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...

After sailing to Content Keys, we went back to Marathon to fill up on diesel, gas and water. We then anchored in Newfound Harbor South of Big Pine Key to celebrate Julianne’s birthday. 5 years old!!! Crazy how time flies. We went to a super cool place for lunch, called Kiki’s Sandbar Bar and Grill. They had this nice beach, hammocks, drinks and ice cream!! Perfect place if you ask me. I had managed to make a cake the night before, so she was stoked to have that and some presents in the evening! Coolest addition to this party: bioluminescence all around the boat. Yeah! When the winds went down, we checked out Picnic Key as we were told that it was a really cool place to go and that there was a beach. We got there only to realized that it had been completely wiped out of the map by Irma!! There was only a tiny piece of land where some people were living in tents and hammocks. :( So we moved to Molasses’s Key, and it felt like paradise to us! The weather had been ...

Home sweet home... That’s how it felt when we got back to Rolianne after many hours on planes and in airports. The boat was just how it was when we left, apart from additional rust on different things we didn’t think of putting inside! We enjoyed the marina’s facilities for a little longer than we were supposed to, as we extended our stay there due to bad weather expected for a couple of days. So we went fishing and cleaned up the boat! 🤪 Finally, on the 23rd, we were able to leave the marina for some sailing and adventure in the Keys! We wanted to make it to Content Keys, to explore isolated beaches with the dinghy. We made it to Johnson Key the first day and anchored there for the night. It was again cold, windy and cloudy. January has been that way all around North America I guess! The next morning, we had to go hide in Bogie channel because the forecast was all about rain, thunderstorm and wind. Personnally, I prefer being around civilization when it comes to bad weather. So w...

So after the medical evacuation in Stanley, we turned around towards Antarctica. It took 2 full days at sea from there to finally reach it, crossing the Drake passage and passing the Antarctic convergence, where the water temperature dropped a couple of degrees. Days were pretty relax while at sea. Lots of movies, fooling around and chilling in the lounge. And a little bit of home schooling! Lots of desserts, too. 😵 Sugar rush.   All landings in Antarctica were unique and amazing! We first landed at Baily Head, part of the outer wall of Deception Island, an active volcano which is part of the South Shetland Islands. There, we saw a large colony of chinstrap penguins with multiple chicks in their nests made out of pebbles. So many of them were walking around, making little highways for penguins. After the afternoon landing, we went inside the crater with the ship to have a look at the scenery. There is an old whaling station, and it's pretty neat just to think...