What have WE been up to for the past month?

(Wandering Dolphin @ Crown Bay Marina / Tickles where Beck works in background)

Remember that LOOOONG list of things that needed to be done on “Wandering Dolphin?” Well It was narrowed down to: #1 URGENT, #2 immediate, #3 important, and #4 I wish.

We decided that before we could head south for the summer we needed to take care of all of the things on the URGENT and immediate lists. I am happy to report that we are finishing up the very last items on that list and it looks like we have a weather window for Grenada on Saturday. Wandering Dolphin will be sailing away from Honeymoon bay for another summer. We will be back the last week of October to spend the fall and Christmas season with family who will be visiting us here. Our sail toward Panama and the canal crossing was backed up a little bit because of the lists mentioned above. We still plan to be through the canal in February or March, 2011 so we can make our first Pacific jump in April and May, 2011.

                                   (Oh MAN.... we are gonna miss Momma)

Our toughest decision this year was to leave Becky in St Thomas for the summer. The dreaded LISTS were very costly and pretty much ate up all of our savings so the choice was for her to come on down to Trinidad this summer but we would have to stay in St Thomas next year until June working to fill the kitty again or she could stay and work through the summer and we could leave after our Christmas get together at Honeymoon Bay next winter. She decided to stay and live at Island View Guest House for the summer while continuing to work at Tickles. Jimmy is in Wyoming now so I will be taking, EmilyAnne, Kanyon, Kaleb, and Benny with me to Trinidad for the summer. It was a tough call and not one any of us wanted to make but sometimes you have to make a hard call to do cool things and this will enable us to keep our weather schedule for the Pacific next year.

                           (She may be small but she's still a great Hand sailing!)

So the adventure of sailing 3 or 4 days to Grenada will commence on Saturday if our weather window holds out. The kids and I will stay in Grenada for a few weeks and then head on down to Trinidad and our friends at TTSA. We are hoping there will be a lot of kid boats there this summer. We will haul out in October and do a bottom Job before Becky fly’s down to join us for the sail back up to St Thomas.

                       (Our last haul-out was 3 years ago in Oriental, NC!)

Wandering Dolphin has been feeling the love and is in the best shape she has been in since we refitted her 5 years ago. It will be nice to have AIS in the cockpit. I have been spoiled on deliveries with the safety and confidence AIS gives you. If you have a boat and would like to add AIS without installing a new antenna and all the other junk you need to get it to work, check out the Standard Horizons Matrix AIS GX2100 VHF Radio. For the cost of a new VHF radio and a RAM3 mic you can have AIS at your nav station and at the helm.

We will also be using SPOT on the trip starting on Friday so check in to see where we are and Becky will post the instructions for you to send us messages on our Iridium phone. The riddles would be fun again Blake!

God Bless,
Captain Tofer