First, the obligatory sticker/button:


That is something that would have taken a lot more planning were we still underway, so a plus! And no, it's not as much fun as being in the Caribbean, but it was still fun staying up late to watch the returns and the speeches.

Second, Iris and Coy (M/V FantaSea) are here!!!! That's very cool. We got together at Hoolihan's for the Irish session before Iris went back up to Pensacola for more work, and now she's baaaack! But we are going to avoid Irish sessions and just see them for fun... I can't seem to concentrate on conversation when there's a session going on (blush).

Stan from Carried Away was still in Granada (3 months! It must be a great place to hold his interest for so long!) Oct 23rd but hasn't done a blog update since. He had a friend coming down to help with the next offshore leg. Much more fun than staying up solo for the whole run!

There's a Nor'easter coming, apparently, and that's a reason for a lot of cruisers to be waiting a few days wherever they are, until this thing resolves itself. I don't think anyone is taking the weather lightly after the Bounty went down trying to skirt around Sandy just over a week ago. We had an Internet one-week observance last Sunday at 6:30 pm EST.

Survivor stories are here: NYDailyNews Nov07, 2012 Bounty Survivors Recall Ordeal

Among those planning for the blow, Chris and Marisa on S/V Charisma have been heading north (wrong way, guys!!!) toward New Jersey and one of those "jobs you can't refuse" gigs, freezing their poor sun-bronzed patooties off going through locks along the way, but they are staying put in VA while whatever-it-is blows through or fizzles. Good call! That's the problem with getting used to tropical summer weather, heading north in October and early November feels like an ice-breaking voyage through the Northwest Passage:


We're sad to hear that it's expected to pound the same areas that were so damaged by Sandy. A friend of Derek's has only had a couple of hours of access to her (and her father's) damaged houses since the storm. The water took everything on the ground floor, including all of the family photo albums, and now this nor'easter is coming to swat them again. Here's this morning's update on the storm, which on The Weather Channel they are calling Winter Storm Athena:


A good thing to not head into!

The Full Monty crew are back in Beaufort for a while and probably on the hard by now, doing bottom paint and the whole list of repairs that always accumulate, waiting for the next time the boat is hauled out. We have to set that up for Parallax pretty soon, as well.

House update: The previous owner has been leasing it back from us for a two-week period so that she can finish up her job here in Fort Myers and join her husband in Miami. They are going to have a baby, how cool is that! Anyway, that means we (well, technically, guys in a moving van) will be moving our stuff SE from Colorado around the 14th-to-19th.