Sailing on the high seas

This post has taken me a while to get to.  I was caught up in enjoyment with my cousin Karen, her husband Dean (whom I had never met) and three of their lovely (and very well behaved) kids and didn't want to take "Brent time" to write this.  In my last post, they had picked me up from the airport at Key West where I had dropped my rental car and I had done a short trip into town to get my iPhone screen replaced and was waiting to get up to speed on the new boat with Dean and the skipper they had hired to make the long offshore passage to Isla Mujeres. As the boat was brand new to Dean and Karen, in fact it was nearly brand new being Beneteau's US demonstrator for the model (Sense 55) and only 2 years old, and they were travelling with the young kids, they made the decision to hire a series of delivery skippers to help them move the boat from St. Petersburg to Key West, then from Key West to Isla Mujeres, and then from Isla Mujeres to it's new home in the Cayman ...

I last left off that I had spent an enjoyable night wandering around the charming little town of St Augustine, the oldest community in the Americas, and was to head down to Fort Lauderdale to meet up with Joel Potter, the former Amel sales representative for the Americas (who now just sells boats he believes in out of Fort Lauderdale (he can’t fly much so lost his distributorship of new Amel’s) I got up early, grabbed the free breakfast such as it was at the Red Roof Inn and decided to take the coastal route down as far as Daytona Beaxh. I was hoping to get a sense of the coast but the highway is mostly commercialized so you see lots of strip malls and gated communities.  I saw no end of people talking and reading their cellphones in the car so figured the cellphone ban hasn’t got to Florida yet and decided to chance taking some pictures on the move (I was trying to make it to Cort Lauderdale for a 3 pm appointment with Joel  so didn’t really have time to stop and gawk) Th...

Well, it's 2019 and I have yet to do much sailing but all that is about to change!  I have three off shore voyages planned this fall.  The first is from Key West to Isla Mujeres (Cancun) in Mexico with my cousin Karen, her husband Dean and their family on their new Beneteau Sense 57 sloop.  They left St. Petersburg here in Florida a couple of days ago and got into Key West last afternoon and are now waiting for me.  The second trip, is on a friend's Amel Super Maramu 2000 from Annapolis to Bermuda and then the third is from Bermuda to Martinique, all up totally nearly 2,000 nautical miles - almost enough to sail across the North Atlantic to Europe! Feels like a sad day for Canada after the disastrous election (Canadian's essentially voted "none of the the above") last night but I'm happy to be leaving this weather behind for warmer and sunnier climates!   This morning (Tuesday October 22, 2019), I flew out of Toronto's Pearson airport (thanks for th...