Ugne and I wish ya'll a Very Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year.  2002 has been a very interesting year for us and the time has flown by. As we get ready for the new year our projects are coming to a close and we are looking forward to getting underway again. Our watermaker is installed, the generator is working and we have started putting 4 months of ship stores aboard, the boat is sinking deeper into the water and we have not gotten to the heavy items yet. Ugne is having fun finding places to put all of the stuff.  Some of you might ask why are they putting so much aboard. Well the Bahamas is a relatively expensive place to provision as almost everything is shipped to the islands. An example is a box of cereal is about $8 and a case of beer is about $37 to $40 dollars. There are a few things cheaper such as Rum and New Zealand butter.

Our target date for leaving the marina is Jan 16. We will spend a day or two in the anchorage outside the marina so we can test the watermaker to ensure that it is working properly. Then we will set sail for Miami to wait for a weather window to cross the gulf stream and onto the Bahamas.  We are hoping that the current weather cycle will change and open up a 3 or 4 day window for the crossing. The weather has been like a yo yo with cold fronts coming through every 3 - 4 days.  Listening to the cruising net each morning on our SSB radio boats are stacking up waiting to cross over. Our friends on Gypsy Common told us that there are 53 boats in the North Lake Worth anchorage waiting and our friends waiting in Miami said they are stacking up down there also. So if the weather breaks and all the boats leave at the same time one might be able to walk across to the Bahamas. 

We will be spending Christmas here on the boat and have invited our good friends Allen & Colleen on Freedoms Dream over for a Roast Duck dinner. It will be the first time that we have not spent the holidays with family so it will be different. But we are looking forward to a good time with boating friends.