We must be getting more into the cruising mode – Friday’s deadline for our report to SetSail came and went without so much as a notice aboard Beowulf. We’re anchored behind your typical tropical island, fringed with lovely white sand beaches backed by a forest of palms – sharing the anchorage with five boats – Yank, Brit, French, Dutch, and Spanish flags are flying.

Lobster has been much on the menus. Going rate for a medium size “langusta” is $2.00. Periodically the local women come by with their molas and our collection is growing – Xmas shopping is being done early this year.

One of our neighbors is Heart of Gold, Jim and Sue Corenman’s 50′ sloop, aboard which they’ve been cruising for the past eight years. They are on the last leg of their circumnavigation – headed back to the West Coast of the US. We’ve been corresponding by e-mail for six years – ever since we did a write-up on Heart of Gold for the second edition of Offshore Cruising Encyclopedia. They were in the Queen’s Birthday Storm and provided valuable insights for our last two books – so it is nice to finally put faces to the people behind the data!

Jim developed “SailMail,” a wonderful SSB based e-mail program, with Stan Honey. He’s gotten us set up on SailMail now and that is how this data is going to SetSail.com. We’ll report in more detail after we’ve got some additional experience.

The passage from here to the bottom of the West Indies is dead uphill – 1100 miles against wind and current. Most of the folks we’ve met think we are nuts – but in reality this should not be more than six or seven days-depending on wind shifts, velocity and current. A few days ago would have been the perfect time to leave – but then we’d just arrived. The ideal would be to have a front or shear line drop down into the neighborhood, and then use the westerly shift to gain some distance to weather before the wind swings back on the nose. But, if that doesn’t occur, we’ll take what the weather gives us – we’ll report daily while enroute to give you a feel for the passage.

We’d like to check out Curacao and Bonaire, two Dutch islands between here and the Grenadines, but we’ll see what the wind gives us.