Moondancerx's BIG adventure

Back to Jamaica – 22nd May If I had to take root anywhere in the world this would probably not be my first choice, but here we are again. Our intended departure date was yesterday, and with all of the weather information we gathered we figured we would be alright – a few squalls to go through but in general not too bad, in fact for the next couple of days almost no wind according to one of the weather sites we check on the internet. So we left at 11.00am, took a shit kicking for a couple of hours under dark menacing skies, in 30 – 35kn winds gusting over 40kn, rain so heavy we could only see a couple of hundred yards, so heavy that it was knocking the white caps off the 10 foot waves which were pummeling us abeam. We were sailing though under double reefed main and genoa for about half an hour, then we reefed the genoa a couple of times, kept going for about 10 miles, now down to just the reefed main, the occasional wave seemed to get up to about 15 feet, and neither of our steering sy...

Jamaica – Yeah Man – May 14th Pretty much the only words of patois we understand is ‘Yeah Man’, beyond that it could be Swahili for all we can tell. We’ve been in Port Antonio for 2 weeks, still tied up in our original spot at the marina, where we have enjoyed a very lazy time. It was great to have Hans and Roos’ company, but they left 2 days ago for Chesapeak, we await news on their Windward Passage passage. It seems there is always some daunting place that we have to go through to get to the other side – now doesn’t that just sound like life. Hans and Roos have been renamed twice by us, Tony always called them Hans and Franz, as in ‘I pump you up’, you had to watch Saturday night live. Josie renamed them Guns, as in Guns and Roses. They didn’t seem to mind. Hans and Tony did some work on the SSB radio connections which seems to have improved our reception. Will not be able to tell properly until we are out of the marina where there is a lot of interference. This marina is called the ...

Leaving Dominican Republic – May 1st After an incredible 10 days in the Dominican Republic we made our final attempt to round the point off Isla Beata this morning – and now we are headed for Jamaica. We aren’t sure whether we will be able to continue with our plans to sail across the Atlantic this year to be in Malta in September, but we’ll work that out after we have a holiday with Josie – yes she is here safe and sound. I picked her up at the airport in Santo Domingo on the 29th on time, having spent the night at the airport attempting sleep on some metal wire chairs. That didn’t really matter after what it had taken to get there, and I didn’t really know how I was going to get back with her. The above was written on the way back to Jamaica. We are now in Jamaica, we arrived at 0730 on 4th May. We had a nice downwind run, something we have not experienced for a long time. The first day we had very big seas and Josie was not feeling too well, but she took Stugeron, enough to keep her...