Always Grateful for the Small Things

After a lovey couple of days, in Punta Allen the time has come to move to the next destination which was a sweet 40 nm sail to the next bay, as I mentioned earlier, we intend to make lots of stops as we gradually start to move south toward Panama for Hurricane season.

Both SV Happinez and Sunrise joined our duo of Intle Breeze and Dilly Dally, to the bay of Bahia del Espiritu Santo. (Bay of the Holy Spirit) Although one of them had a hard time getting into the bay due to having a much longer keel than ours, so they left early the following morning, while we decided to stay a little longer as it was lovely and calm, and we are always happy to take the break.

The journey to this bay was pretty fast and some great sailing. We managed to get the sail up with easy…….Oh But wait……getting it down, 😩 for some reason became really hard, while Eric was up at the mast trying to tug it down he saw that one of the screws on the sail slide had taken so much pressure that it had totally bent out of shape, which of course was the villain that created the chaos and in that lay the problem. So strange as we had such a perfect point of sail, the boom was silent, the speed was good.

We really have no idea how or why this happened, but it did. Needless to say, there were some very stressful moments, and many hard and loud words between us, both of us extremely frustrated with the situation and the extreme challenge it took to get the sail in a safe position. When bringing the sail down we need to turn the boat into the wind, this is very uncomfortable and incredibly bouncy at the best of times, and of course the swell was large, the wind was high and the current very strong, all of this always adds to the tension. We managed to get the sail to a point of safety so that we could get to our anchorage. You really need a very strong marriage to withstand the dramas of sailing ……… just putting it out there, thankfully we actually do.💙❤️

The beauty of nature makes all these challenges so worthwhile, and a constant reminder of why we chose this life style, especially when we get a lone dolphin escorting us into our anchorage, a beautiful ocean carpet made up of bright yellow seaweed, with our sailing buddy Dilly Dally close by, life felt good.

Entering the anchorage and dropping the hook was easy, either that or we are just getting good at it. 😜 Feeling thankful for small mercies, and beautiful sunsets even though our sail is a mangle.

Arzum and I really felt deserving of a break from the boys, so we sent them to the beach to play with their drones and Miço, while we peacefully enjoyed a bottle of wine, it was not very long lived before the guys returned, seems they get bored without us. We are the only and sexiest girls around here after all……. but hey, we take what we can get in terms of girl time. 😁

This was a really lovely anchorage but, the mosquitos have been driving me out of my mind, those little vampires will simply not leave us alone, I have spent most of my time chasing them around the boat like a raging lunatic and spraying so much insect repellent that there is a good chance we will fall into a chemically induced nap, but those mozzies happily lived on.

Finally after 2 days at anchor we decided it was time to move on again, this time  heading for Robinson Island Belize, as we lifted anchor at 09:00am another boat that was ahead of us called us on the VHF, to say the water is just too rough and they are turning around and coming back for one more night, so just like that we dropped anchor again and spent a 3^rd night, of course an impromptu dinner and cocktails on SV Dilly Dally with Arzum and Jens, to have a brief discussion about how great life is when we are scrapping the bottom of the food barrel due to visiting uninhabited islands and somehow those crayfish always manage to appear, popped on top of a pasta, this certainly feels better than sitting in a nice car, fighting through city traffic to have a boring and rushed dinner in a brick home.

Take me sailing….We choose this life every morning when we wake up.