To give you an idea of our plans...

Chris here... I know, I know, we've been at Velcro...errr... Vero Beach forever. It's hard to give up these $12/day moorings, nice showers and free shuttle! But at some point soon we will, and our voyage will continue.

Right now we're waiting for two things. First, Kristen is heading home to New York on Tuesday and Wednesday for bizzzness. Yes, we still have to work some. She has a meeting on Wednesday afternoon she has to attend, so she'll be flying up Tuesday afternoon, running a bunch of errands, doing the meeting on Wednesday and then flying back Wednesday night. I'll be hanging out here on Pelican with the kiddos. I'm looking forward to it! We'll see what I say after :).

The second thing we're waiting for is Provence, one of the boats we met in Charleston. They finally were able to leave Charleston today after fixing a bunch of issues, and we're so happy for them since they've been trying to get started on their cruise for three years! They plan to work their way down the ICW, and we hope to see them in 5 or 6 days.

After that, we figure we'll give them a day or two to enjoy Vero Beach before we head to Lake Worth (not to be confused with Fort Worth TX - we're not going that far in a day or two!) to visit some relatives. We may or may not then go to the Miami boat show for a day, and we may or may not go to Ft. Lauderdale. Evolution is planning to leave for Cuba sometime after Wednesday to take advantage of a weather window, but we have to wait until Obama HOPEFULLY lifts the Cuban embargo to visit that neat country.

Once in Lake Worth or Ft. Lauderdale, we plan to look for a weather window to head over to the Bahamas. Basically, we'll be looking for light to medium winds (5-15kts) coming from the South, Southwest or West. We have to cross the Gulf Stream, which heads from South to North, and if the wind is pushing against it from the North you get some serious seas developing. We've had enough of serious seas after Cape Fear! Since we're heading East, it would be bad if the winds were directly in our face, so that leaves the choices above. Apparently the appropriate winds show themselves for a few days every three weeks, but we're hoping they show up sooner.

Where are we going in the Bahamas? I have no idea. I'll probably look at the charts next week to figure that out. We have to be someplace out of the hurricane zone by the end of May, so we have to leave the Bahamas with enough time to get south or north. We'd love some suggestions on where we can go after the Bahamas based on our timeframes. We'd like to get to Georgetown and spend at least a couple of weeks there, so base your recommendations on where we go after on us being there.

What are we going to do between now and when we leave Vero Beach? Kristen definitely wants to relax. She finished the cushions today and was ecstatic! I'll take a picture soon to show y'all. We have several other projects that need doing - covers for our cockpit cushions, sanding a lot of the wood topsides and refinishing it, new thyocol for our teak decks, replacing a few bungs that popped off, and many other projects. Perhaps we'll even find time to do one or two! We'll see.

In the meantime, thanks for your patience and continued blog reading while we hang here in Vero Beach. Pass the word around about our blog - the more people we have reading it, the more we seem to post. We're up to about 200 readers every day and are amazed that people find this stuff so interesting! Also, feel free to e-mail us - we love hearing from everyone, and we're happy to answer any questions people have.