We moved aboard The Fox in March, 2003, and by December, 2014 we had spent almost all 11 Christmases aboard. We spent some holidays by ourselves at anchor. Other times, we shared dinner with 1 or 2 other boats. Sometimes there was a typical cruiser potluck-style event. But that Christmas in Marina Chiapas in 2014…
It is now February 2014 and The Fox has been cruising the Bahamas since our arrival on January 15, 2014. This is actually our second cruise through the Bahamas; we were here for the first time from November 2011 through the first week of February, 2012. I had avoided blogging about our first trip to…
OK, not like it's any surprise to any reader who still looks in occasionally, but I've hit yet another dry spell, posting-wise. Regardless of my own behavior I dislike getting bombarded by spam comments all over this here blog, which has been happening regularly and is increasing. My personal best for one day is 84…
The Caribbean side of Panama attracts a type of tourist few other places see: seafaring backpackers. That there pic of the West Holandes anchorage in Panama's San Blas islands, is a view of several vessels that serve this subset of the adventure travel community. In fact, The Fox was the only boat in this view,…
Apropos of absolutely nothing, here are three small things that make the boatin' life easier. 1. Stern or mast reflectors. It is generally very bad practice to enter an anchorage at night, but once every 15 months or so we've found ourselves having to do exactly that. We've always had a choice of entering a fairly well-charted anchorage with a…
For some time, I'd been mildly interested in taking the test to get my HAM radio license, mainly because it would expand the frequencies available to me to use on our single sideband radio. We were either moving around a lot on the boat, or were not in a location where the test was being…
WiFi pirate, that is. Accessing reliable Internet is difficult for a boat at anchor. Sure, there are the occasional Internet cafes on shore, and we use them when needs must. However in certain areas either Internet cafes are rare-to-nonexistent, or you have to schlep your precious laptop in a dinghy through rain or choppy seas;…
There are worse places to anchor than off of the city of La Paz, Baja California Sur. It is one of the places in which a cruising boat can anchor comfortably, dinghy ashore, tie up at a friendly marina's dock, and get all kinds of work and provisioning done without once having to pay for…
I suppose that cruising is the kind of activity in which people make friends quickly because it's so obvious from the first encounter that boaters share common interests, and have gone through similar experiences to all get to the same place. Perhaps the longer you cruise, the more your values become in common with those…
Does anyone else routinely keep their shoes like this? m