We made it! We’re back in Jacksonville, FLA. We are dead tired, having spent the last 11 days working like dogs on Atlas. The amount of work we’ve accomplished is, to us, staggering and, frankly, I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished. We’ve knocked out more jobs than we typically would in an entire off season. Something about not having a job and the weather being warm might have something to do with that!

Like many things in life, there’s no free lunch. All this work has come at the expense of boat schooling and any semblance of quality time with our 2 boys, Oliver (8) and Elliott (5). We’ve basically ignored them for the last 2 weeks, without any outlets for physical activity or any sort of positive stimulation. This has been incredibly stressful. I know other families who do much better than us, dividing the labor so at least one parent is focused on the kids, activities for the day pre planned. This wasn’t us so far in January ‘22. Atlas has been torn apart. Every. Damn. Day. We would work on our projects, having to move mattresses, floor boards, drop ceiling panels…only to have to move them back so everyone could sleep/eat/sit. This isn’t fun, or efficient. The next day we’d start again…

We left the boat here in Jacksonville to have a boat yard do some of the work for us. This becomes painful when you start doing the math (2 guys @ $110 usd an hour to put on hose clamps?!) but we knew what we were getting in to. This process isn’t new to us…we like doing boat work but it comes at the expense of time with the kids. And I didn’t blow up my life to ignore my kids while doing boat work. So we viewed the inevitable boatyard invoice as a bill for time spent together skiing in Colorado. By the way, that was fucking awesome.

The time together skiing was like a dream. Truly. I’ve never spent a month of my life skiing and getting to do it with my family made it ever more special. Sure there were times that I would have preferred to ski tougher terrain rather than taking the same green run for the 243rd time in 2 weeks, but so what? Getting to watch my 2 boys absolutely explode in their growth on the slopes is far better (I only had to repeat that mantra about 20 times each day to calm down). Being able to stay with Barb and Steve, Melissa’s Mom and her truly wonderful partner, made things even more special. The boys absolutely loved the time with their grandparents. Since we left Atlas we’ve spent time with all the grandparents and all the uncles and cousins. It was a dream for the boys and they had so much fun.

After Christmas, however, we’ve been running flat out. We extended our stay for a few days to grab a few more days of skiing at Winter Park in truly EPIC conditions. But after that, it’s been GO GO GO. From Colorado we drove back to my family in Holland, Michigan. We immediately took Covid PCR tests to allow us to get in to Canada where we had scheduled doctor and dentist appointments for each family member, in addition to needing to knock out administrative crap and putting the car in storage 2 hours north of Toronto. Unfortunately our Covid tests coincided with Omicron and the massive demand on testing, in addition to NYE. With just 5 hours left before Canada’s 72 hour time limit on test results expired, we packed up our car, the MASSIVE Ford Expedition Max XL Grande Extended edition and drove to the 3 hours to the border. We hoped that our test results would come in at the last minute and we could get in to Canada and our appointments. Alas, it was not to be, so we turned around and drove the 3 hours back and then took 2 more rounds of Covid tests hoping one would come back within 72 hours! It wasn’t surprising that this happened but it blew up our schedule of appointments in Toronto.

I’ll fast forward here but we made it to Toronto, via Buffalo and a stop at our good friend (and Atlas alumni) John Goller‘s house so we could drop off all our stuff so we didn’t have to take it over the Canadian border. 40 hours later we were back in John’s house, down to 1 car, having put the wagon in storage, made a few of the appointments and picked up a bunch of Canadian foods we wanted to take with us to the Bahamas. He treated us to a lovely pancake breakfast before we set off again. (Thanks again, John, it was so much fun to see you and Julian!) We then spent the rest of that day driving approximately 35 mph in awful lake effect snow, cursing the Ford’s RWD and all season tires. The next day we rolled in to Jacksonville elated to be back and eager to move back aboard Atlas.

We checked in to a hotel for 3 nights as we knew we wouldn’t be able to sleep aboard Atlas as it was so torn up. We unloaded all of our stuff from the Ford Expedition Max Super Huge Edition and immediately drove to Costco for our Bahamas provisioning. I’ve chuckled at all of the provisioning pics on the ‘Gram of fellow cruisers heading to the Bahamas. Most of them have catamarans so I felt like our haul was on the small side since we simply don’t have the space to store stuff on our wee monohull. And after living for 7 weeks in homes that aren’t ours, it felt so so so good to be back in our own space, even if it was completely torn up.

So, in summary, our pace has been relentless. We’ve accomplished much, at least in terms of boat work, all at the expense of time with the kids. We’ve had numerous set backs but I don’t think many of you care to read about that. But I’ve definitely got more fodder for the Muppet Diaries, Florida Edition one of these days. My final pic will be of our To Do list, posted on our dry erase board. The list will probably look minor and easy to you. I’ll simply add that we’ve been doing this while living aboard a boat that we have to take apart and put away each day, with 2 young boys and an injured dog (yes, again, another expensive trip to the Vet). It’s been a really tough time. But we’re almost done. You’ll see what’s left for today in the pic. And tomorrow we’re out of here and it feels GREAT!

One of the reasons we decided to embark on this adventure was a desire to slow down, breathe deeply and spend more quality time together as a family. And we’ve been rather successful in that so far. However the last 3 weeks haven’t allowed us to do that. Actually, no, rather than delete that sentence I’ll correct myself here and say that, over the last few weeks, we’ve failed to slow down, breathe deeply, and spend quality time together as a family. We’ve been so focused on the boat work and its attendant madness that we’ve barely reflected on the truly fucking incredible time we had with family in MI and CO. We’re looking forward to tomorrow’s passage to Cape Canaveral where we hope to reconnect together as a family in the cockpit, reflect on our most recent adventures and look forward to the upcoming azure waters of the Bahamas.

We hope to be in the Bahamas in a week from now. The passage from Jacksonville to Cape Canaveral takes 24 hours, arriving Monday. On Tuesday we’ll take the boys for a tour of the Kennedy Space Center. We hope to catch a rocket launch as well but the weather has wrecked havoc with the launch schedule and it’s not looking good. From there we’ll be trying to coordinate 1 last provisioning run, a dog examination to obtain a health certificate for our entry in to the Bahamas, and then juggling Covid tests with a weather window as our test results can’t be older than 48 hours. We hope to go directly from Cape Canaveral to the Bahamas but this will be tricky as the passage takes approximately 44 hours. can we find a weather window, get tested and get there in time? Probably not. So the alternative is to get to southern FLA (West Palm/Ft. Lauderdale/Miami and wait for a window, get tested and then have a shorter passage over. Seeing as it’s currently 37 degrees, blowing 25 and raining we aren’t being too picky about our exact route…so long as it’s SOUTH!

Emotionally the family is doing pretty damn well. The worst is behind us. We have so much to look ahead to and it’s coming up soon! We enjoy our passages (usually). We’re so excited to link up with kid boats again and we’re hoping to catch up with our friends aboard Noonsun, Passat and Mug Up. Atlas is in good shape, the bill has been paid, the lines are ready to be cast off. We’re gonna do this! Years of dreaming, months of prep, an amazing 4 months of voyaging to get to this point, now we get to leave the USA and sail to the Bahamas and start living that tropical lifestyle. Let’s do this!!!

A reminder you can track us using AIS, which we’ve linked in the about us section. Once we arrive in the Bahamas, however, you likely won’t see as many AIS updates due to a lack of terrestrial stations. We’ll turn on our satellite tracking once we leave the Bahamas and head offshore to the BVI at the end of February.