S/V L'ORIENT

Twas the night before Christmas And all through the boat while relatives froze there was nary a coat Our beach towels were hung from the mizzen so high another day's swim has passed us right by But don't worry cold kinfolk there's no need to fear while it's 3:00pm your time it's cocktail hour here Come conch fritters, shrimp and rum spiced cake with restaurants like this Kirstin never will bake So we bid you farewell and turn off our Skype Merry Christmas to all And to all a good night

What a difference a night can make. We each make decisions daily; often times without realizing their future profound impact. Yesterday, we chose badly. Fortunately, today we got it so right. Yesterday started with a decision to head northeast to an island called Anegada. After an hour of pounding against ferocious winds and big seas we remembered that there are cocktails on other islands as well and we looked for the closest anchorage as the weather closed in. DECISION POINT: We chose Cane Garden Bay, which looked as good as anything else on the chart. While most cruisers forgo mooring buoys in favor of anchoring, this bay was littered with buoys making anchoring very difficult. The concern when anchoring among buoys is that either your boat will swing and hit one or, more menacingly, you will collide with a boat that is on a buoy which has a different swing radius. DECISION POINT : We took a mooring ball - the problem with the bay is that it featured both an unpredictable ground s...

Happy Monday Drinking Jost Van Dyke's famous "painkiller" rum drink at 1:00 PM on a Monday ? Who does this woman think she is.......what about her job ? Oh, yeah.......she doesn't have one. What about the flight home; don't want a hangover for that !!! Oh, that's right.......there is no flight home. She lives just over there on the boat. Kirstin and I are still pinching ourselves. We can't believe it. We are floating off the coast of Jost Van Dyke in the BVI in utter shock. We arrived very late Thursday to our boat. Two days of maintenance (filters, oil, laundry, provisions) and we set sail on Sunday in perfect winds from Tortola to JVD. It's really hard after years and years of looking at my cellphone every 10 minutes to get used to the fact that we don't have to do that anymore. Everything has slowed down. I'm planning on finding out who won the weekend's football encounters before Wednesday.  It's beyond good, and words can'...

I froze. For the first time in my professional life, I didn't know what to say at a sales meeting. Let's back-track a bit.......I've been selling services to hospitals for about 20 years. I've visited more than 1,000 different hospitals; flown the equivalent of 25 times around the Earth; driven another 4 times around it in Hertz rental cars.........you get the picture. In sales, pre-meeting chatter is a social lubricant. It's a required skill of the job. In all modesty, I've always been good at this. "How 'bout them Cowboys", "Whoa......it's been raining a lot hasn't it ?", "Your uncle is a Serbian war criminal ? Mine too ! Maybe they've done a few massacres together !" And yet, here I was in Oakey Doakey, North Carolina absolutely tongue-tied. The question someone had just asked me was simple. Where's home ? I feel like I'm ethically bound to provide factual answers to questions......at least til the meetin...

Sunset 600 miles from land During our visit home, we have been asked - what surprised you the most? Given that the sail was 1500 miles (24 hours a day for 9 days) there was definitely room for a lot of surprises. The first thought that came to mind was pretty simple - "Wow, it gets really dark out here". The dark I am talking about is a "walk into your closet and turn off the light" kind of dark - oh, and now take your closet 600 miles from the closest spit of land. Oh, and make it move at about 10-15 miles per hour. Overnight sailing was the key aspect of this sail that really intimidated me. Tom has a Kindle full of sailing disaster stories that he cheerily has shared with me over the years that generally involve a) sailboats being attacked by whales b) sailboats being hit by freighters or c) crazy people murdering people on sailboats (see Dead Calm - technically a movie but mentioned to me by so many people before this trip - thanks again). You can unders...

Never thought I'd say it, but as Kirstin and I walked through O'Hare in our sailing shorts we felt very fortunate. While we had a relatively benign sail through the gulfstream and on to Tortola, some friends in the Caribbean 1500 were not as fortunate. Several boats were victims of mechanical failure, diversions, fuel issues, lack of water, and even crew scheduling conflicts - one is currently making its way through the Atlantic using an emergency tiller and with a fouled prop. More than a handful are still not in Tortola, 4 days after the official end of the race. A special shout-out to our new friends Mark and Eileen on SV Wavelength, a beautifully restored Cherubini 44. They diverted to Bermuda and hopefully aren't facing the 40-50 ft rollers reported by others in the vicinity. We're tracking their progress and wish we were still in Tortola to greet them when they arrive. We look forward to sailing with them this winter. Kirstin has figured out how to post videos t...

OK, so we didn't exactly win. According to the so called "judges", we came in 7th out of 35. But do we live in a world where style counts for nothing ? What good is speed when you're not sitting in faux ostrich luxury ? Anyway, officially nine days and three hours after departing Hampton, L'ORIENT arrived safely in Tortola. Here is our Caribbean 1500 report: First of all, the positives. We saw two whales, had numerous dolphin encounters, and the crew caught three fish including a 44 inch dorado, which was totally yummy. We also learned a lot about weather and wind forecasts, which was definitely a blind spot for us prior to the trip. Sailing in high winds in pitch blackness at night was also thrilling. Also among the huge positives was our new friend Bob Poole. He was a much needed voice of reason and calm during the trip. A special thanks goes out to Herb........no not Herb Hilgenberg, the guru of offshore weather. Our Herb was better. Herb Hellwig was the si...