We originally planned to spend only a week or two in Jamaica, yet somehow, a month and a half later we are still here. We can partly blame the weather for the delay, but mostly we are just enjoying life here too much to rush away.

Montego Bay to Port Antonio
We motored out of Montego Bay for the 90mi overnight run to Port Antonio a few days after Elan’s parents left us. Our forecast was for light winds and calm seas, which we were looking forward to since the prevailing wind, seas, and 1 knot current over the North coast of Jamaica would all be running against us. We left the bay with calm water, no wind, and blue sky, only to be shocked by pouring rain, blustery wind and short, steep seas within an hour of leaving. These less than pleasant conditions continued to bash us for the remainder of our 26 hour passage. Oh Mr. Weather Man, I have a bone to pick with you. We considered ducking into one of the ports we passed along the way, but the forecast was supposed to deteriorate over the next few days, and we were trying to beat my Dad to Port Antonio, where he was flying in to meet us. Besides if that was “good” weather, we didn’t want to sick around to see what “worse” looked like.

At one point during Elan’s shift, I was down below moping, when Élan suddenly yelled ‘waaaahoooo!’. Terrified, I ran up to see Élan with a huge grin on his face, exchanging fist pumps with a kite surfer who, seeing our boat about a mile offshore, zipped out just to do some spectacular jumps all around us. It was such a cool surprise, and I have to admit it made me feel like a total wuss for being grumpy about rough weather on 40ft boat when this guy was clearly having a blast on a tiny board being dragged at lightning speed across big waves by a kite. Ok, I am ready to be a big girl now.

Port Antonio
Our plan was to only stay in Port Antonio long enough to get a good weather window for the infamous Windward Passage, beat 350mi upwind and meet my Mom in Providenciales, in the Turks and Caicos 4 days later. However, our weather never cooperated, and in the end, Mom came to meet us in Port Antonio instead.

We have been pleasantly surprised with Port Antonio. Not blighted by the cruise ship plague like her bigger sisters, Montego Bay and Ocho Rios, Port Antonio is a much more laid back town. I don’t know what it is about the cruise ship crowds, but they seem to bring out all the local hustlers, scammers and hard-sellers wherever they go. Thats not to say that PA is necesarily quiet… we still hear the stereo wars blasting across the otherwise peaceful anchorage every night, though not quite so intensely as MoBay.

We are anchored outside of Errol Flynn Marina, which allows us to use their pool, showers and….. laundry! Our clothes haven’t been in a real washing machine since we left the States, almost four months ago, so its a very nice break from stomping them in our ice chest, using water hauled in jugs from land to boat by dinghy, woohoo!

Touristing with Mom and Dad
While Mom and Dad were here we entertained ourselves with a drive over the Blue Mountains, one of the highest spots in the Caribbean, and drive around the beautiful, rugged and pot-holed East end of the island.

We visited Reach Falls, a pretty spot where you can swim under the crashing water to several caves behind the falls, climb from bottom to top, and swim through amazing crystal clear pools, so intensely blue I swear  it looked fake.

We visited the Blue Lagoon (where the Brook Shields movie was filmed), ate at Boston Jerk (the birthplace of the Jamaican specialty, jerk pork), and toured the unique Eco-tourism resort, Great Huts.

Trident Castle

We also explored Navy Island, the island which affords our anchorage in West Harbor such great protection. At various points in it’s history, the island has been home to a Navy Base, a marina, a resort and a housing development. All have been abandoned, the most recent due to fire. The lush green jungle is quickly reclaiming it all.

On the far side of Navy Island is a quiet beach, protected by a reef, and covered in conch shells.

A short walk from the marina is a rocky beach that runs along the side of the channel entrance. For whatever reason, this particular beach is covered in bits of painted ceramic tiles and smooth pieces of beach glass- my favorite!

And of course, we couldn’t let my parents leave without one smooth day-sail along the coast.

The plants and flowers here are so amazing. Elan doesnt always appreciate me fillng up our camera with flower pictures, but I just cant help myself!

Stowaways!
Speaking of flora and fauna… The day after we left Panama (8 weeks ago), we discovered we had a stowaway. Several weeks later, as I was trying to take this shy guys photo, I started seeing double…. that is, I discovered that we actually have TWO stowaways! We don’t mind having them aboard, they eat bugs after all, but they do have a tendency to show up where we least expect them!

And finally, a quick note on blogging…
When we started this blog, we thought we would just use it as an easy way to keep our family and friends updated on our whereabouts. As you can imagine, we were shocked that our year-end report shows 10,600 views! 10,000 views is small fries for many, but pretty cool for us. We have met new people, swapped info with other cruisers and have had views from 74 countries. Whoa!
Generating enough power to run the computer and finding an internet connection strong enough to upload photos can be frustrating to say the least (I fought with the internet for 14+ hours for this post, and you can see that many of my photos were still funny sizes and were missing captions – oh well), so it makes me really happy to see that so many of you are still following us along. Thanks, and keep those comments coming- remember, we love to hear from you too!!

Our Plan
We are still waiting for that perfect weather window to go through the Windward Passage. Given that we have taken a beating on our last few “good enough” weather windows, we are going to sit tight until we have a “too-perfect-to-miss” weather window this time. Until then, I guess we will just have to endure some more poolside sitting!

Happy 2013!
Like the entire year of 2012, the last month here in Montego Bay, Jamaica has positively flown by. We have been loving it here. The people are friendly, the food is excellent, and the beaches are gorgeous. 

An Improptu Visit
Elan’s folks hopped on a last minute flight and arrived on Christmas Day. We were so excited to have a family Christmas, albeit an unusual one. Reed and Mary left 30 inches of snow in E Washington to sit with us on a white sandy beach on Christmas Day instead. 

We touristed around Montego Bay vistiting Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville, checking out the local craft market, and trying the local delicacies like curried goat and stewed oxtail.

We had some big wind days during their visit but we did manage to squeeze one day of sailing in before they left. We passed our lazy days painting, swimming and shell hunting on the beach. I think I’ve met my match- Mary had an even longer attention span for shell hunts than I did!

Elan’s Dad is an excellent guitar player, and he never goes anywhere without a guitar. As he walked, guitar in hand, up and down the streets of Montego Bay, strangers would stop and ask for a mini-concert and Reed never dissapointed.

He learned Zach Brown Band’s song, “Knee Deep” so he could play it for us. The lyrics are pretty apt:

Rasta New Years
We spent a fairly low-key New Years Eve with Lee, Serena, Reed and Mary at the Montego Bay Yacht Club. Lee was our bartender so after the fireworks things got a little silly.

Pass the dreadlocks…

Life in Jamaica
Jamaica is up there on our list of friendliest places we have visited on this trip. It was all Serena and I could do to NOT hug our first waiter here. Compared to the cool, arm’s-length treatment we received in Panama, Jamaicans greeted us like old friends.
The colors on Jamiaca’s green, yellow and black flag stand for the lush vegetation, golden sun, and hardship of its people. The locals here are the first to admit that life in Jamaica isn’t all fun and sun and pretty beaches. Only independent for 50 years, Jamaicans are still struggling to work things out. Cost of living is high, wages are low, and the Jamaican dollar is losing value. 

Adventures in Anchoring- Carribean Style
Elan and I are well aware that we have a much more conservative view on anchoring than many boaters, we would just rather have a little too much space, rather than too little, between us and the next boat. It has been clear that we are in the vast minority on this matter of opinion, especially since we crossed through the Panama Canal and anchor near more Europeans, who, by necesity are used to anchoring much closer to one another.

Take the French catamaran (below) for example. After E and I hemmed and hawed over whether we were too close to the white boat (in the front), the catamaran came and anchored BETWEEN us. We told the captain that we measured their distance with our radar at 115 feet away, and that we had out 120 feet of chain. To us, this clearly meant that we could swing into them if the wind shifted, but he just shrugged his shoulders and spent the night. 

On another day, we were just coming in to the dock on Solent after a day-sail, struggling to “med-moor” (a tricky process of dropping your anchor about 100 feet from a dock, and then backing your boat up, between the other boats, to only tie the stern of the boat to the dock – its the “parallel parking” of the boat world, and it sucks!) on a windy afternoon. Elan was trying to help from our dinghy when the dock line got tangled in the prop, which let Solent drift until it’s prop was resting against another boat’s anchor rope. At that exact stressful moment, I looked out into the anchorage to see another French boat attempting to anchor so close to Silver Lining that they actually wrapped OUR CHAIN around THEIR PROP. They were literally dragging our boat away as they tried to use their windlass to pull their now disabled boat away from Silver. Three tangled props all at once- a perfect storm of sorts. Elan zipped over in the dinghy to dive their prop for them and untangle 8 wraps of our chain from their prop, but in the meantime, their boat bashed scrapes into our hull and bent our stainless pulpit railing. When all was said and done the couple, although very polite, didn’t apologize, much less offer to fix the damage they caused. 

We put a lot of effort into anchoring our home in a safe place, so it’s frustrating to have our safety compromised by someone else’s careless anchoring practices. We were lucky to have escaped with as little damage as we did, but it would have been nice if the other people had at least accepted responsibility. I don’t want to make any generalizations, its not like all French people are bad at anchoring… but why is it that every time we have problems with other anchor-ers it involves a French boat? Oh well, all’s well that ends well, and we are still afloat.

Crossing Things Off the To-Do List
As usual, in between days relaxing with our feet up at the beach, we have done a lot of work on the boat too. Elan finished running some wiring from our VHF radio to the GPS plotter, which allows us to not only receive important AIS info (speed, bearing, name and radio call sign) from large ships on radar but it lets us use the radio more like a phone. We can call those big ships with just the press of a button- pretty sweet! We also finally figured out the problem with our radar… or maybe I should say MY problem with the radar… it seems as if I mis-wired something as I attempted to fix it during the middle of the night in rough seas months ago. Since then, we sent it all off for warrantee work, when we didn’t actually need to… My bad! However, Apollo says I redeemed myself by installing netting along all of the lifelines- this means he is a lot safer and more comfortable running around up on deck. Wouldn’t want to lose the little dude if he ventured too close to the edge.
Elan is proud to be the only person he knows to have replaced a prop with only a snorkel. He and Lee mustered the courage and did it all between breaths gulped at the surface. Our new prop seems to be a much better match with our transmission, but we are delaying our verdict for now since a long passage will be the true test.

Hard Goodbyes

After almost a year of buddy-boating with Solent, we may have just parted ways for the last time. Lee and Serena are putting Solent in dry dock in Jamaica while they go home to work for about a month. Elan and I are leaving first thing tomorrow morning for a 24hour run to Port Antonio, on the north coast of Jamaica. From there we will head through the Windward Passage towards the Turks and Caicos followed by the Bahamas. There is a chance that they might catch up with us there, but since we are basically going to start heading in the direction of home at this point, we’ll just hope that our meandering paths cross again, if not on this trip, then for sure once we return to “normal life”.

It was also hard to say good-bye to Reed and Mary, but their visit has stirred up the inspiration for my parents to join us in the next few weeks as well! My dad will be here in 3 days to crew for us through the infamous Windward Passage. He wants an exciting trip, and if it lives up to its reputation, I have a feeling the Windward will provide just that. Mom will be waiting for us on the far side of the passage in the Turks and Caicos… I am beginning to wonder if she is the only one of us with any sense!

Until next time,
Ashley & Elan