The seas look a little dicey for Monday night and Tuesday, so we’ll evaluate things on Monday and decide whether to stop in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, or continue on to Rhode Island.

Last night we were in a band of thunderstorms off the coast of North Carolina, and it was pretty intense. The seas never got terrible, but the lightening and thunder were quite unnerving. We put a laptop (with charts) and a GPS in the microwave oven (a makeshift Faraday cage) in an effort to protect them from the possible catastrophic lightening strike. Fortunately we were spared, and we even managed not to forget the computer was in the convection microwave before pre-heating it for breakfast this morning!

Two days ago we were cruising off the coast of Georgia/South Carolina in pretty big seas, when a new contact appeared on our radar about two miles in front of us. Usually a contact appears sooner than that, but because of the big seas we decided it might have been masked until then. Kathryn immediately saw water breaking against the contact, and it was straight ahead of us. It looked strange: it wasn’t a boat, but it wasn’t a buoy either. It looked like two pipes sticking up out of the water. We checked our charts to see if maybe there was an oil/gas wellhead in the vicinity, but the chart showed nothing.

We altered course about fifteen degrees to starboard to give it a wide berth, and we kept an eye on it through the binoculars as it got closer. Something wasn’t right: Water was breaking against these pipes in the opposite direction than we would expect from the prevailing seas — it was moving through the water! Holy cow! It’s a submarine! Sure enough, when it got next to us, about a half mile off our port beam, it began to surface. We could see the tower and fins, and then once it was behind us we saw the whole submarine surface. Wow! That was cool. And terrifying. And cool!

So now we’ve pointed the bow towards Ocean City, Maryland, and then we’ll run the coast of New Jersey up to New York. Whether we stop in Sandy Hook, New Jersey or continue on to Rhode Island, it’s been a fantastic voyage!

Location: Straits of Florida
Coordinates: 27º 19.336′ N 079º 44.978′ W

By the time I finish posting this blog entry we will have covered half the distance on our journey from Puerto Rico to Rhode Island. We have been underway for six days straight, and we’ve broken our previous distance and time records for a non-stop transit. It has been a remarkable voyage for us, and we’re not finished yet.

When we left Puerto Rico last Thursday afternoon, we hoped the weather would hold long enough for us to get to Florida, and it did. We’ve had light winds and calm seas the entire way, which is pretty unbelievable given the distance covered. Our ship systems are performing flawlessly, and it feels like Three@Sea could continue on indefinitely (given enough fuel). Most important, all three of us feel good: We’re getting enough sleep, sharing the tasks of being underway, and enjoying the family time together. The only potential problem is that we’re running out of new movies to watch!

Last night while crossing the Bahama Bank we evaluated the latest weather information to decide if we could keep going. Ideally we would like to go all the way to Rhode Island, but that will be up to Poseidon, Neptune, and Mother Nature. Would the latest forecast allow us to get to Charleston, SC? How about Beaufort, NC? Our insurance coverage requires us to be north of the Florida border by June 1, and we need to get somewhere with a decent airport so I can effectively work. Either of those places, as well as several others along the East Coast would be fine, but how long would our weather luck hold?

I’m happy to report that we’ve pointed the bow north, and we are currently riding the Gulf Stream towards Cape Hatteras. The weather looks good enough that we should be able to get as far as Hatteras, which we should round on Saturday. After that it looks a bit uncertain, but we’ll keep an eye on it over the next couple days. If we get around Cape Hatteras, then we could stop somewhere in the Chesapeake Bay or Cape May, NJ, and then we could hop up to Rhode Island over a weekend. We’re thrilled with our weather and sea-state fortune — another ration of rum for Poseidon and Neptune!

Location: Fajardo, Puerto Rico
Coordinates: 18° 20.325′ N  65° 37.900′ W

It’s time for Three@Sea to migrate north. We can literally feel it in the air: there is more humidity, more rain, and more bugs. There was even the beginnings of a tropical depression just northeast of here last week, although fortunately it fell apart before it was able to fully form. Tropical depressions often turn into tropical storms, which sometimes turn into hurricanes. Yikes! Time to get out of here.

Our plan is to depart this Thursday evening (May 5), and the weather is currently looking good for that target. Our summer destination is Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, where we spent last August-September. It’s about 2000 nautical miles from here to there, through the Bahamas, up the Gulf Stream, around Cape Hatteras, and along the New Jersey and Long Island coasts (approximate route is included below). If we run non-stop it will take us about twelve days to get there. It is unlikely we will get good enough weather to allow us to go all the way in one shot, but we’re preparing for that in case we get lucky. If we need to stop for awhile, our possible targets are The Turks and Caicos Islands; Palm Beach, FL; Charleston, SC; Beaufort, NC; and Cape May, NJ. We would rather not stop, so let’s hope it’s one for the record books!

We’ve done various preparations during the last couple of weeks, including:

• Clean the bottom (diving using our hookah rig)
• Provision with food and supplies
• Prepare and freeze snacks and meals (in case the seas are rough)
• Change the oil in the main engine and generator
• Order and receive spare hoses for the main engine
• Check the wing engine fluids and operation
• Top-up and test the satellite phone (e-mail and voice)
• Check the navigation lights
• Rain-X the windows in the pilothouse
• Activate various weather subscriptions for e-mail delivery
• Fill the tanks with fuel

Just before we depart we will top-up our water tank, file a float plan, and make an offering of rum to Neptune and Poseidon.

The first three days we will be in the open Atlantic, cruising from Puerto Rico past The Turks and Caicos Islands. After that we will be within a day of land the whole rest of the way as we make our way through the Bahamas and up the east coast. You’ll be able to watch our progress on our location page, which we plan to update twice daily via satellite phone.

See you in New England!

Location: Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands
Coordinates: 18° 30.169′ N  64° 21.804′ W

Some cruising grounds are legendary throughout the world: The Greek Islands, Alaska’s Inside Passage, the South Pacific’s Polynesian islands, and The Bahamas’ Exumas cays all come to mind. The eastern Caribbean Islands certainly make the list, and the British Virgin Islands might even qualify in their own right, which is why we’ve come.

We are currently anchored in North Sound on Virgin Gorda, which is a large, well-protected harbor with several small resorts lining the banks (The Bitter End Yacht Club being the most well known). I don’t have to travel for work this week, so our plan was to cruise to the BVI’s over the weekend, spend the week anchored someplace beautiful (and with good cellular and Internet coverage so I could work), and then cruise back to Puerto Rico next weekend.

So far so good: We cruised to Jost Van Dyke on Saturday morning, where we picked up a mooring ball, checked in with BVI’s Customs and Immigration, and dropped into Foxy’s beach bar for lunch. We were tempted to spend the night at Jost Van Dyke to experience the famous party scene and calypso music at Foxy’s, but we had a higher priority that lured us away…

There is a unique geological formation on the southwest end of Virgin Gorda called The Baths, where huge granite boulders seem to have been dumped on the beach by some mythical gargantuan wheel barrow. We wanted to visit The Baths early in the morning to avoid the crowds — we had heard that the small cruise ships shuttle their passengers into The Baths starting late morning — so we left Jost Van Dyke and cruised to Cooper Island Saturday evening. We went ashore and had a nice dinner at the Cooper Island Beach Club, and then endured a windy and rolly night in the lee of the island. We got up at dawn Sunday morning and headed for The Baths.

The Baths have been designated a national marine park by the BVI government, which they preserve by disallowing you to land your dingy on the beach. There are large mooring balls set offshore for cruising vessels, and there are small mooring balls about a hundred feet offshore for dingies. You must swim into the beach from there. When we arrived at about 7:30am there were already about a dozen sailboats there, and we picked up one of the few remaining mooring balls for Three@Sea. It didn’t look like anybody was on the beach yet, so we hopped into Dilly Too (our dingy) and headed in. By 8am we slipped into the water and started swimming for the beach — it felt like quite an adventure!

The Baths did not disappoint: All three of us agreed they are one of the coolest things we’ve seen during our 2-1/2 years of cruising. We had them completely to ourselves at that time of the morning, which definitely enhanced our experience. We felt like we were walking through nature’s cathedral, wondering how such a beautiful arrangement of massive boulders came to be. Sand underfoot, sunshine overhead, and water lapping in and out of the narrow crevices completed this unique experience. We spent about an hour exploring from one end to the other before returning to the beach. It was magical!

What a difference an hour makes: several tour boats had arrived from Tortola, and a cruise ship tender had just dumped their snorkel-equipped passengers into the water. It looked like a naval invasion, as more than a hundred people stumbled up onto the beach, out of breath and unhappy about having to swim to their target. How different The Baths would have felt with a long queue of people waiting at every narrow passageway! We smiled to ourselves as we slipped into the water to swim back to our dingy.

With The Baths tucked away as a wonderful memory, we cruised to our current location in Virgin Gorda to get settled for the week. Although I would prefer to be here on vacation, I think the next best thing is to have my office located in such a beautiful place. I am indeed a fortunate man.

I am in London this week on business, and on Sunday I took the opportunity to visit Greenwich, England, where the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Observatory, and the prime meridian are all located. It was a fun field-trip, and very relevant to our travels aboard Three@Sea.

You probably know that a “meridian” is a line of longitude, running from the North Pole to the South Pole, and longitude is measured in degrees east or west of the prime meridian. The location of the prime meridian is an arbitrary choice (versus a geographical characteristic like the equator), and the current prime meridian in Greenwich was established by international agreement in 1884.

One of the most challenging problems in the history of seafaring navigation was formulating a way to accurately determine your longitude when at sea. Latitude is relatively easy because it can be determined by direct measurement of the angle between the observer and a known celestial body (like the Sun) using a sextant. Longitude, on the other hand, is more difficult because the Earth is always rotating. Solving the longitude problem was considered so important that in 1714 the British Parliament offered a prize of up to 20,000 pounds to any person who could produce a solution.

There were several proposed approaches to solving the problem, but keeping accurate time while at sea was one of the most promising: If you know the current time in Greenwich by carrying an accurate clock aboard that is set to Greenwich Mean Time, and you accurately determine the local time by observing a celestial body (like the Sun) at its apex, then you can compute your longitude from the difference between the two times. Last winter Ayla and I wrote a blog about our experience learning to use a sextant, and this was one of the measurements we made. The Earth spins at 15 degrees per hour, so if your local time is 2 hours behind that of Greenwich, you are at 30 degrees west longitude. We are about 4 hours and 20 minutes behind GMT in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, which means our longitude is about 65 degrees west.

Although the time method is simple in principle, the main challenge in the 17th century was keeping accurate time while at sea: no clock or watch existed that was capable of doing so in such a harsh and unstable environment. Motivated by Parliament’s challenge, a self-taught English clock maker named John Harrison set out to build an accurate “marine chronometer”, and he stayed focused on the problem for more than thirty years. He produced three very accurate seafaring clocks (H1, H2, and H3), and in 1761 he produced the H4 “sea watch” that was capable of keeping accurate time on a trans-Atlantic voyage. Captain James Cook carried a replica of H4 on board during his second and third voyages in the 1770s, and the charts he made of the Pacific Ocean are extremely accurate because of this chronometer. The story of the longitude problem and Harrison’s achievements are chronicled in the book “Longitude“, which is an enjoyable and enlightening read.

The main reason I went to Greenwich is because the original Harrison clocks are housed at the Royal Observatory. I stood in front of them and tried to let the significance of their contribution to navigation sink in. In our modern world of GPS I think it is important to remember that we can reach as high as we do only because we are “standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Location: Ensenada Dakity, Culebra, Puerto Rico
Coordinates: 18° 17.439′ N  65° 16.854′ W

The crew of Three@Sea has been remiss in posting blog updates about our adventures in and around Puerto Rico. We have no excuse except that life gets busy, but that’s a lame excuse at best.

To get things moving again I thought I would give an overview the cruising we’ve been doing, and then Kathryn and Ayla will blog about a couple noteworthy adventures. But first I should probably describe the logistics of our current situation.

We are spending the winter (probably through April) at Sunbay Marina in Fajardo, on the northeast coast of Puerto Rico. We chose this location because it is relatively close to San Juan Airport, and it also puts some nice cruising destinations within reach on the weekends. I am working full time, and I fly somewhere about three weeks out of every month (I’m not usually gone the whole week). We do not have a car here in Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rico has almost no public transportation, so we rent a car whenever I need to get to or from the airport (about a 1-hour drive). Kathryn and Ayla then use the rented car to visit interesting destinations around Puerto Rico while I’m out of town. When I’m in town on the weekends (and occasionally for a week at a time) we try to cruise somewhere.

Culebra

We’ve spent the most time on Culebra, which is one of the Spanish Virgin Islands. Formally Culebra and Vieques are part of Puerto Rico, but they’re known in the cruising community as the SVIs. Culebra is only about 3-1/2 hours from our home base in Fajardo, so it’s very easy for us to get to on the weekends. It also has the best anchorage / mooring-field of anywhere we’ve been because of a well-placed reef that blocks the constant swell from the ocean. The small town ashore, Dewey, is small and sleepy compared to the mainland — we like Culebra a lot.

Vieques

We recently spent a long weekend anchored near Esperanza on the south side of Vieques. This other Spanish Virgin Island is much larger and more populated than Culebra, and we had several adventures while on Vieques. The most interesting activity was a visit to the bioluminescent bay, which Ayla will report on soon. One of the “top ten beach bars in the Caribbean” is also in Esperanza, so we made a pilgrimage to Bananas to sample the local mixology.

Our anchorage in Vieques was a little rolly because the ocean swell curved around the end of the island and entered the relatively open anchorage. We deployed our flopper-stopper to help with the roll, but it still got a little tiring after several days. We enjoyed Vieques very much, but we were ready to move on at the end of the weekend.

St. John

The U.S. Virgin Islands consist of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John. St. John is the least populated of the USVI’s, and it has no airport so you can only visit by boat. More than half of the island is set aside for Virgin Islands National Park, so much of the island is forested and undeveloped. We picked up a mooring ball in Fancis Bay on the north side of the island, and we spent five days exploring the area. We had an excellent snorkeling adventure to the reef near Watermelon Cay. Kathryn and Ayla hiked to the ruins of a sugar plantation from the 1600s.

One of the things we love about the Bahamas and the Caribbean is the beautiful blue water. The different colors of blue and green are amazing when the sun hits them. The water here in the northern Caribbean is about 80 degrees, so it’s both swimmable and refreshing. The water around St. John is the prettiest we’ve seen yet, with it’s deep blue morphing into clear green as you approach the beach. There’s something about this water that is both soothing and exhilarating.

So that’s a short summary of our cruising adventures since we arrived in Puerto Rico. We’ll post more detailed blogs about a couple specific adventures soon. We love PR and the Virgin Islands, and we’re really glad we made the trip down here!

As far as additional cruising, we would still like to get to the British Virgin Islands before we move on, but I’ll probably need to take some vacation time to do that trip. We’ll be heading out of here in late April or early May, but our next destination is still unclear.