The Votaws' Ocean Adventure

Well we made it! We finally arrived in the Dominican Republic.

We departed Provo on Tuesday, April 8th and headed across the Caicos bank to “Six Hills Cay”. As you might imagine, there are six hills that distinguish this small island. We motored pretty much dead into the wind due to the shallow water and limited room to tack. We arrived in the afternoon and spent a great afternoon and night there. Very clear water, great snorkeling, nice and calm for a good nights sleep. On the way from Provo, we came across a fishing boat that sold us 5 lobsters for $10! What a deal! (We found out later from our friends on “Toucan” that lobster season had closed on April 1st, so that might explain the great deal.) Read the rest of this entry »

Weather windows rule the “cruising” itinerary, you can “sail” in any weather, but to “cruise”, you have to take it easy and wait for easy going weather. “Type A” personalities have a hard time cruising. You can stick to a schedule if you are so compelled, but there is a good chance that you won’t feel like you’re on a pleasure vessel,  because it may not be very pleasurable in rough weather.

When we crossed the Gulf of Mexico in January, we sailed 800 miles in 8 days; 5 days of that time in very rough and adverse conditions. Of course, if we had waited for a week-long weather window we might still be in Texas. Since then we’ve come an additional 700 miles in about 80 days. We were “sailing” across the Gulf. Now we are cruising. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi Folks, We’ll be updating our blog software to the newly released WordPress 2.5 today. So if the site is down, not to worry, try again later. We will also flesh out the other pages, including the broken kids page and the boat page. We will also be adding a cruising guide/local knowledge type page for those interested in treading where we have trod. The site won’t be down long but the page content changes may take a while. We’ll keep you posted!

We arrived in Providenciales on Wed evening and cleared customs & immigration on Thursday. This is a beautiful place! Even the customs stamp in our passport is pretty. The anchorage is not too close to anything, though. It is very close to the port where the customs office is, and there is a 7-11 within walking distance, but that is about it. Actually, everything is walking distance when that is your means of transportation! We met another cruiser heading into town when we were coming back from customs and he told us it was easy to hitch rides into town. So we did. All 5 of us headed down the highway and immediately a truck stopped. Inside was the guy that had told us how easy it was to hitch…so we shared the truck with him. The driver was from Haiti. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s what the water looks like, only it’s more clear than Jello. It’s like transparent blue jello, or powerade. It’s yummy looking! The shallower water is the most beautiful shade of turquoise. It looks like a very large, very refreshing swimming pool. We can see the bottom no matter whether we’re in 6 feet of water or 60!

Read the rest of this entry »

We arrived in Georgetown this afternoon. This is a real town.

They are having a music festival in town starting tonight and tonight is gospel night. We are anchored right offshore from downtown so we can hear the music very well. They just finished a rocked-up island beat version of “Victory in Jesus”. It was awesome.

We had a great sail down from Musha Cay today. We were gonna wait another day and do some snorkleing up there but we had a nice west-southwest wind so we figured it was a gift from God to make our trip to Georgetown easy. So far it’s worked out great…what with the gospel music and all. Now they are doing Kirk Franklin’s “Stomp.” Very cool!

Internet is a little dodgy on board right now so I’ll go ahead and end this post before I lose it. We’ll post more later.