Tideye

“Are we going to the VOID!?” Charlie asked innocently with eyes as big as saucers. The Void is the empty space at the edge of a world in Minecraft. When I explained that we were sailing to islands with very few people and no restaurants, that was his logical conclusion. As we motored past the end of the Exuma chain to the elusive Raggeds with ZERO wind, it was hard to determine where the sea ended and the sky began and I had to agree. It looked like we were sailing off into The Void.

We spent ten days enjoying the seclusion and wildlife of the Jumentos and Raggeds. We used the light wind days to make our way to the southern most island in the chain, then worked our way back up to a few anchorages we didn’t want to miss. We fished. We hiked. We ran aground. We blew conch horns. We got mohawk haircuts. We even sailed…fast.

We set out of Elizabeth Harbor with our friends (now wonderfully close friends) on SV Flying Tiger. When we arrived in Hog Cay, we added two more family boats to our flotilla and really got the party started. Movie nights, kid hikes, beach bonfires, it couldn’t get much better. Sharing the experience with awesome sailing families was icing on the ragged cake.

Now we are back in Georgetown to re-provision. (The kids were snacking on peanuts with shells our last passage, our food supplies were almost depleted.) We need all the things: gas, food, laundry, rum. That cold front that blasted the south with snow is going to make it all the way down here – no snow of course, but some strong breeze. So we’ll stay put for a few days while we pull out the charts, look at the weather, and pick our next remote adventure.

If you find yourself asking that question… it’s time to UP ANCHOR. We arrived here in Georgetown on November 20th, just in time to celebrate Thanksgiving. Then, well, we just never really stopped celebrating. Christmas, my birthday and New Year’s all flew by while Tideye hosted her first two rounds friends and family of the season. This holiday was packed with love, lobsters, and so.much.sand.

Celebrating Christmas on a sailboat with my folks on board has to be one of the brightest highlights of our cruising adventure. All of our annual holiday traditions were enhanced by invigorating sunrises and searing sunsets. While we never even picked up the anchor during their visit (totally embarrassing!), we spent each day getting our toes sandy on morning walks and showcasing one of our favorite cruising spots. And now that they have lived onboard with us at anchor, they have a much better understanding of what our day to day life feels like. Warm showers? Talk about a luxury!

We got the sheets drying on the lifelines just in time to grab our friends Val and Joel from the bench outside of Island Boy for a week of adventures we named BensXuma 2025. Fun isn’t a big enough word. Lazy River in Moriah Park, Go Fast Boat tour for pigs, dolphins, blue hole and blow hole, Junkanoo…what a week. Thanks so much for making the trek down you guys!

While we were neck deep in entertaining and celebrating, we also managed to get ourselves rooted in this beautiful community. We sailed down to Georgetown so early in the season with the hope of finding cruising families to share a few beach playdates with. We did. We really did. The kids have all found friends to defend treehouses with, giggle late into the night during sleepovers with, and spend endless hours splashing in the water with. And good news for Logan and me, the parents of boat kids are, you guessed it, boat adults! We have found some awesome friends here for us too – our crew is pretty dang happy.

So we aren’t technically residents, although most days it feels like it as we walk through town exchanging waves with our Exuma friends. I guess we are tourists – but the kind that can give directions and have a local grocery store loyalty card. But we can’t really call ourselves cruisers if we don’t cruise anywhere. It’s been a treat to set our anchor for so long in a protected harbor with so many friends and beach bars, but it’s time to head out exploring again. The Raggeds (an island chain of remote, mostly uninhabited islands with fish and lobsters aplenty) have been calling our name for a long time now, really since we cruised here a decade ago. The weather looks juicy so we upped anchor today to head “off the grid” for a while. Time to earn back our cruisers title. Yeehaw!

As I wake up this morning with a warm cup of coffee, our bow pointing east, and watching a powerful sun rise over Stocking Island, I am filled with an oozing sensation of peace mixed with excitement. Christmas Eve is finally here and our crew is buzzing with anticipation. It’s going to be a good day.

Wishing everyone a calm moment to slow down and enjoy the chaos.

Big love and Christmas warm wishes from S/V Tideye.

The sun had just dipped below the horizon to our starboard, leaving Tideye to make her way across the shallow Yellow Banks in total darkness. After 36 hours at sea, we were settling into our second night of watch schedule when the RPMs of the engines plummeted and binoculars were deployed. A barge was charging right at us. No response on the VHF radio – what WERE those lights?! Two boats were passing directly across our bow with an unfamiliar nav light pattern…

Bahama Lobster Pirates. Seriously. Turned out to be two 70 foot boats, each towing three other skiffs, all lit up with their own white nav light. After a little internet research we stumbled upon a reality TV show produced here in the Bahamas titled, “Bahama Lobster Pirates”. We added the show to our queue and sailed on into the dark after the pirates had safely passed. An exciting non-event in the middle of our passage south to the Exumas.

On our way to the Bahamas we made a couple stops along the east coast of Florida. St. Augustine was a new spot to us. New to us but the OLDEST settlement in the continental US. The whole town felt like one giant history lesson reminiscent of 4th grade Texas history – Ponce de Leon, Spanish and French explorers, natives and massacres. Sprinkle in a few souvenir shops and you have the Ancient City. The city marina had incredible facilities and since we were downtown, everything was walking distance from the dinghy dock. Throw in some great cruising friends and we had ourselves a week!

As I was preparing myself to become a resident of St. Augustine, the weather had different plans. Cap’n Debbie hopped on board and “sailed” with us down to West Palm Beach – a 32 hour motor boat ride south. Even before we dropped the anchor across from the city docks, we knew we needed a little break before we sailed farther. Two bumpy passages and a few boat projects left us feeling the need to slow the boat. So. We did. West Palm is one of our favorite spots – what was the rush?! Live entertainment several nights a week and the BEST library – free classes and programs for the kids every day! Our last two weeks in Florida were busy, but each port got us a little more prepared and provisioned for the cruising season.

We found a tight window to make the crossing across the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. All the windows are pretty tight with cold fronts pushing off the US every week or so. What exactly is a “weather window”? Every boat has their own definition. For us these days it’s pretty simple – as little excitement as possible. (Excitement = green faces, reefed sails, unpredictable squalls) The Gulf Stream has the extra requirement of no north component to the wind direction. So when we saw several days of light SE wind, we decided to motor into it and get to Georgetown in one 56 hour passage. Aside from the lobster pirate encounter, it was an easy passage. Motoring into the wind made everyone a little green the first day, but slowly the smiles returned. Fishing lines went out and sea legs came back. No mahi this trip, but we had a yummy bonita sashimi snack and a couple good hits.

We dropped the anchor onto a sandy bottom in seven feet of neon water. Logan rushed to shore to get us checked in and legal before the immigration office closed while the crew stared at the harbor in absolute amazement. Elizabeth Harbor was EMPTY. I counted six other masts anchored – in two months there will probably be about 400. Totally cool, but also really bizarre.

We covered a lot of ocean in November (842 miles actually). But now we are back on island time and ready to settle ourselves into a salty routine for a bit. S/V Tideye, anchor set.

We did it! It wasn’t comfortable (understatement!) and we are exhausted BUT. We sailed overnight out in the Atlantic with just the five of us – big milestone. Big happy milestone.

We weren’t planning to leave Charleston until later this week, but when we got a note from our weather router that it was time to go, we quickly adjusted our plans Thursday morning for a Saturday morning departure. That meant two days to wrap up all of our Charleston business with a spooky holiday to celebrate in between.

I’ve mentioned before how much I love night sailing. After this sail, I need to amend my stance to I usually love night sailing. The day started out beautiful. Sunny skies, light winds, we were motor sailing under full sail. Everything was cool until…waves. They built. And they were coming at us directly on the beam. Something about the motion did us all wrong. Very very wrong. The kids were all sick (a bucket was involved) and the wind never filled in as forecast, so we just pushed forward as the boat swayed back and forth over every rolly sloshy mess of a wave. We’ve never been so uncomfortable in such light conditions. By sunrise, we were getting lots of inquiries of when we would be arriving. Charlie was hilarious though – even though he didn’t want to eat, he was detailing his first meal on land with intense emotion. Kid loves himself some chicken nuggets.

Logan and I have made several solo overnight passages before, but none on this boat and none with the kids. Having an extra adult on board makes life easy. We take three hour shifts overnight, meaning with three adults we get six whole hours of beautiful rest overnight. With just the two of us, the three hour naps feel very short. Not to mention that when you are off “boat watch”, you are still on “kid watch”. Sea sickness aside, the passage was uneventful and we arrived in St. Augustine, FL yesterday around noon – happy to be here and very proud of our passage.

We are going to hang here for a few days, then plan to continue down to south Florida where we will stage to cross over to the Bahamas. We are cruising baby!

How DO we prepare ourselves and our boat to set sail for international waters? For the next nine-ish months? When we arrived here at the dock in Charleston, the list (or really lack of a list) made my head spin. Boat projects, cleaning, provisioning…where to start?! Some things can’t be done once we leave, but most are just easier with access to Amazon and unlimited power and water. And yes…Costco.

Logan had several fun projects that he wanted to tackle before we took off this season -projects that we can’t work on in remote waters. A new camera installed on top of the mast, tweaking the location of our Starlink, plumbing water directly to our little washer in the forward “garage”, new knot meter, and finally a working anchor light! Lots of sweat, a few frustrated grunts, but mostly great outcomes for projects that will improve our daily cruising life.

While he has been writing code and scheduling boat work, I have been making my way through every storage compartment, cabinet and drawer to deep clean, purge and re-organize. If we didn’t use it last year, we don’t have space for it (spares and safety items excluded). With a year under our belts, we have learned a lot about what we use and how we use it. Sometimes the whole boat feels like one giant jigsaw puzzle – one with endless solutions.

The dumb thing is that with all that purging, we are loading up the boat faster than we can get stuff off. The holidays are big in our home – that means decorations, annual traditions and gifts don’t get missed while we are out cruising. I have done more holiday planning in October that anyone ever should – I wish everyone could have seen the look on the face of the lady at the post office when I told her I was mailing Christmas gifts last week. Anything special we want to make sure we have to celebrate has to be brought onboard before we sail off. You bet we know our way around the Amazon locker here in town. We are currently spooked out with spiders and Crispy Captains and in a few weeks we’ll pull out the good ol’ travel tree!

It definitely hasn’t been ALL work since we got here. We were welcomed into the harbor by one of the most show stopping sunsets we’ve witnessed. I don’t think anything has ever been able to distract me from docking before, but I couldn’t help but scramble down to grab my phone to try to capture this one. Our buddies on Island Time had dinner (and a puppy!) waiting for us as soon as dock lines were secured. We had family come visit and worked our way down our Charleston must-do list. We called this marina home last year for several months, so it’s not a surprise that returning feels a lot like a homecoming.

With hurricane season officially coming to an end, it’s time to wrap up the projects and set sail for warmer waters! We’ve decided to head straight to the Exumas (southern Bahamas) to start out this season. Time to put away the jeans and pull out the swimsuits!

We spent the majority of the 2024 storm season living on land, but somehow managed to be affected by all three storms that have made landfall in the US so far. We went looking for Beryl in Houston, Debby brought lots of rain and wind to Hilton Head, and Helene brought howling gusts to the boat here in South Carolina as well as catastrophic rain and flooding to Western North Carolina – the place we called home for the past six weeks. We feel lucky to have been spared any damage and be left with only a few frazzled nerves. (all mine by the way – the rest of the crew were cool as cucumbers!)

The Smoky Mountains.

That’s where we decided to spend the rest of our summer and man oh man did we all fall in love. We got asked lots of times how we picked a remote cabin in the woods. The answer was simple – we’d never been there before! Our list of “must-dos” seemed to grow longer the more we did (similar to our boat maintenance list actually!). Logan hiked several sections of the Appalachian Trail while I picked up like a hundred new hobbies. We were regulars at Music Bingo on Thursday nights in town. The kids played and hiked all over the mountains, ate WAY more s’mores than recommended, and became Junior Rangers in the Smoky Mountain National Park.

All of that was great fun, but the best thing we did was slooooooow down. Even though our day to day pace of life has slowed significantly since moving aboard last year, we have been in constant motion and it has been exhausting. We took some time to focus on a quieter, easier days and emerged excited and pumped up for another season of travel and cruising life. Thank you Almond, NC, thank you.

And that’s good news, because with storm season winding down, it’s time for us to start to cruise again! We had some wonderful friends (more like family) from our Stella Blue cruising days here to visit this weekend. Now it’s time to toss off the dock lines and sail up to Charleston for a few weeks to prep and provision for our upcoming adventures. Also – of all the places we visited this year, the kids have crowned Charleston, SC as their favorite. Sigh. So we’ll head north to go south. We are back aboard and ready for action!

It’s been a while since I’ve had the brain space to sit down to write. July was…big. We watched from Colorado as Hurricane Beryl destroyed islands, homes and boats of people we love and then drove straight into her path to Houston to witness her punch first hand. Tucker turned nine and Charlie turned six while we ventured out on “Tour de Tejas 2024,” a familiar Texas circuit to squeeze as much of our family and friends as possible. And this morning I am staring at my list of lists trying to figure out how to prep for Tropical Storm Debby as she set her sites on Hilton Head. Never a dull moment!

Hurricane Beryl made landfall as a Cat 4 directly over Union Island where my sister-in-law is from and her family lives. We felt helpless as we watched the models and texted family. After the storm, we also got news that our first sailboat, Stella Blue, was on the hard in Carriacou and is no longer. Emotional times. After a week of family fun, we packed up our duffel bags and began our voyage from Colorado to Texas, once again obsessively checking the weather – Beryl had made a turn and was heading straight to Houston! We drove through the outer band of storms, tucked ourselves in and woke up with no power. We rode out the now Cat 1 storm with my parents ON Tucker’s 9th birthday! Definitely an exciting page in his life story!

We spent the next week crashing with friends and family who had power – thanks guys!!! Then spent the rest of the month traveling and celebrating in a much less dramatic fashion. We felt the love as we pulled into as many driveways as we could to load up on Texas hugs.

Spending time in Texas was a funny thing. It felt so familiar and comfortable, but a month is a long time to be on the road. We travel around on Tideye constantly, but our home is always with us. It’s so cool that SV Tideye has truly become our home – not just a sailboat with a coffee maker.

The weather is still pretty uncertain – but models are lining up for this storm to track directly over Hilton Head. We will head to the grocery store, double up on lines and get out a deck of cards. Time to batten down the hatches.

After a long battle of “Mama Vs Mahi,” I managed to pull this beauty in on a hand line while we were zooming up the Gulf Stream. Any hit on a line while trolling is exciting, but when you see that bright yellow flash leap out of the water, oh man. Debbie grabbed the helm to slow us down as much as possible while the rest of the crew gathered in the cockpit yelling, “Fish on! Fish on!” The problem with me catching the fish is that that’s about all I can do. Logan wrestled the hook out while I grabbed the cooler. After the most awkward fish snapshot (lots of panicked squealing as he used all his muscle to try and flop back into the ocean), we enjoyed the freshest sashimi lunch possible. Tucker even sampled a bite! Lucy got close, but returned her bite to the plate and Charlie just laughed at the thought. The passage to Hilton Head, South Carolina was shaping up to be an eventful one.

We motor sailed with light winds from all directions throughout the day Friday as we made our way to the underwater superhighway known as the Gulf Stream. Crossing the stream with a north component wind can be extremely unpleasant. But sailing with the northerly flow of the current and favorable winds is bad ass. Our speed through the water averaged about 7 knots, but the current pushed us along and our speed over ground was always at least 10kts – we even saw 13.4 over night. The sea turtles in Finding Nemo say it best, “Ride the wave, man.”

Speaking of sea turtles. We saw more sea life out at sea than ever before! We ended up bringing three fish aboard, the mahi, a black fin tuna and a jack that we caught while circling an old Navy platform. I also saw a sea turtle with a head the size of a coconut – mondo turtle. We had dolphins jumping and diving under our boat and slid through a colony of jellyfish. When you spend hours and hours with your eyes fixed on the horizon or a fishing line, it’s a nice surprise to catch a glimpse of the world below the surface.

Then the MOST exciting thing happened. We happened to be right offshore of Cape Canaveral for a Space X rocket launch! After a an hour delay, we all gathered up in the lounge to have our jaws drop. The rocket lit up the entire sky as it took off and shot into space passing behind our mast with a trail of rainbow sparks. Definitely an unforgettable sight.

The speed boost of the gulf stream was faster than anticipated and we made seriously good time…giving us an overnight arrival as opposed to dawn. Another first. We considered slowing down and motoring around until first light, but Logan decided the charts looked straightforward enough. So after a call to double check that the marina was well lit and had an easy slip for the night, we slowly and blindly made our way thought the inlet and up a creek to our new home base. Kind of fun to wake up to a sunrise somewhere that you are seeing for the first time in the morning.

And that was our last passage for the 2023/2024 cruising season. We are tucked in and making plans for the summer as we attempt to make sense of what we just did. Just shy of a year aboard S/V Tideye, riding that wave baby.

“Happy hurricane season!” she whispers under her breath with sarcasm. June 1st to November 1st, every single year. Blah. The good news is that the active season is August-September and with our ability to monitor the weather the way we can now, there are no surprises. Make a plan, keep an eye on the weather, both eyes actually, and hope for the best.

Bigger news: We escaped Dania Beach, FL!!! After almost a MONTH at a dock and on the hard, we are finally back on the hook this morning watching the sunrise. Dania Beach is just south of Ft. Lauderdale and really feels like the epicenter of all things marine. You can get anything upgraded/fixed/fabricated/cleaned that you can imagine, and all you have to do is pick up the phone. We tackled a list of warranty projects on the boat, mostly cosmetic. The engines and generator are serviced. The bottom is clean with a fresh coat of antifouling paint. A little carpentry, a little plumbing and a lot of electrical. All sorts of good stuff, but the upgrade we are most excited about is… a new mattress. The boat comes with standard foam beds, which are super firm and surprisingly comfortable. We decided to sleep on it for a year to see if it would suffice. Almost….but nope. This new beauty is AWESOME and we are tickled every night we when we get to crawl into a proper bed. Our purse is a little lighter, but the boat is in fabulous shape.

Well, almost fabulous shape. We sailed 45 miles north from Dania Beach to West Palm Beach – great day out on the water. After being at a marina for so long, the incredible expanse of the open ocean tastes like freedom. We played our favorite sailing playlist and jammed up the coast before dropping the hook in a familiar anchorage, ready to enjoy a few days of south Florida. And then…..generator problems. Our solar power can run most of our systems, if we are a bit more frugal with our power consumption. But it can’t power our air conditioning. It’s June in south Florida – it’s hot. Temperatures don’t drop below 80 at night, the water is 85. That coupled with our boat facing the direction of the current as opposed to the wind (meaning no breeze onboard!) meant sleeping in an 85 degree stifling box. Yuck. Also made us laugh at ourselves and realize that we probably need to toughen up a bit if we were all so debilitated by a little warm air. After some sweaty troubleshooting, we need to replace the automatic voltage regulator – a part we can’t get our hands on for a week.

We looked at the weather, looked at each other, called our weather guy, called some crew. We are headed back out to sea baby. It’s 330 miles up to Hilton Head, SC. With the speed boost of the Gulf Stream, it should take about 42 hours – two days and two nights with a dawn arrival. It’s a bummer to miss a few of the Florida anchorages we keep hearing about, but with the summer and hurricane season staring down at us, it’ll also feel good to be tucked in and secure (not to mention a little less sweaty). S/V Tideye, anchors aweigh!