Now safely anchored alongside our friends in Deshaies, Guadeloupe, we can honestly say that after reflecting upon yesterday’s trip, we don’t think we have ever had a better passage. I know that with the miles we’ve covered, that’s a pretty strong statement, but it’s true.

The wind was, for most of the trip, blowing between 15-20 knots and consistently from the east. This allowed us to sail on a fast beam reach all the way to Guadeloupe without tacking (we averaged about 7-8 knots). Although the water wasn’t glass calm, the waves were not so bad that our autopilot couldn’t keep up with the demands, at least most of the time anyway. The sun was shining, the engines were resting, the music was playing, and to top it all off, we caught another fish, a Little Tunny! What more could one ask for?

As I wrote in my last post, we’ll be sailing from Antigua towards Guadeloupe today. Our friends on Earthling will be traveling there as well although they’ll be departing from Falmouth Harbour, 4 miles east of where we have staged in Carlisle Bay.

The trip between the islands is approximately 42 nautical miles on a course of 178˚ true, essentially due south. On a passage of this distance, or any real passage for that matter, we take a number of steps to ensure that the trip will be smooth and enjoyable.

To begin, we plot our route on our laptop computer. I have begun using the Polar View software that I wrote about a month ago. I really like how the software can “stitch together” the charts so that when zoomed out, I can see the big picture (as in the screen capture below) but when zoomed in, I can see the full detail of the smaller scale charts.

After the basic plan is sorted out on the computer, we plot the same route in the Garmin 546 chartplotter that we keep at the helm. We now know where we are going. Next we need to decide when.

When is ALWAYS dictated by the weather. Period. If Mother Nature says that we can go, we go. If She says stay put, we stay put. We consult two websites to get the forecasted wind and wave conditions, www.passageweather.com and www.windguru.cz. Fortunately, as you can see in the images below, both of those sites concur, saying that we should have winds north of east and moderate seas. Given that we’re heading south, this would put us on a comfortable broad reach, the ideal point of sail for a catamaran.

Now that we know where we’re heading and when we can go, we need to make sure it’s all legal for us to do so. This means that we need to pay a visit to the Customs and Immigration people. It’s always a little bit of a mystery as to what will happen when we do this, including what it will cost us. Fortunately the Port Authority, Customs and Immigration people were all very pleasant to us. It did cost us $70.00 EC ($28.00 US) to clear out, which we were a bit unprepared for, but oh well, what can you do?

The final bit of preparations involve making sure that the boat is shipshape for the trip. This includes confirming that we have adequate fuel for the voyage and also that there are no repairs that need to be taken care of prior to setting sail. As we recently acquired some fuel that item was looked after. We did have a minor sail repair to take care of though. During our trip from St. Martin to St. Barths, we had one of our mainsail battens jump ship. Now it’s hard to imagine that an 8 foot piece of fiberglass could go flying out of a sail high above our heads without our taking notice, but that’s exactly what happened. It has taken us all this time to get a replacement. Yesterday afternoon one of our pre-passage tasks was putting the new one in the sail and to make sure that we won’t lose this one, we lock-stitched the sucker in place! In addition to that little chore, we also scrubbed the entire boat’s bottom so that she’ll be a little quicker through the water. Lastly we removed our dinghy engine and stowed it on the rail, something we always do before a big sail. Occasionally, especially if we think that we might have a rough passage, or will be sailing overnight, we’ll prepare some food in advance. As tomorrow’s trip should be neither too long nor too rough, we’ll likely be OK to deal with food prep while underway.

Last on the list is making sure that we get a good night’s sleep. For trips that will not involve night sailing, we almost always leave around sunrise which today is around 6:30 AM. As always, we set our alarm clock so that we were awake with plenty of time to enjoy some coffee before getting underway. It’s going to be another great day on the water. See you in Guadeloupe!

Having now spent just over a month in Antigua, this island has grown to be one of our favorites. Perhaps it’s the abundance of picturesque beaches that has caught our fancy, or the great hiking that can be found all over the island. The friendly people that we’ve had the pleasure of interacting with sure hasn’t hurt our opinion of the place. As much as we’ve enjoyed our stay here though, the time has come for us to bid adieu to Antigua, and we’re set to make our way south towards Guadeloupe tomorrow morning.

We think it’s only fitting that we spent one of our final nights here watching the sun set from Shirley Heights, a prime attraction on Sunday evenings in Antigua. Unlike the countless pale-skinned tourists that also attended the festivities, Rebecca and I chose to hike to the top instead of taking a cab. To be honest, we enjoyed the hike as much, or perhaps even more, than the get-together at the top. If it weren’t for visiting with our friends on Earthling when we got there, and being introduced to some other cool people, it would have been a bit anticlimactic. As it stands though, we’re very glad we made the trip up there. It was a fitting send off from such a beautiful place. We’ll miss you Antigua!

Can you pick out ZTC in the above photo?

Rest assured dear readers that Zero To Cruising will not be turning into a cooking blog. Neither Rebecca nor I have much interest in spending time in the galley. We do enjoy eating though and were recently inspired by one of the comments on our blog (thanks for the suggestion, Geoff) to try to make some Ceviche out of our recently acquired Mackerel.

If you think this dish looks a lot like the conch salad that I posted about before, you’re right. Substitute conch for fish and you pretty much have a form of ceviche.

For those who would rather look at some more beautiful island photos instead of plates of food, I uploaded not one but two new galleries of pics (another 200+ shots) from our recent trip to Barbuda. Enjoy!

For the first time ever we have a freezer full of fish! We caught a nice Mackerel while sailing from Long Island to Nonsuch Bay and a big Jack two days before that. No longer desperate for protein, we even threw back a Barracuda that we caught after the Mackerel (yes, we are aware of the dangers of Ciguatera poisoning and quite likley would have let him go anyway as he was pretty big).

Sorry for the abbreviated posts the last two days but the internet where we were anchored was excruciatingly slow making it almost impossible to upload anything (I worked for over an hour this morning trying to get this online). Now that we’ve changed anchorages, having moved over to Mamora Bay which has much faster internet, I’ll try to do a little better tomorrow.

“I am a citizen of the most beautiful nation on earth. A nation whose laws are harsh yet simple, a nation that never cheats, which is immense and without borders, where life is lived in the present. In this limitless nation, this nation of wind, light, and peace, there is no other ruler besides the sea.” Bernard Moitessier

If we were to head east of where we are anchored now, behind the reef in Nonsuch Bay, we wouldn’t run into land until we made it to Africa!

The more we trek around the brush on these islands, the more plants we come in contact with that are not super friendly towards humans. I wrote quite some time ago about the Manchineel tree, nicknamed the “Little Apple of Death.” In the Clive Cussler novel that I am currently reading on my Kindle, an assassin kills a small plane full of passengers by adding Manchineel to their food!

Fortunately we have not been overtaken by the desire to ingest strange little pieces of fruit that we happen upon in the woods and thus are still among the living. We have however run into another nasty little plant, the Sand Spur, on a number of occasions. These little buggers have to be some of the sharpest plants out there. In the photo below you’ll see how they have imbedded themselves in my flip flop! If you have the bad luck to step on one, once you finish swearing, you will probably find that it will stick itself in your fingers as you try to remove it. We are definitely not fans of the Sand Spur!

Both Rebecca and I enjoy taking photos although as you might have gathered, the camera does tend to be in my hand more often than it is in hers. We take our trusty little Canon PowerShot D10 with us pretty much everywhere we go and it is not uncommon for us to come back to the boat with a hundred or more shots if we’ve been out exploring (we took 173 photos during our recent trip to the caves in Barbuda). Because we so often receive compliments on our pics, I thought that I’d share some info on exactly what happens before the shots get posted on this blog or on our Facebook page.

My “amateur” digital photography tips for bloggers:

• Most important… take photos. Lots of them. This isn’t film that you need to pay to develop and pixels are free. If you don’t take photos, you won’t have them to enjoy later.
• Try to pay attention to the lighting. Unless you’re going for a specific effect, or shooting a sunrise/sunset, photos will look much better with the sun or light behind you.
• Learn your camera’s various features. Just the other day I figured out some cool things that our camera can do that I wasn’t aware of.
• Give some thought to the composition of the shot as you are framing it in the camera’s view finder.
• Although most pros shoot digital pics in Raw format, we record them as .jpgs. We do use the highest resolution setting that the camera offers though.
• When we get back to the boat, we download all of the shots onto our computer. We do this daily so that, in the event that the camera gets damaged or lost, we won’t lose precious shots with it. Also, I do not typically delete the shots off the memory card right away. I instead wait until they have been backed up before doing so.

Almost all of the photo editing that we do takes place in Apple’s iPhoto (version 9.1.1 currently). Occasionally I will use Adobe Photoshop if I am trying to do something more complicated but this happens rarely. In iPhoto I will:

• Crop the photo to emphasize the subject (if necessary).
• Straighten the photo if the horizon is not level (unless I tilted it a lot on purpose).
• Occasionally I will use iPhoto’s “Enhance” feature to make the shot more vivid. I will also pay attention to the “Shadows/Highlights” features in case they need to be adjusted.
• Increase the photo’s “Definition.”

All of the above can be done in Photoshop or other image editing software if you don’t use a Mac. Photos are then exported from iPhoto. For web use I set the quality on medium and adjust the size according to where they will be uploaded (for example, all shots on this blog are 596 px wide).

As you might imagine, going through this process for 100 or more shots can take a while. I do think the end result is worth it though.

Rebecca took this shot of s/v Earthling as they passed in front of the rising sun yesterday during our trip from Barbuda to Antigua. It was tweaked in iPhoto as I described above.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. Now go take some pics of your loved ones!

When it comes to carrying bikes on board a cruising boat, it seems that people are either extremely for the idea, or very much against it. It seems there are few who are on the fence with respect to the subject.

I know that our friend Drew, who sails a PDQ 32 the same as us, is a big proponent. In fact, I’m pretty sure that he rode his bike over to our boat the one time that we met him (we were on a dock of course, not at anchor). I also think Bob from Boat Bits is a big fan of bikes because he does post about them from time to time. On the other hand, we’ve met many other cruisers who felt that carrying bikes on their boat was a big waste of space. Unfortunately, we don’t have bikes of our own so we can’t comment on that.

Since setting off cruising, we have had the opportunity to borrow friends’ bikes on a couple of occasions and have enjoyed how we could get around on them. Yesterday we actually rented bikes so that we could explore Barbuda a bit with our friends who themselves have a couple on board their boat. We were fortunate that there was actually a place in Codrington that rented bikes and although we thought it was a little pricey to do so ($20.00 US per day per bike), the bikes were in excellent shape. When it was all said and done, exploring the caves at Two Foot Bay, our destination for the day, was definitely worth the money, and the effort that it took to get there.