I HATE SHOES

St. Maarten was exactly what I had expected in an eastern Caribbean island; high-brow resorts sharing beachfront property with relative shacks the true locals live in. The scenery also as I had imagined, a tropical place where mountains meet the sea with the gentle trade winds rustling the palms. We departed on Wednesday morning after Lisa, the owner, and Bill, the father of a friend of Grants, came aboard Tuesday afternoon. Funny aside about Bill's son, he worked on the boat owned by Rupert Murdoch, and apparently he's on it a lot. I won't editorialize on that fact. Anyway, we left with 10-12 knots of breeze out of the northeast and with this Swan 56 pointing 30 degrees off of the apparent wind, 20 degrees in the gusts. The picture below is a stitch of a bunch I took to capture that first day sailing. That's Lisa reading in the cockpit and Bill at the helm (click on it for a bigger image). After a day of this blissful sailing the wind fell and we motor sailed

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, you can track our progress on Amerigo on this link:  http://share.findmespot.com/ sh ared/faces/viewspots.jsp? glId= 0nXrkg9adnhrc92feTQqcyXTmJGSNo qc0 Things are great so far, the captain is a whole 9 days my senior and from Scotland, an interesting fellow. The boat, and St. Maarten, are gorgeous. We depart tomorrow morning and from the looks of it the breezes will be light and variable. That's all for now, back to work!

I would apologize for the lack of blog posts but, to be frank, there hasn't been much going on to post about. After I returned from the final voyage of Terrapin Flyer , I got an apartment in Sarasota and also got engaged. I've been doing some casual sailing on a ComPac 16 and some racing on a friend's Bristol 40 but that's about it. It has been a nice change of pace actually, compared to the thousands of miles I logged in 2010 and 2011. I've been looking for jobs where the pay is a little steadier and more substantial than the occasional delivery, but that is not to say I won't take the occasional delivery! The job market is weak in Florida right now, and to supplement my income as well as my sanity I've been looking for a delivery gig. It's high season for them as the winter gales ease and before hurricane season starts in the north Atlantic. A friend gave me a contact down in St. Maarten for the captain of a 90' Pendennis sloop. Unfortunately, by