Trucking Along

We got our 30kts yesterday alright, right up the bum and Sunflower was moving out screaming down the coast of Cuba in the shipping lanes with her 2 headsails set. We arrived at Cabo San Antonio the SW Cape at 1600 perfect timing really as with the currents there and all that wind was quite messy and in went 3 reefs in the main with staysail and a tiny bit of Genoa and we were screaming on a broad reach south. Just before midnight enough was enough crossing through a shipping channel with the waves on our beam touching 9 knots quite regularly it was time to slow down, the cabin was a mess from stuff being thrown around everywhere by the odd wave that smacked the side like a freight train so with the 3 reefs and just the staysail we were a lot more comfortable doing 5.5-6knts with no stress
It's been a wild ride but today it has eased off a bit but with some rain around and even managed to have a shower so things are smelling a lot better aboard the fine ship Sunflower with 200nm to get to Belize...Happy days

Back on the road again!!

I landed back in Key Largo on the 19th of December after doing 6 weeks work back in Aus which was great, a well needed top up anyway. We wanted to get going ASAP so the rush was on and we had 100 things to do and after my first day back we had the bottom clean, headsail up, filled with diesel and beers and we were pretty much good to go. Our good friends Dale and Sandy who's Dock we were alongside were staying at there apartment in Palm Beach so we went to say our farewells to them and stopped in a couple of shops in Miami and Fort Lauderdale on the way. We have committed to a full refit in Guatemala so we had to collect the 1000's of $ worth of paints and epoxies for the job and also find Julie her birthday present, a new stand up paddle board!! We had a great night out in Palm beach in a classic American bar with Dale and Sandy which was really great fun and on the way home picking up all the gear which pretty well filled the big Lexus four wheel drive!! We got it all back
to our dock laid it out, boxes and boxes of paint and all the rest of the gear including the new addition to the Sunflower Dinghy family......a fold up dinghy that sails. She's a beauty although I haven't had the time to even test her out yet!! We were also waiting for a new SIM card for the iridium that was delayed in the mail so we decided to have it redirected to Key West and then we stop in Marathon for Xmas with some sailing friends which turned out to be a really fun day. Boxing Day we sailed to Key west and hung out for a couple of days still waiting for the package and toying with the idea of staying there for New Years. It's apparently a mental place to be but the weather forecast looked reasonable for the passage to Belize and not so good for hanging around so we decided to go and will spend New Years at sea but be in tropical paradise hopefully a few Days After!!
Tonight we will be of the NW coast of Cuba and we have a Norther coming, first one for the year. Apparently bringing cold winds 25-30knts but all behind us so should push us along nicely and should last less than a day. Last night we had good sailing with the 2 headsails out and then the wind died and we are motoring and will for most of the day looking at the forecast but then should have wind for the rest of the trip with any luck.

Merry Xmas to all ourFriends and Family!!!

Key Largo

Has been a while since the last update and a bits gone on, just been a bit slack after the excitement of Matthew!! Sunflower was fine after Matthew passed anyway, others that where left there in the water were not so lucky. About a half a dozen yachts ended up smashed against the wall at the Green Cove Springs Marina after their moorings dragged. Apparently 70kts was all that was recorded there but it is no surprise they dragged as nothing seems to be properly maintained around the place there but it was a real shame to see a beautiful little Hans Christian that had just finished a big refit including full respray with its side all chewed up and pretty buckled. Anyway we were very happy to get back into the water without any incident but it wasn't without worry that's for sure, it is one dodgey boatyard.

So we went downstream 20 miles to Jacksonville and got a free berth in the city centre that turned out not to be so free after receiving $100 fine but that's another story. We decided when we were lifted we would commit to doing a refit in Guatemala early next year and do a proper job on Sunflower so Jacksonville was an easy place to stop and stock up with loads of tin foods ect. From there it was another 300nm south to Fort Lauderdale which took 2 nights and we copped a fair beating with the wind on the nose and weather a fair bit worse than they forecast but we got there without too much trouble and enjoyed the beer even more than usual. Fort Lauderdale is a full on joint, there's some serious money floating around that's for sure. We managed to find a free anchorage after being told to move on from the first place but ended up in a great spot with easy access to everything. Our main purpose for the visit is to buy paint, loads of it. From the epoxy barrier coat to the Coppercoat antifoul type stuff and then all the whites and yellows for everything else, it's a lot cheaper here than Guatamala apparently. After a couple of days of catching buses back and fourth to get the perfect shade of yellow mixed I then got an email.....work. Most people dread it but I was absolutely stoked, we can actually afford the paint now!! 

Friends of ours on "Imagine" had a friend named Dale join them in Cape Town for the crossing to Brazil where we met him. He is a super nice guy and after getting to know him over those few months he said if we ever end up in the States in the "Keys" to give him a call and we were just on our way to say hello when I got this email and he said we could park up on his jetty in Key Largo which was so VERY nice of him and that is where Julie and Sunflower is now. I had a week there before I had to fly out and it was great to catch up with him and meet his wife Sandy and have a look around the place and meet some of their friends and neighbours, what a spot! Certainly the most luxurious mooring Sunflower has ever had in our hands anyway, thank you so much Dale and Sandy😀

Now I've been back at work in Aus nearly 3 weeks now and I'm not sure when I will finish but it is all going well so either way I'm not too worried but with any luck we will be in Belize for maybe Xmas or New Years, who knows???

Hurricane Matthew

We'd been watching this storm track across the Caribbean and then it turns north and it's like wow this could be pretty big. Monday we start thinking we really have to start making a move so first thing Tuesday morning we leave our anchorage just north of St Augustine and plan to go to Green Cove Springs. GCS is 20nm inland from St Augustine up the St Johns river but to get there it is just over 60 miles as you have to go north up to Jacksonville first and then back down. With a dirty bottom and prop and the current in the river against us it was a little slow and then we get to Jacksonville and the city bridge opens at certain times and unfortunately we missed it by 5 minutes and had to wait 4 hours until 8pm. In the pissing rain we were very happy to have the new Simrad radar. The river is fairly well marked with not much traffic especially on a night like that and we made it safely to GCS arriving at 1am. I booked a spot to haul out on the way so at 6am we were up dropping the headsail and then in to confirm the haul and after waiting for 2 boats we were out early afternoon yesterday and very happy. Well as happy as can be, the yard is fairly disorganised with a lot of scruffy boats and junk around but it's the best we could do under the circumstances. The problem with leaving Sunflower in the water and setting lots of anchors isn't just dragging but all the stuff that may flow down the river when it floods like trees, boats, docks and whatever else that floats. There are creeks running off the river which would be great but they all have bridges blocking the entrances so that scraps that idea.

So then the fun begins stripping the boat of pretty much EVERYTHING, solar panels, sails, kayak, dodger you name it and all in the pooring rain. Sunflower looks like a bomb has gone off inside with everything on the cabin floor but we got it done and now we are in a cheap hotel room close by and the waiting game is on.. it will start getting windy in the early hours of tomorrow morning and then the peak will be that evening and there is not much else we can do besides sit back eating noodles and drinking beers watching the TV!! Ive given up watching the forecast as it changes every time but at the moment the eye is going to pass over ST Augustine heading straight up the coast so hopefully the 20nm inland we are will do us good but who knows it could all change once again for the better with any luck. Anyway we have done all we possibly can and now it's just a case of crossing our fingers and toes and hope sunflower will be alright:) and to be honest the scariest moment so far has been the lift to the hotel from a lady recommended from the marina. In Australia we would say she's a 50 year old bogan who's had a hard life. She was drunk as anything and trying to make small talk and telling us about previous accidents she's had and how her brakes don't work and she kept asking me if my name was Kaden (?) and after three times she gave up, luckily we made the 5 minute journey without a scratch!!

Hurricane Matthew tearing up the coast

Road Trippin'

After saying good bye to Al and Beth we went over to Virginia and stayed in another state park and camped right in their lake. Was a great couple of days just hanging out barbecuing, walking and getting scared in the car while Julie practices how to drive again! (She did alright;)

From there it was across to New Bern in North Carolina to see our cruising friends we met in Maldives Stuart and Sheila. Beautiful old town they live in, it's about 30nm up a sort of river system from the coast with a massive boating community, nice place. They live right on the water and at times have alligators on their front lawn!! We didn't see any but they're there, pretty amazing as they are 600nm north of the bottom of Florida and it freezes there in winter!? Brown bears are also a common sight and plenty of deer eating their roses on the front porch. It was a great few days meeting their friends and helping launch a friends boat and getting that going, driving down to Beaufort and checking out the Maritime Museum and having a look at all the boats around the place including theirs which is now for sale if anyone wants a great Stevens 47?? We also went one night to a music talent show (Julie thought we were going to a bar) at the local school which was a bit of a laugh and one of their friends was playing there who was really good. It was pretty interesting to see the small town out and about and it felt like it looks in the American movies from the presenter to the cheerleaders it was all there. 

Card games with a few beers also got pretty serious and now we have brought them back to Sunflower and that has been distracting us from a few jobs also!! It was really good to see you guys so thank so much for a great few days.

From there a few hours drive to another spot to camp for the night in South Carolina and then home to Sunflower the next day, it was a great trip. Very interesting to see the countryside, a lot different than what I expected I just couldn't get over the greenness of the forests to the mountains it was all real pretty and completely different to the mainly dry west coast of Australia!! It's a big old country also with a lot of history that everyone is super proud of and wants to share which is real nice. And then there's the churches, I couldn't believe how many. There will be a tiny town and it will have at least 5+ churches one for each religion and race and a lot I have never heard of, I didn't realise how religious the US is. Then there's the cars, you are nobody in the country unless you have a V8 truck with a 6ltr engine, they're a dime a dozen burning fuel like crazy around the place with nothing in the back. We did 2400 miles and it cost us just $150 in fuel for our 2ltre car so fuel is unbelievably cheap. Yes it's a very diverse country from what we have seen from Miami to Ohio it has something for everyone!!

Now we are back we are all stocked up with nowhere to go!! Just waiting for the Hurricane season to end. Well we are actually anchored in the nicest little spot a few miles north of St Augustine all by ourselves in a very quiet little part of the ICW. It's great, just a short dingy ride in and a walk and we're at the beach which is real nice. We have been ticking a few jobs of the list and making some plans, the latest is refitting in Guatamala?? Maybe be there by the end of the year, who knows??!

Stuart and Sheila 

Our campsite in Virginia

Bears around

Fremantle Sailing Clubs old travel lift in North Carolina!!

Hot Beef rolls heated while driving on the engine👌

Ohio

We decided to hire a car and do a bit of a road trip to visit some friends and do a bit of camping and are discovering that this is a big and spectacular country with amazing forests and scenery. The old owners of Sunflower now live in Ripley Ohio so we of course had to catch up with them and see how they are. We left on the worst possible day, tropical storm "Julia" had just passed over us the night before and was heading north the way we were also headed and after driving for 7 hours we finally passed through it into clear skies we ended up in a State National Park on Lake Murray where we camped in a beautiful spot for a couple of nights and just hung out BBQing, walking and trying to catch a fish.

From there we drove up through North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and then into Ohio over some beautiful mountains, farmland and forest, everything is so lush and green and all tuned into the local radio stations that only seem to play country and western which I have to say slowly drives me nuts but definitely sets the scene. Was great to see Al and Beth in Ripley, very nice old rustic little town on the river that is the border for Kentucky. They couldn't have made us more welcome and showed us around their area and introduced us to their friends was a great 3 days, thank you so much! One of the highlights for me was going to a shrimp harvest. They have these fresh water shrimps in ponds on a farm and harvest them at the end of summer draining the pond completely. It's a big day with a lot of the locals coming down to help and buy and I reckon they would have got close to getting a ton of shrimp from the one pond as well as a heap of frogs they collect to eat and a little turtle they release somewhere else, the kids were having a blast anyway. Al also showed us his giant pumpkin he has been growing the last few months of the summer! He says it's about 750 pounds! Another very interesting thing was the tobacco fields which we had never seen, all in all it was a busy few days😀

Now we are heading of camping again and then onto seeing some other friends in North Carolina

Al and Beth in there garden amongst the Sunflowers!

Tobacco hanging to dry

Als pumpkin 

Shrimp harvest 

Some guy that paints amazing murals for a living around the whole country

ICW

After 7 weeks work back in Aus I was ready to get back that's for sure. Julie had done an amazing job as usual bringing the best out of Sunflower while I was away and had the dodger rebuilt with new clears with her new sewing machine. She had made a bunch of new friends in Marathon who we had a few drinks with over the week we were there and I also fitted the new Simrad radar which seems to work a treat. The bottom of the boat was filthy and had grown its own coral reef while I was away so that was the other job on the to do list. We waited for favourable winds to sail up the coast but it was all NE so we just waited till it was light and motor sailed up to Miami over a few days and had the weekend there, it's a great town for a couple of days, chaos but good fun. We checked out the Happy Hours around on the main beach ended up in one that Layla recommended and it's actually free drinks for an hour!! Tipped him $20 and he looked after us alright:) We also went into Little Havana, bought lots of clothes that we both probably didn't need and hung out. It's a pretty cool town, FULL of Latinos from all over amongst everyone else from around the globe would have to be the most multicultural city I've ever been to that's for sure.  Then we did an overnight sail up to Fort Pierce and entered the Intra Coastal Waterway or ICW as the locals call it. You can travel from right at the bottom of Florida to the very top of the US east coast on this waterway if you like with entrances normally at rivers or cutouts along the way. The depths on the charts show 2.7m all the way and we've always had a metre+ under our keel which is pretty amazing when you think about it. They built it for back it the days of cargo transport but we are yet to see any barges being pushed along so far in the 150nm we've done but hopefully we will. There's a good few bridges, most with a clearance of 65 feet+ and a few that open on demand in daylight hours and the bridge masters all seem a real happy bunch stoked to see us come through. In the American winter time apparently it's super busy with yachts but except for the weekends it seems to be empty with a lot of boats in storage for the hurricane season. Talking of Hurricanes there is one going on tonight as I write crossing the gulf and coming across the land and becoming a tropical storm that is going to pass north of us but give us some pretty crappy weather by the looks of it but we have to expect this for the next month or two.

We are now in st Augustine which was first settled in 1565 and they say is the oldest town in the US. It's a very pretty town with nice sheltered harbour with a big old fort looking over it and plenty of bars with Happy Hours also with beers from $2😀!! 

We have a few jobs to do which we are slowly ticking off the list and plan at the moment to stay here a while, maybe hire a car and do some touring to see some friends from this side of the planet.

Miami

ST Augustine Bridge

Florida

Not long after arriving in Varadero which is just 50nm east of Havana I checked my emails and had a great surprise.....there was one from work. We left that night for an overnighter to Florida and landed in a town called Marathon. Had a great sail especially once we got in the Gulf Stream and had a good 2-3 kts current with us. Marathon is in the Florida Keys and is a very nice protected anchorage within the mangroves and apartments  and there are also 200+ moorings owned by the local government. Checking in with he authorities was easy enough after phoning up and giving our details we then caught a taxi to the airport and was cleared in from by the customs guy within half an hour, welcome to  the United Staes of America!!

After a few days we jumped on a mooring and it was time for me to say goodbye to Julie and get a minibus up to Miami to fly back to Aus where I have been for over a month now but will hopefully be back within the next couple of weeks and we will sail north. Not too sure of our plans yet, we were hoping to sail up to Chesapeake Bay but time is running out so we may just get up as far as North Carolina :) 

   

    Here's the mooring field for any cruisers interested

Dugongs in the marina

 

Marina "Tiki Bar"

Cayo Rosario

After a few days on Cayo Largo we had a nice short sail to Cayo Rosario. Rather than anchor in the channel there is a reef entrance on the south coast at the western end with a reasonable anchorage with protection from the reef. Beautiful beach for swimming and BBQs under the trees and not bad fishing out at the reef so we were happy enough. After a only a few hours there we saw our good friends from the Indian Ocean sail past on Kantala, they said they would be back this way in a couple of days so we waited and was great to catch up with them for the first time since Brazil over a few beers on the beach was great fun.

The forecast for the next week then said light south easterlies on the North coast of Cuba so we decided to make the most of it and sail to the cape and then head up the North coast to Havana. Normally there are quite strong NE winds and you will have to bash into it on that coast but we had a great trip mostly. 360 miles took us just over 3 days with 18 hours motoring so wasn't too bad, better than expected anyway. 

Michael from Kantala gave me a good tip for radio weather forecast on 8137fqz USB. His name is Chris Parker, some weather guru and he starts I think around 8am local time and slowly covers the whole of the Caribbean finishing around Cuba at 930 for those interested. People subscribe to him and he advises cruisers best time to leave ect on passages around the place.

Michael and Sheila for drinks on Sunflower

Fish BBQs on the beach

Thoughts on Cuba

We had a ball in Cuba but some things when travelling on a boat do your head in. It is a different country that's for sure with the friendliest happy out smiling people but it's hard to see sometimes how they can be so happy as the government really rips them off. A doctor for instance who has studied for years and is one of the highest paid gets only 40cuc or $45 a month and things aren't all that cheap so it's amazing to think how these people survive, they do it tough. But then most have good clothes ect and seem to be out drinking rum and having fun so I don't know how they afford it. 

Then when you are on a yacht there are a lot of restrictions. They are paranoid about their people escaping from their own country so us yachties if wanting to go ashore in a populated town there has to be a marina there where they can see you get on and off your boat with no locals allowed near. Then there's only 8 marinas around the whole island that would be a say 1500nm journey around. So you HAVE to go to these marinas and then they charge us 30cuc a night and the facilities are minimal and all run down. So basically the tourists get screwed paying more than one months salary for one nights berthing and you have no chance to anchor. We tried at some other places to anchor just for shelter for the night but you soon get told to move on regardless of the weather. This seemed to mainly be on the north coast though from what we saw. The south coast seemed a lot more relaxed with the regulations. I would go back for sure to the islands, for me this is the best. They are uninhabited so the authorities let you stay there without a bother. The cities are fun for a couple of days but the hussle gets to you soon enough. Santiago was our favourite city, seemed to be the most authentic with loads of fun to be had in the bars, we also heard Trinidad was very nice but we couldn't get there with our 2m draft. 

And if you are heading this way on a boat make sure you are well stocked up. The shops here have only the very basics and then you still have to go to many shops trying to find them. About the only thing cheap is the rum for under $5 a litre! The water from some of the marinas has a chance of cholera so is not recomended for drinking so top up your tanks for sure because you can only buy 5ltr waters for more than 2$ a go. Fresh vegetables are not always the easiest to get and the choice is very minimum but we always managed to get enough. The fishing at the islands is amazing which makes it easy for dinners there which is a blessing. 

In all we are so happy to have seen this place when we did as it is changing soon. The Americans are now aloud to come in and already the tourist prices are going up everywhere. It will be good for a lot of the locals that's for sure to make some money for themselves but will change the place I'm thinking.

The cost for a boat to enter is $55 then $75 pp for your first 1 month visa and then another $25 to renew for another month.

In all I wouldn't have missed Cuba for the world, it was great and well worth it, not always easy but that's what makes it so special I guess.

Havana!!

It was pretty cool to land in Havana, we were pretty happy with ourselves anyway. After getting sorted at the Marina Hemmingway we got a couple of local buses into town which was dirt cheap and easy enough. It's a happening place with loads of beautiful old buildings and loads of parks would have been some site back in the day when Cuba was doing well for itself. Now it is all geared for the tourist and tourists there are, loads of them. I guess we should have known that would be the case but it's still a bit of a shock. We went in for a couple of days and nights walking around loads and checking out a few bars with music, did the tourist thing and had a tour in an old convertible Chevy and then decided we had had enough so set sail 70 miles further east to Varedero to make an easier sail for Florida.

Plenty of old cars to look at!!