Rolianne Afloat and Abroad

After a month and a half away, Sam flew back to Miami on March 18th. First thing on his list when getting off the plane: grocery shopping before driving down to the Keys!! Everything is at least twice the price down here, and even more when you sail to the Bahamas. 800$ US later, the boat is full of canned veggies and fruits, beer and cereals! I was almost glad not to stay too long in the Bahamas, as the boat could not be more loaded. 😅 So we spent the first hours together sorting all the food, filling every hole of the boat and inventoring the whole thing. The kids were super stocked to see their dad again! They didn't stop talking for days, telling him everything about catching lizards and our manatee friends.  After everything was said, we were ready to sail away from Marathon. The kids and I have spent enough time wondering around, and we are ready for new places to explore! Unfortunately, the winds are not with us. It looks like northern winds for the next couple of ...

With the past weeks spent here in the Keys with the kids, I felt like writing a post about friendship while sailing. I'm thinking about that today because a really good friend of mine was supposed to come and visit with her son, and stay on the boat with us. It would have been the best spring break ever!! Bad timing; she started having fever 3 days before flying, and had to cancel everything. The doctor thought it was Influenza, which is a virus that 1) sucks, and 2) is highly contageous. None of us had been vaccinated this year (no reason for that!), and we're getting ready to cross to the Bahamas, so catching the flu would have been pretty bad. Anyway, it made me really sad and felt homesick. I miss my friends from home... We have been away for over 6 months now, and because of our constraints with Sam's travels, let's say that we haven't followed the typical path for sailing families. We haven't met a lot of people with kids staying in the Keys for so lon...

It has been about 6 months since we left Lévis, and what I miss the most is my people, so having my mom and sister onboard for some time was just awesome for me, and the kids!! It felt so great to finally share with them everything that we’ve learned to love of our boatlife. Even though we didn’t go sailing because, well, I still need Sam for that!, they experienced living on a sailboat just enough. Of course two hours before they arrived, our AC stopped working. That’s what a boat does, right? Something breaks at exactly the wrong time. As it was supposed to be really hot and humid all week, I tried for 1 1/2 hour to fix it, sweating my life in the hole under the cockpit trying to unclogg the tubing, the strainer and the seacock, without any success! I felt blessed when a friend of mine told me that her husband used to work at an AC marine place and that he’d be happy to help the next morning!! It took him 15 minutes and yeah!! AC was back on. Thanks again TJ. My sister was stayin...