We enjoyed a fun weekend with Mike’s sister, Aunt Mary! It went by in a blur but there were plenty of fun times. Saturday was low key playing games at home, walking round Blue Lake, playing in the back yard, eating snow ice cream and root beer floats. Oh… and baking bread! Sunday we took bigger excursions to Ashcroft to ski and remind ourselves what snowy mountains look like, followed by hot tub time and eating brownies hot out of the pan for an early birthday celebration for Mike.

On Monday Mike took Mary to the airport at 5:30am and the Mike and Tina dropped the kids off at the school bus at 7:25! No tears. Good attitudes too, though I can’t say the kids were really excited either!

Emma is keeping it together really well after news of a classroom change. She started thinking positively of friends of friends that she knows in those classes so “at least I will have 3 friends” she said going to bed last night. She’s accepted the news and is finding ways for it to be good. As she came home Monday she was all smiles. It turns out she knows almost everyone and is quite happy with her new teachers.

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Day 113 – Wed 3/27/19

Tonite we walked in the door of our house…officially bringing an end to our family adventure sailing through the islands on Amel. Thank you Reid and Rheta, from the bottom of our hearts, for giving us this amazing family opportunity.  Thank you Amel for keeping us safe and sound on this journey and providing the means for such a wonderful experience. We are also so thankful for all the family and friends that supported our crazy plan and helped us along our journey, especially in times of crises and in keeping our home & cars safe while we were away! And thanks to many of you following along sending us encouraging and fun comments/emails along the way…..it was always wonderful to hear from you and know you were enjoying the journey too.It’s a longer-than-usual 11 day March break here in Basalt so many people are out of town right now. Henry and Emma get an extra few days to get used to being home before returning to school with all their friends on Monday April 1.  It will be nice to have a few days altogether to slowly get reacquainted with land life! 
We landed in 60F gray skies in Aspen, snow on the mountains, bulbs blooming in the garden, sun tomorrow then snow storm on Friday.  Sounds like spring in the mountains when you get a bit of everything.   We did watch the sunset from our front porch…while wearing sweaters…it was a much shorter sunset appreciation then in Amel’s cockpit I must say!

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Goodbye Bahamas. Can it be? We are now in Florida.

I am in full shock. Cars. Highways. people.  System overload.

“Where is the water? says Emma.

Sunday – Tuesday Update 3/26/19:

We are writing to you from Fort Pierce, Florida at my Dad’s house.  We left the Bahamas 48 hours ago….it has been a bit surreal saying goodbye to Amel and being back in USA.  Here we are back in the land of highways, cars, stores, traffic, people, people everywhere.  Unlimited cell service, data, wifi, texting and easy phone calls. Less then 2hrs after landing we were in a huge fancy Florida mall at an Apple store to get Tina’s laptop fixed. Kids got lucky with a robot class to join while we met with repairman.  We have walls surrounding us, running water (we used a month’s worth on one round of showers and baths) and flushing toilets (“I get to put the toilet paper in the toilet!” Emma exclaims with glee).  We have been treated with yummy food from Lorraine (ribs last night for Henry!) and visited a huge food store to pick out any kid of ice cream they wanted from the biggest wall of ice cream we’d seen. Yet we would trade it all for one more day sailing to a deserted harbor on Amel.

There is no sense in dwelling on the differences between life on land to life on a boat.  They are just different.  Benefits and challenges to both!

Tomorrow, we travel on the last leg of journey home finally to Carbondale, CO.

This afternoon we’ll go to the beach and pool to soak in as many hot sunny rays as we can!!

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It’s official – Reid and Rheta are back in the Bahamas!  Amel’s owners arrived from Canada on Thursday afternoon to a hot, sunny Bahamian day.  It was so much fun to have them back on board and be together again.  Last January we had 3 weeks together on Amel – this time barely 3 days – lots of visiting to get done in a short period!  It’s been fun showing them how much the kids have learned about operating the boat in the months we have been aboard.  Lots of laughs and good stories to share.

Tomorrow is our last full day in the Bahamas.  Where has the time gone?!

PS.  Forgot to post the fun photos of us enjoying the conch Henry got in the cut south of Overyonder Cay a few days ago

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Have not had great cell service for days.  Have phone hoisted up the mast to try and send this.  Need to get caught up!
Update from Sunday/Monday at Compass Cay – March 17/18

Rachel’s bubble bath was a joy to revisit (hadn’t been there in 15years) and such a beautiful few days to be there too.  We left Warderick Wells Sunday morning and explored all afternoon then loved it so much we did it again Monday morning! It’s on the northern tip of Compass Cay (the uninhabited part).  A 10min walk up a tidal creek bed with shells, little fish and juvenile conch to enjoy along the way.  Rachel’s bubble bath is a 5 ft deep tide pool separated from the Exuma sound by one rock wall.  When the ocean waves hit the wall, the foam top of the wave spills over, creating a lovely bubble effect in the pool.  We were lucky enough to have the place to ourselves for hours.  After we returned to Amel we watched tourist boats arrive one after the other for the next 2 hours, all hiking to the bubble bath.  We sure got lucky on our timing!  The creek bed that you walk up is less than knee deep but kids had so much fun snorkeling it instead of walking.  Always tiny shells and creatures to be found.

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3/17/19 – uninhabited northern tip of Compass Cay – Sunday

Look what Henry and Mike showed up with at 5pm tonite – the biggest lobster we have ever seen in our lives (never mind speared!!).  What a way to end our trip in style. We gorged ourselves and ate all of this 1lb 5oz lobster tail (the whole lobster was 42” long from antennae to tail and weighed 4.5lbs).  The tail alone was 10” long.  We grilled half, boiled the other half, the legs had huge amount of the most succulent meat.  It was heavenly.  Emma didn’t agree and ate carrots instead, but she’ll warm up to it someday we hope!  Both she and Henry loved to crack open the legs and antennae to find all the meat they could.

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These last few days have just been so special.  We feel the journey coming to an end, in each place we re-visit and say goodbye.  Other stops are wonderful at new places we have just discovered – showing that there is always something new around the corner.  We loved our time in Warderick Wells, the Exuma Land and Sea Park where we moored Friday to Sunday. Weather was lovely and the spotted eagle rays did not disappoint as they swam past our boat for hours in groups up to 7 at a time.  We even had 2 visiting sharks that circled our boat each evening (right at shower time as luck would have it! And yes we did still jump in…have to rinse the soap off somehow!).

The weather has turned out to be fine, but has been troublesome with inconvenient timing of this big front that is now possibly arriving today.  Or not?  It already passed the northern Bahamas but may or may not make it this far down. Since it’s been on the forecast for a week, it can be all consuming getting weather updates and tracking it to determine where we should be.  Ensuring we had the right wind to get south was critical as Reid and Rheta fly in Thursday and we didn’t want to get stranded too far north.  As luck would have it –Sunday and Monday as our motor sailing south became engine-off sailing as each day we got a change in wind in our favour so conditions were always good.  We had some nasty rain squalls all around us on Monday….but sadly no rain.  Fingers crossed for today – we need to fill up our water tanks!  Here’s hoping.

Each day we say “this is our last sunny day” or “this is our last chance to swim”…only to find out the next day is lovely too.  Yesterday was no different. We could see the front to the north with huge clouds and heard about 50knot gusts in the Abacos, but we were sunny and 10-15knots anchored off Thomas Cay in the Pipe Creek area of the Exumas.    We started some packing and then spent the afternoon exploring new territory – reefs around Over Yonder Cay.  In most exciting news – Henry finally got a CONCH!!! Well done Henry.  He found it, dove for it, and swim-carried it back to dinghy (they are heavy!).  It was huge, though Henry’s smile was even bigger!  Happiest boy ever.  The last thing on our bucket list….check! (not that we really had a bucket list….but he has been dreaming of finding a conch this whole trip. So many juvenile conch we’ve found and left behind.  This is the first mature one).   Also we found a huge Whelk, right near the conch AND a helmet shell too….all with living creatures inside.  Amazing to find 1 never mind all 3.  Then our last snorkel of the day between Rat cay and the mice we had 2 turtles swim by, calmly letting us join them till we tired of the up current swim.  A wonderful way to end.

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Thursday – Castle beach to Blckpoint (laundry) then onto DECCA stm at Pipe cay – 3/14/19Friday- Pipe Cay to Warderick wells – 3/15/19

We hunted for shells all morning, sailed all afternoon to Warderick Wells, baked cookies with kids after dinner, snuggled in the cockpit reading stories together….then after they were asleep we hoisted the cell phone 45 feet up the mast to pick up a distant cell tower for our all-important offshore weather forecasts.  Of course, that also means we get email and see the news highlights.  It’s hard to completely ‘turn it off,’ even out here. 

This week in particular –  news and reports from family and friends have hit home hard.  Avalanches and blizzards in Colorado are affecting friends, extreme flooding is affecting Nebraska where Mike has a lot of extended family – many of whom are stuck at work, or at home, or away from their families tonight.  Pets stranded, cattle marooned on farm fields that are now islands, family with flooded crop land.  Mike’s sister lives in Christchurch, NZ.  She is safe but lives within a community reeling from a mass shooting.   We’re even entangled in the unfortunate news about the Boeing 737 Max aircraft issues abroad – our flights home in a few weeks include a leg on a Max 9 that will need to be rebooked or rescheduled by the airline.

We are blessed to be together with Henry and Emma, safe and sound, in this protected harbour.  Even though we may be a thousand miles away on a boat, but know that we are thinking of friends and family back home each day and as we write these updates each night.  We look forward to catching up soon.  We expect to be “back to normal” by April 1^st, which is the Monday that the kids plan to climb back on the school bus. If you’d like to reach out, our cell phones and home phone should be back to normal by then as well.

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It’s just a number, but 100 days seemed worth celebrating somehow.  There were no fireworks, but there were Skittles and the last pieces of Rum Cake after dinner!

It’s hard to capture the many things that make a sabbatical-sized vacation different from a vacation.  After all, if today were a vacation day it wouldn’t have started with school (the kids were great today, plowing through more than average in two separate sessions).  And a vacation typically doesn’t involve baking bread during bad weather (sunny, but gusting 25 knots in the anchorage).  But we did get off the boat, enjoying a family beach walk on the Atlantic side, and on a second trip to land we met Jean who lives with her husband in the “Sand Castle” built on its own little bay – it really is a castle and is their seasonal dream home-away-from-home in California.

Our trip has been less about our usual blitz of vacation activities that happen on long weekends or an occasional week away and more about the home-away-from-home adventures made possible by living in a portable house, or in this case in a floating house.  The cooking, repairs, school work, and chores of home all come with us, but we unlocked plenty of quality family time on amazing islands and underwater, meeting some great people along the way.  On the occasions when supplies have been low or the weather was sour, taking a vacation from our vacation begins to sound appealing.  But I think the four of us are happy we’ve taken the extra leap of faith and effort to make it out here.  Thanks again to Reid and Rheta White for entrusting us with Amel, the floating house which made it all possible!

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Wow –  it’s been days since an update.  We were recharging after cousins left – so much fun to see them though anchoring multiple times a day and keeping 8 people fed and entertained on the water was a lot of work!  In last few days, we’ve had a good time sorting through all the photos of their visit and so glad we could share our Amel experience with them.

Our days have still been full – Sunday we did the last grocery run for us, joined a Bahamas Baptist church service, then picked up anchor for a heeled-over sail down to White point (about 3 hours south).  Wind on the nose but Amel surprised us by performing well with the apparent wind just 45deg off the nose.  No hope that Mandolin could ever have come close to that!

Monday was our day of rest.  We anchored off a pretty beach and swam to shore. With wind calmer we pumped up the paddle board again.  It’s been 2 days and we’ve still not used the gasoline-powered dinghy!  Emma has come a long way in 3 months – she swam the entire way back from shore to Amel – about 1000feet, 0.2 miles or the equivalent of ~13 lengths in a swimming pool.  No lifejacket, no wetsuit, no worries – just a mask and snorkle.  Those pencil stick arms do have some good muscle in there!  We found a nice coral head with TONS of fish on it.  Very surprising considering it was just one small coral head with nothing else around.  We also speared a lobster for lunch – now that was a treat!

Daylight savings sure has hit us.  I remember spring is always the toughest one to adjust to.  But somehow, the clocks changed 1 hr – and our routine has changed 2-3hrs!  Monday Henry slept in till 9:15am and today 8:30.  Kids are usually up around 6:30-7am.  We are enjoying the dinnertime/sunset adjustment.  All winter it has been such a rush to try and get dinner made (which has me in the galley) but also enjoying the sunset around 5:30-6pm.  It is lovely that it’s at 7:15pm now.  So wonderful to have bedtime stories in the cockpit with the sky glowing all around us.

Captions for photos in facebook:

It’s lunchtime!! Glad our fishing drought has finally come to an end. We haven’t caught or speared anything since January. Glad the kids could have this exciting moment again in our last days here.

Emma on paddleboard – Taking a moment to recharge between beach hikes, swims to coral heads and paddle boarding upwind. It’s a rough life, but Emma’s figured out how to handle it all!

Happy school work involves comfortable kids…picking their own location for work as along as they accomplish something is encouraged. Emma loves to snuggle in jammies in bed for literacy….henry is all about sun, wind and crazy places!

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