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It’s November 6th – Election Day in the USA and we’re back in Florida working on Crimson Kathryn. It’s been over 15 months since the boat was hauled out and placed on the hard and we have a lot of work to do in the next 2 weeks. Launch date is scheduled for Thursday, Nov. 15!!

Over the winter and summer, our main mast was infested with bees. Mark came down in February and June this year and noticed the “wasps” buzzing around but unfortunately the yard believed the summer heat would drive these pesky bugs away. Well they were wrong!! The pesky bugs were (are) bees and they have built a terribly large hive at the top of our main mast (inside of course). So, job #1 – get rid of the bees. To do that, our main mast had to be pulled and a bee keeper was called in. The bee keeper removed the main bees but that didn’t get rid of the nest. Mark and I noticed immediately on our first day here that the top of the mast was buzzing with bees. The bee guy was back today and spent 3 hours power washing the top of the mast (with some help from Mark). We’re hopeful that the hive has been destroyed and the bees will leave!

Next up – replace all the rigging on the boat (now that’s a big job when you have 2 masts). Mark has been working hard to remove all of the chain plates (metal fittings that connect the wire stays to the deck of the boat) because new ones need to be created using the old ones as templates. We will be picking up all the cables and fitting for our new rigging on Thursday.

My main job is to clean up the boat. We have a fair bit of mold everywhere because the boat has been closed up for so long. But the main mess is bee poop and dead bees!!!! Yes, the interior of our boat is littered with dead bees and poop (which looks like yellow spots and drips). It’s pretty awful, but easy to clean!

Our plan so far is to work on the boat in Florida until mid December. Once the boat is launched, we’ll be moving to Burnt Store Marina (not far away – further south and closer to Fort Myers) where we will continue to fix things up. We’ll return home for Christmas and then head back to the boat in early January. After that, it’s time to head back to the Bahamas. That’s the plan!

It’s sunny, warm and mostly dry…not exactly your average Canadian Christmas but definitely your average Ballarat Christmas. We had a wonderful early Christmas dinner with a few of Margie’s family. The house was nicely decorated and we had a great turkey dinner. 

We’ve had such an amazing time staying with Matthew and Margie. We will miss them terribly and can’t wait for them to visit us next Oct.

It’s hard to believe that 3 months of traveling is over and Christmas is just around the corner. We fly home on Wed., Dec.7 at 11:25 am and with the time change, we’ll actually arrive in Toronto at 8pm (after about 24 hours traveling time). It sure will be great to see everyone when we get home😄.

Ballarat comes alive at night with some awesome Christmas lights. Without snow you can really light up your property.🎄

This is our final post for phase 2 of our year off. Stay tuned for phase 3 –  sailing Bahamas style⛵️ – starting in the new year.

What? Where? ….huh?
So that’s in Queensland, Australia, just north of Brisbane, on the beautiful Pacific ocean, part of the ‘Sunshine Coast’ area of Australia. And it is gorgeous, with perfect weather and nice people. We visited the Australia Zoo where Evelyn made friends with the kangaroos and koalas. We also went to the Mooloolaba Aquarium where Evelyn fed a seal. We had a great week of swimming and doing lots of fun tourist stuff.

The photos below show the various activities and sites that we enjoyed here.


Hey everyone. It’s been a few weeks since I last posted anything. Mark and I have been home in Braeside doing some renovations and getting ready for phase 2 of our year off. This past weekend we had a great visit in Toronto with both our families and it was a wonderful way to start our European wine tour.

So here we are at Toronto Pearson International Airport, waiting for flight 1 to take us to Washington where we’ll connect to flight 2 to Paris. Let the wine tour begin🎉😉🍾

Well we have finally come to the end of phase 1 of our year off. Mark and I are resting in a hotel in Orlando, waiting for our flight to Toronto tomorrow (Sunday, Aug 7). From my previous post, you know we had to wait to get into Riverside. We ended up moving Crimson Kathryn over to Riverside on Friday (about 2 minutes by car and 20 minutes by boat – one bascule bridge to pass through between the 2 marinas). We tied up on the end of the haul out dock and then spent the rest of the day packing up. We decided to store all of cushions and fabrics in an climate controlled storage facility just up the street from Riverside. It took us several trips on Friday and Sat. to move all our stuff but it’s worth it.

We started the final storage prep today at 6:30 am and were  ready to leave by 12:30pm. Unfortunately, Riverside couldn’t haul out the boat today so we left her in the water, leaving her in the hands of the Riverside workers to haul out and store our boat. 

Tomorrow we’ll get into Toronto around 3:30pm and spend a few days visiting before we head home for a few weeks. Phase 2 of our year off begins on Aug. 29 when Mark and I fly to Paris, France for a month of touring the wine regions. Evelyn will be joining us on Sept. 10 (after she defends her Master’s thesis on Sept. 6) and spending the fall with us as we visit France, Greece and Australia. Caroline will spend a week with us in Greece – it will be great to have the four of us together even if it’s only for a week.

Here are the last photos for phase 1.

Hi everyone. We’re still hanging out at the Harbortown Marina waiting for Riverside to have room to haul us out. We’ve had a chance to relax and enjoy the lovely Florida weather (from inside our air conditioned boat😎⛵️). We’ve rented a car for the week so we can get around and see a few sites. Today we spent the day at Kennedy Space Center. It was very interesting and really neat to see all the rockets and the space shuttle Atlantis. We heard all about NASA’s next venture into deep space and the spacecraft that will be taking some crazy folks to Mars (it won’t be me!).

Wifi is working better thanks to our funky wifi booster called “Groove”. This device is new for us and it hasn’t worked since it was installed at the top of the mizzen at Hop’o’nose. We took it down and tried it with a different cable and now it works great, boosting the wifi signal here at Harbortown so I can include some photos with this post.

After 5 weeks and approximately 2500 km, Crimson Kathryn has finally reached her new home for the fall. What an experience this has been, from the amazing things we’ve seen and people we’ve met, to the stinking hot, hot weather. We started calling this adventure a delivery trip because of the pace at which we were  traveling (and the lack of relaxation we were experiencing). Delivery trips are not the most fun but they are extremely rewarding when you reach your destination.

I think in my last blog I mentioned the Knox Bridge not working. Well we ended up leaving St. Augustine on Wed. night at 10 pm and motoring on the ocean. That went really well once we got out of the St. Augustine inlet (one last green buoy tried to take us out but I saw it at the last minute and Mark reacted with cat-like reflexes to miss it.) It was fairly easy going after that. The ICW  is pretty straight and rather dull after miles and miles of motoring  (except for watching the crazy limited depths).

Right now we are tied up at the Harbortown Marina in Fort Pierce. We are being hauled out and stored at Riverside Marina but they can’t get to us until maybe Thursday this week and they didn’t have any empty slips at their dock so here we are. It’s very nice but a bit expensive. We have lots of work to do in the next few days to get the boat ready for storage. We are taking the masts off again (our insurance company prefers masts down) and the boat really needs major washing. All that salt makes for messy decks. If all goes well, we could be back in Toronto on Sunday, August 7. 

The wifi here is not the greatest, so I’ll have to load my photos later. Stay tuned😀😀

Well we’ve made it into Florida with only one little funny surprise (which I’ll tell you about shortly – it deserves it’s own paragraph😊). Traveling this part of the Intracoastal is much like driving on the highway behind a snowplough – you want to go faster but you don’t dare in case you get stuck in those “skinny” places (shallow for us Canadians). We did run aground a few times but easily managed to get unstuck.

After Thunderbolt (where Mark received some good advice about the engine and things are working much better now), we made our way to Brunswick, Georgia. We had an interesting tie up that night, staying on the fuel dock at Ocean Petroleum. Not the nicest scenary but great fuel prices. It was pretty sketchy but we survived. We did a bit of sailing to get into Brunswick, so that was nice. 

Just before we crossed into Florida (the ocean inlet at St. Mary’s), we met our little surprise. We’d been seeing these very large buildings for some time and had no idea what they were. As we got closer, it became clear that they were part of another naval base – a very special naval base that services submarines (an important side note here, we’d forgotten to turn our radio on that day – a first for us). I think you can probably figure out where this is going, especially if you’ve checked out the photos! As we passed the major dock and entrance channel into the facility, I said “Wouldn’t it be crazy to meet a submarine in here!” Well not 5 minutes later Mark is looking through the binoculars and says “Oh my god, there’s a submarine heading for us”. I thought, yeah right haha. Well there was and with a major escort. One of the escorts (a small naval boat with manned guns – very scary) came zooming towards us because we weren’t answering the radio hails  – oops! They were very nice but firm – stay out of the way and we were very happy to obey. It was an amazing experience to watch this vessel slowly make it’s way into port. I took photos slyly, just in case – big guns and all😳. I tell you, we giggled for awhile after that – dumb Canadians, no radio, big submarine!!

Okay so we made it to St. Augustine yesterday, July 26 and were planning on heading out today for Daytona Beach, but the god of the bascule bridges had other plans. We found out from our friends Sharon and Len (check previous blog) via email that the Knox Memorial bascule bridge just before Daytona Beach is stuck in the down position. That’s a problem. So here we are, spending another day in St. Augustine (which will be fun) and hoping the bridge gets fixed today. We can go on the outside but it’s 53 knots to the next inlet and it’s all motoring into the wind, waves and current. Not much fun. I’ll let you know what happens.

Wow!! Last time I shared with you, we were in North Carolina. Tonight we are just outside of Savannah, Georgia (we decided to skip South Carolina😊). The weather changed for the better and we decided on Tuesday night to head out onto the ocean for a 30 hour run along the coast. As usual, it always takes longer than you expect, especially when the  air in the fuel problem resurfaces as you’re motoring along. But here we are in Georgia 35 hours later.

Funny thing – when we brought Crimson Kathryn home 6 years ago, she had an overheating problem that caused us to spend 5 days at  Thunderbolt Marina (near Savannah). Well here we are 6 years later and don’t you know, Crimson Kathryn wanted to visit her old buddies at Thunderbolt. We are here to have someone look at our fuel issue. Well if you have to breakdown somewhere, Savannah is a pretty good place😉

I hope you enjoy these photos for the past few days.