S/V Adventurer

After 8 months away, we've finally made it back to our floating home. Except at the moment, our sailboat isn't floating at all. She's been sitting on blocks in a dirty and dusty dry storage yard in Anacortes exactly where we left her 8 months ago. And those 8 months haven't been kind to the old girl. She looks pretty rough. She has a thick layer of grime covering her decks, the odd piles of seagull poop in random places, and even a few crab shells that those seagulls left behind with their poop. The inside of our boat isn't looking much better either. For the next few weeks, we'll be scrubbing, sanding, painting, wiring, and general maintaining, just trying to get her back into shape so we can head off onto the high seas. The list of chores is long, but really, all of those things don't matter if our new mast doesn't show up. So far, the word is our new mast is supposedly going to be in Anacortes sometime around the beginning of May-ish. We are cros...

We've been getting lots and lots of questions about our upcoming little sail to Mexico, so I thought that I could keep repeating myself, or I could just answer those questions right here and now and stop myself from sounding like a broken record.  So, for all of you non-sailors, sailing to Mexico is what we are going to talk about today.  And before we get into all of this, keep in mind that I have lived aboard a sailboat for almost 20 years, I've sailed thousands and thousands of miles, and been out of sight of land for days on end while bobbing up and down in the middle of the ocean.  With all of that, I may sound like I am an expert, but keep in mind that we've never sailed to Mexico, so really, I don't know Jack (who's Jack?). What I do know for sure though, is that sailing to Mexico from Seattle is a slow process.  It's not like hopping on a plane, taking a quick cat-nap, and then waking up in Cabo a few short hours later.  We will leave Seattle sometime ...

The West is big. It's actually huge. There is a ton of wide open spaces that are mostly run by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). A lot of the land that is managed by the BLM is used for cattle grazing, wildlife preserves, mining, and my personal favorite, it's open to us for recreation. Before we left on our big adventure, we hadn't really ever taken advantage of what the BLM had to offer. A lot of the land has not only wide open spaces and cattle that will roam through your campsite, but amazing natural wonders that are unlike any other place on earth. There are old ghost towns, oodles of wildlife, ancient Native American artifacts, fossils, and great hikes. To see most of this stuff, you have to be willing to put in some time and effort and really get way out there. During our 9 month road trip last year, our main focus was to see as many National Parks and natural wonders as we could muster. We quickly found that near most National Parks, the surroun...