Looking Back at Our First Sailing Season: Our Five Favorite Places

After 5 months at sea, our first season sailing is winding down. As we finish prepping Kairos for storage on the hard in Puerto Rico, we reflect on all of the gorgeous places we’ve visited. We’ve loved almost all of the 50 plus anchorages that we have visited over the last 150 days. We’ve seen pristine sandy beaches, inviting turquoise water, breathtaking mountains, and lush forests. We’ve met some crazy cruisers and some incredibly sweet locals. We’ve hiked, swam, fished, lobstered, and snorkeled our hearts out. We’ve experienced a lot, but for one reason or another these locations stand out as our top five favorite anchorages. They are listed below in chronological order. read more

Two Salty Sailors in Paradise: Our First Two Weeks in the BVI

The Thorny Path to Windward is well behind us and we are in the British Virgin Islands. We did it! We sailed here from the Tampa Bay area, covering 1600 miles. We battled lightning storms, repaired boat issues, gathered paperwork for importing the dogs, withstood our fair share of high seas, and spent several sleepless nights behind the helm on overnight passages. We are no longer the greenhorns who had trouble setting the anchor and who laid awake all night checking every 15 minutes to make sure it was holding. Nor are we the newbie sailors that didn’t realize that 20-25 kt winds on the nose in open water is near suicidal. We are no longer intimidated by docking in tight slips. We are now intimately familiar with our boat’s systems. We now have a good understanding of Kairos’s and, more importantly, our own limits. We have learned a lot over the last 130 days at sea. We’ve learned about our boat, about sailing, about liveaboard life, about ourselves, and about each other. read more