Jazzy Lady's 2019/20 Cruising Adventure

Vessel Name: Jazzy Lady
Vessel Make/Model: Catalina
Hailing Port: Montreal
Crew: Meg, Mark, Annie, Alistair
23 April 2020
30 March 2020
25 March 2020
13 March 2020
21 February 2020
21 February 2020
08 February 2020
16 January 2020
09 January 2020
03 January 2020
29 December 2019 | Paradise
17 December 2019
12 December 2019
06 December 2019
06 December 2019
24 November 2019
Recent Blog Posts
23 April 2020

REFLECTIONS

30 March 2020

Night Watch

(March 28th)

25 March 2020

Emergency Migration

Emergency Migration

13 March 2020

The Three Musketeers

Mark has gone away for four week-long stints of work, one each month since December. The first time we had Tracy with us, the second time we had my Mom with us, last month we had Walden to play with every day after school and this month it was just us three musketeers:) So it actually felt like [...]

01 March 2020

Jazzy Lady bursts at the seams

*This post starts while on the last full day of our trip, and ends a few days after our arrival home.

21 February 2020

Still in Spanish Wells

At home one of my favourite summer delights is lying in a hammock listening to the wind rustle through oak or maple leaves. Another audible treat is the smoother, lighter swishing of the wind through the needles of a pine tree. Here in Bahamas I am storing the audio memory of wind through palm trees. [...]

No more Mice and no more Lice

12 November 2019
megan osler

We caught the mouse four nights ago! Larry had been the only one to see it fall through the companionway onto the floor of the saloon last Tuesday and we hadn’t seen any sign of it since so I was beginning think he imagined it. But on Saturday we found muse droppings in the cutlery drawer and one of our food storage cubbies. (The only nibbled casualty was an emergency reserve package of SideKicks pasta). We placed the traps accordingly that day and by bedtime heard the trap snap. Luckily the kids were already asleep so they were spared the gory details.
As for the lice...well...we are 95 % in the clear...We have, painstakingly, been going through our hair multiple times a day. Between Annie and me, Mark spends 2 hours per day combing through our hair. He has threatened us with his electric raiser but the situation is not quite THAT dire.
Thursday was a long day offshore starting in Morehead City in the dark, departing at 4:15 am. We arrived in Wrightsville, North Carolina just after 4 pm. An arduous day like that was made a lot easier having Beth and Larry along to share the load of navigating, schooling and meal prep. Our reward, upon arrival, was a fabulous romp on the vast and beautiful Wrightsville Beach. We hooped and hollered and jumped in the surf saying “We’ve made it!” We are in palm tree, manitee and alligator territory.
But don’t feel alone, Canadians! We are wearing toques to bed tonight. Down to zero this evening. We’ve seen our breath the last two mornings. It seems to be an unusually chilly week coming up.
I experienced a proud first the other day. I went to the top of our mast (58 feet)! I’d love to say I clambered up self-propelled but actually I was HAULED up, in a harness, by the electric windless....and a haliard strapped around my mid-section for extra precaution. The reason for going up was a silly turn of events from the previous day. Annie and Alistair were determined to string our hammock up, even though we’ve told them numerous times we won’t do that until Bahamas. They got bored and we were desperate enough for them to occupy themselves any old way. They were successful but before going to bed they had to bring it down because we were expecting rain. We didn’t check their deconstruction work and, in the middle of the night, with howling winds and driving rain, I was being driven crazy by a line slapping inside the mast (which is right beside my head in bed). I knew something had been left loose up on deck and Mark mentioned he forgot to tighten a haliard the kids used for the hammock. So I grumpily threw on my rain gear and stumbled up on deck. Without giving it much thought, I pulled like heck on the loose haliard to tighten it up.... Any sailor knows, you never yank a haliard too hard before you’ve looked to confirm it’s secured to something (clipped on, at its end, to a shroud or something). Otherwise, if you yank on it un-secured, you’re hoisting it up into the air and once it’s high enough to be out of reach you’re out of luck. That is exactly what happened. By the time I realized what I’d done it was a third of the way to the top of the mast, swinging around in the wind. I grabbed our boat hook and extended it as long as possible (telescopic adjustments). I stood on the deck like a mad fool for atleast 20 minutes trying to snag the haliard with the boat hook. But it got caught up on the main sail’s lazy jacks and was totally out of reach. So, not only had I NOT fixed the slapping noise right by my head, I had to go to bed knowing I was heading up the mast to retrieve it the next day😒 I’ve been looking for a reason to test my constitution so now I had one. It was scary. I didn’t look down once. We need to put a windex on the top of the mast so I will go up again sometime soon.
We lucked out AGAIN with a cruising friends connection and rendezvoused for dinner in Wrightsville at friends’ of Mark’s aunt&uncle. There was a couple we’ve been meaning to connect with since Annapolis who we finally met at our anchorage. They brought us along to their cruising friends’ place for pizza. We had showers and did laundry and heard about a million fun things to look forward to in Bahamas:) Thank you Allan&Bev for putting us in touch with Lana&Robert and Val&Mino! It’s a privilege to be brought into this circle of friends. A really gracious bunch!
We are in Charleston now. We had a lovely walk through town today and tomorrow we may go to a plantation.
We’ve been cooking up a storm in our little galley! Mark has made cornmeal muffins and I baked our first loaf of boat bread the other day. Dahls, curries and quinoa salads, yum yum!








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