More Bahamas pics

Here's another photo album of more Bahamas photos

Videos!

We've uploaded some videos finally. I'm going to throw them all into this one post...hopefully it doesn't make loading this page too slow!

Here's a video of Emily and I in Blades' dingy as we pass by his catamaran and then circle around New Passages!


Emily and I and Emily's friend Cecile diving part of the Wreck of the Rhone in the BVIs.


Another video diving the Wreck of the Rhone...this time coming up on the huge propeller.


Emily, Blades and I snorkeling into the Thunderball cave off Staniel Cay in the Exumas. This is the cave where they filmed one of the scenes in the James Bond movie Thunderball!


Pigs wading out to us in the water off Big Majors by Staniel Cay


Some birds feeding on sugar on Emily's hand in the Exuma Land and Sea Park.


Snorkling with a barracuda in the Exumas


A lobster coming at me in the Exumas.


Friendly stingray in the Exumas. Only part of this clip uploaded...I'll upload the rest later.


A turtle coming up for air in the Turks and Caicos.


Emily swimming with the turtle!


The turtle feeding.


Dolphins swimming with the boat while Emily and I watch them from the bowsprit.


Diving with a trumpetfish in Culebra.


A moray eel in Culebra


Leaving St Martin for an overnight passage back to the BVI.


Rolly anchorage in St Martin.

Turtle video

Here's a video I took of the turtle in the Turks and Caicos

The Bahamas

I've written so much for the last 2 sections that I'm exhausted of writing. Basically, I'm just going adding a post to show our photos. We are loving the Bahamas...in part because so far it's really gorgeous, but also in part because we're taking our time since we been rushing to get north for so long. Also, since we're here off season, there are very few boats, leaving these islands not as packed as they often are. We've already met some really great people. Just last night a local came by and gave us 8 freshly caught snapper...and that's not the first time! We've been anchored off a beach for almost a week now because it's too nice to leave. We go in a eat freshly chopped conch salad, and then feed the leftover conch to the rays. We always say we'll leave tomorrow...so right now our plan is to leave tomorrow.

Anyway - here are some of the photos we've taken:

Turks and Caicos and the passage up

So the morning after Matt arrived, we decided to get going (partially because the wind picked up and the anchor started dragging). The weather was not perfect, but was supposed to clear as the day went on, and the next few days were supposed to be nice...supposed to be! The first day was pretty uneventful crossing the Mona Passage. The highlights were mostly the good speed we were making, and the dolphins that swam with us...unfortunately while Emily was sleeping in preparation for her shift.

That night the wind died a bit, so we motor sailed most of the night, but by morning we got enough wind back and turned the motor off. By this point though, we were all pretty tired. We weren't sleeping enough it was clear, and we realized that the shift schedule had a flaw. It actually gave us less sleep than if Matt had not come down (but it meant that nobody was ever alone in the cockpit). The schedule started out like this. One person slept, two people sat in the cockpit, with the person who slept last doing the active shift, and the other one just standing by and keeping them company. 4 hours later, that person would go to sleep, the person who had just slept got on active, and the person steering the last 4 hrs sat on standby. That meant we would be up for 8 hrs, and then sleep for 4 hrs...twice a day...which meant only 8 hrs of sleep and 16 hrs up. So we changed it to overlapping 6 hr watches, where for 2 hrs of our watch we were alone in the cockpit, and still only at the helm for 4 hrs. But then we would get to sleep for 6 hrs straight. This proved to be a very good system.

So now that we switched to that things got better, and at times we would all be up and be able to eat together, or just chill, play some tunes on the radio, etc. During this day, we hardly could make out the coastline of the DR...basically it was just water from a few hours out of Puerto Rico, until we arrived in the Turks and Caicos. During the days we were making good time. Occasionally we'd have to change course with the wind to either keep going wing and wing, or a broad reach 40 degrees off the wind. That second night required some motoring again, along with frequent radar checking as several container ships were passing us during the night and into the next morning.

This third day was where it got interesting. The wind slowly picked up all day to the point that we were making 7 kts steady and more surfing the increasing waves. But going dead downwind is deceptive...you don't realize how strong the wind is or how high the waves are. We cruised all day downwind and late afternoon it was about time to make our final turn to the north to head up to the turks and caicos for a morning arrival on Grand Turk. Well, as soon as we turned to the new heading, it was clear we were in for quite a night. The wind was blowing 25 kts...we were double reefed on the main and had 50% of the jib out...on a broad reach. The waves were mostly over 10 ft with the occasional wave probably up to 15 ft. This meant that we would have to hand steer most of the night...the hardest time to do that. The autopilot just does not work well with those kinds of swells. It's strong enough to do it, but the delay and lack of feel for the sea means our heading oscillates so much that we could jibe accidentally. So Emily had the difficult task of hand steering for her shift beginning just before sunset, while I tried to sleep. I got a little sleep that night, but I remember having to grab the mattress at times to keep from sliding off the bed. Not rolling...sliding! Matt was up the whole time with Emily, though was not feeling so hot. But thankfully he stayed up there because I didn't want anybody doing a shift alone in that weather. Emily hand steered through these waves for almost 6 hrs straight! Amazing.

To make a long story short, we plowed through the night...making great speed, but uncomfortably, and everyone was getting pretty exhausted. Finally around 8 am, which was when my shift would end and I would go to bed, we saw the first signs of land, and soon after we got to the leeward of the bank and the waves settled way down. We arrived at Grand Turk to check in. We dropped anchor, and had an early morning beer to celebrate a 350 mile passage! Then Emily passed out, and Matt and I dingied to the beach, walked to customs, checked in, and went to the closest beach bar and finally relaxed.

Thanks again to Matt for coming. He made this trip much easier for us and put up with about 70 hrs of constant rocking and rolling, and crappy meals...fighting fatigue at 4 in the morning, etc. The picture of both us after arriving at Grand Turks does not show my gratitude...it only shows my exhaustion! On that note, thanks to Emily for stepping up the plate that last night and navigating this beast of a boat through some fairly rough weather!

Now that I spent so long on the passage, I'm too tired to say much about the Turks and Caicos, so here's the quick synopsis. We still had about 100 miles to cover to get Matt to Provo where the airport is...on the farthest island west from where we were. So we sailed every day to get there. First we went to South Caicos which had a gorgeous anchorage, we met a guy on a catamaran who was doing sea turtle research, and met a crazy local in town who hung with us all night. The next day was a long sail where we motor sailed much of it to make the necessary 6 kts to get in with enough light to see the reefs...which we never saw anyway. Then the next day was a short but sweet sail to Provo in calm water and nice winds. After a tricky passage, we anchored off the marina, and went in and just relaxed. The next morning, after Emily schooled Matt in some poker games, we dropped Matt off and a taxi took him to the airport.

Too bad, because he missed an amazing experience. We then met up with the turtle research boat, and joined them snorkeling in and area they knew would have turtles and you can see from my photos that we found them. Just two of them, and they were small, but one was so tame that he let us hang out just a few feet from him while he ate for an hour straight! That was a great experience. The rest of our time in Provo was shopping, thanks to the cat who were so nice and gave us their food (since they were leaving too) and let us use their car to go to the grocery store.

The last day we sailed over to the farthest point west to make for an early passage to Mayaguana in the Bahamas the next morning. That will start another section for another day! Meanwhile, here are a few photos:

Puerto Rico

So we're in the Bahamas now, but I'm going to attempt to remember the highlights from Puerto Rico and then Turks and Caicos. The first thing we did when we reached the mainland of Puerto Rico is we rented a car and drove around with 2 main objectives. See the El Yunke rain forest and eat roast pig. The rain forest was cool, and we swam in an incredibly cold waterfall. Then we made way south to a town known for pig roasts. There were about twenty places that roast an entire pig, and then cut it up and serve it to you plain...and it was possibly the best pork I've had. You can see from the pictures what the entire pig looks like on the spit.
After that excursion, we sailed to the island of Vieques to pull into this little harbor which is phosphorescent. So at night, with no moon, we jumped in and every motion produced a trail of sparks in the water. It was impossible to photograph, but it was amazing and weird. When you climb out of the water, sparks just drizzle off your body, and we filled up jugs of the water and would pour them into the cockpit and all you could see was sparks falling and spreading everywhere on the cockpit floor...then flowing out the back to the drains.
We went back to the mainland after that and sailed along the southern part of Puerto Rico. The main highlights were mostly the people we met. The Puerto Ricans have been the friendliest...they've really gone out of their way to help us many times. We also met some wonderful cruisers who gave us a bunch of provisions because we were running out. The other highlight was the dolphins that swam with our boat for about 15 minutes, just turning their heads, smiling at us, and playing at the bow of the boat.
Puerto Rico ended with making our way finally to Mayaguez and dropping anchor just as Matts plane landed in San Juan. He then took a short flight to meet us in Mayaguez. Matt came down to help us sail the boat up to the Turks and Caicos since we decided to skip the DR because we were in a rush to get north of the Tropic of Cancer by July 1st as our insurance company specifies during hurricane season. I'll talk about the passage in the next section under Turks and Caicos.
In summary though, the people of Puerto Rico were wonderful to us, and the landscape was gorgeous. However, the harbors were never very pretty...usually just mangrove areas with silty brown water. But that's ok because then comes the Turks and Caicos!

Here are some pics of Puerto Rico

We're in the Bahamas!

We've been sailing like crazy, and thanks to Matt for helping us do a 3 day 350 mile passage from Puerto Rico to the Turks and Caicos. Now we're at Rum Cay and having a blast! We'll have better internet in George Town in a few days at which point we'll upload all our photos and hopefully some videos. We'll also update the blog with some more travel stories then.

BTW - I was able to update the trip map at the bottom of this page.

J and Em

Culebra

We are currently in Isla De Culebra - a small island off Puerto Rico. We had a good passage from St Martin to the BVIs, and then hung out with Emily's friends Cecile and Travis for a week in the BVIs. Now we're here on our way to Puerto Rico. I have two photo albums that we've updated. One is of our friends that we met back up with in St Martin who made our stay and departure so great. The other is mostly just BVIs, including a lot of diving and snorkling that we did. I still have some videos I have to upload which will come soon. In the meantime, click on the albums below to enjoy the photos!

BVIs

Our friends in St Martin

Back in St Martin

So we're back in St Martin to do work on the boat right now before beginning the next phase of our journey, or trip up to the east coast of the US. Timing was bad though and we got here right during carnival and everything's been closed. So we rented a car and saw the island a bit. Most pics are from the zoo...

St Barth

After eating some great food in Gustavia, and hitting the now famous Jimmy Buffet bar, Le Select, we sailed up to a more secluded bay north and took some of these pictures. Enjoy!

Indian River boat trip, Dominica

New Passages Arriving in St Pierre, Martinique

Coulirou took this video of us arriving with them in Martinique. It was just by chance that we both were arriving at the same time...we didn't know they would be there. Notice Emily waving to the camera!

Martinique photos

We've just uploaded some photos of Martinique...check them out!

More photos from St Lucia

We've added Emily's friend Jenny's photos from St Lucia onto our photo album...check it out!

Martinique

So after a great week hanging out with Jenny and Clay and covering most of St Lucia by car and boat, and after pulling into possibly the prettiest harbor of our trip so far (Marigot Bay), we had a family meeting and decided it was time to start moving north before the hurricanes hit. So we sailed from Soufriere where our boat was surrounded by bats the night before, up to Rodney Bay to reprovision.

On Monday, we set sail for Martinique. We had a pretty uneventful sail, though waves were a little rough with wind too light to really push us through them, even with all our sails up. As we got closer to Martinique, the waves died down and out of nowhere, a dolphin surfaced about 50 ft from the cockpit. He was a much darker color and much bigger than we expected. He was alone and acted more like a whale - taking a deep breath and then diving down. He did not stay at the surface. After about 10 minutes he surfaced one more time, but this time about 5 ft from us, took a deep, noisy breath, and was gone for good.

Just about that time the weather I'd been keeping an eye on approaching from the east was looking a pretty bad and squally. Since the wind was coming at this point directly from our destination of Marin, we turned on the motor and motor sailed towards our waypoint with just the main up. As the squall hit though, we had to double reef the main, close-in the cockpit, and tie ourselves into the cockpit with our harnesses. Waves increased, we lost sight of land, and had 30 - 35 kt winds for about 15 minutes...rather long for a squall. But as it cleared, we were pulling into a gorgeous day in Martinique. We anchored and immediately went onto shore to celebrate our passage and our dolphin siting with a couple cold local beers called Biere Lorraine (which turns out to be my new favorite beer) at a cafe which made us feel like we were in France.

Marin became a little crowded for us though, and we left Wednesday to move 2 miles out to the cute town of St Anne where there are much fewer boats and possibly the best bakery for baguettes that we've found. We're happy here for a few days and we'll be able to meet up with our French friends. Emanuelle is coming back from a trip home to France today, and Oliver is already here, but anchored in Marin. We'll catch up with them tomorrow most likely, but today is just a beach and hiking day for us. Speaking of which - I'm going to get going to the beach now. More photos will be coming up once we have a better internet connection. Ciao!

St Lucia

Here's a small photoset from St Lucia. Internet is terrible here. Just last week they informed us that they unplugged the internet because of the weather. Whatever the case, we have a weak signal now and I've uploaded just a few pics. We leave for Martinique tomorrow and we'll upload more images friend Emily's friend Jenny's camera, as well as update the blog about our trip in St Lucia. A bientot!

New Passages Video

Here's a clip of us Sailing out of Nevis that our French friends from Coulirou took of us:

Antigua to St Lucia

So it's late and I'm too tired to write our first real blog, but here's the lowdown. We got word that Emily's friend Jenny and her fiance Clay wanted to come meet us in St Lucia, so we started making our way down here from Antigua.

We started slowly by making our way out of Falmouth Harbor and had a wonderful sail (Finally!) to Deshaies, Guadeloupe. We cleared in there and enjoyed two nights there before heading down to Pigeon Island which was possibly the best diving we'll ever do...also our first dive just to two of us. We say so many new fish and the visibility was unlimited. There were so many highlights, but if we had to choose, I think it's the turtle we swam with for about 10 minutes. This is the first turtle that didn't mind our presence and just let us follow him along. We were at an average depth of 32 ft for about 78 minutes. We'll probably try to hit this site (on Cousteau's top 10 dive sites) on the way back up north again!

The next day we headed down to the southernmost town on the western side of Guadeloupe to check out. This place had a marina to fill up with gas and water and shops to provision with. However, it turned out to be a shithole for lack of a better term. The marina was falling apart with sunken boats still at their slips. Docks were falling apart with broken concrete spans. The only phone had been ripped from the wall. No internet. Water pipes in the Marina were broken so no water (we started washing dishes in salt water for the first time). We were able to get fuel at least, though I had to do research to determine for sure that Gasoil is Diesel, and Essence is gasoline. To top it all off, the Customs office is basically never open. Giving up on them, we sailed to the Saintes 2 days later which were gorgeous. We ran into our french friend Oliver (Manu is back in France for a couple weeks) and his father with some friends. They shared cheese with us, we shared painkillers with them...and I think we found some olives to feed them with in our stores somewhere.

We checked out the next day, and headed to Dominica, a short sail. Because of our late start, we only got to the northernmost town of Dominica, leaving a 56 miles sail to Martinique the next day. It was long, but as we pulled in, we sailed by our French friends again and anchored right by them in the bay.

Now here's the exciting part. They radioed us and later came by to tell us that a red alert was out concerning some northerly swells that were coming, and advised us not to sail to St Lucia the next day. We devised an alternate plan to wait out the swells in St Anne at the southernmost point of Martinique. We set sail at 6am the next day and after listening to the weather report on the SSB at 8:30am decided to scratch that and make the 22 miles passage to St Lucia. All reports were saying that the northerly swells were just hitting the northern islands around St Martin, and weren't due to hit St Lucia until that night or the next day. The waters looked calm, and there were other boats doing passages, so we enjoyed a short 4 hr sail down to St Lucia in possibly the calmest waters we've had.

When we arrive in St Lucia, we pulled into the lagoon in Rodney Bay to anchor. Little did we know that they don't normally allow anchoring inside the lagoon, but due to the scare of northerly swells, they were letting people pull into the lagoon as if it were a hurricane. Apparently, this is happening everywhere in the Leewards right now, especially St Martin with the shelter of Simpson Bay Lagoon.

Reports are that there are 27 ft swells in Anguilla, 17 ft swells in Guadeloupe, and we're supposed to get 9-10 ft swells here. This is happening now, but it's not a big deal, and many people are still safely anchored outside the lagoon in Rodney Bay.

We've met a bunch of people here, many who knew the last owners of the boat. We were also invited over for drinks and snacks on a 50' Beneteau tonight and it was a gorgeous boat. Tomorrow we rent a car to drive down the coast to the airport to pick up our friends who are here for 10 days.

That's about all I've got in me right now. It's late and I'm going to bed. I'll post another update after Jenny and Clay leave, but I'll leave you with a short album of our latest photos.

Sante

Photo Album update from Antigua

Sea Turtle underwater video!

We're in Antigua!

I know I know...we never update our blog. And I'm not really going to update it right now either, other than to say we've made it to Antigua...after hitting the BVIs, St Martin, Statia, St Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat. At this point I'm only attaching a link to our photos which is the one thing we've been updating. Getting internet is so scattered down here, that when we do get it, we just check our email and skype our parents and then want to get away from the computer and go explore. Obviously we didn't come here to sit in front of a computer!!

I'm also keeping the map at the bottom of this page somewhat updated. That shows our path of where we've sailed, so check it out.

Here's the link to our photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jeremiah.jacobson

We have a few videos that I will upload too once we get a good enough internet connection. We will also try to update this blog more, but I can't promise anything!

We head to Guadeloupe next...sometime early next week when the waves have subsided. We'll try to post an update then. Until next time, cheers everybody!