I know. It’s weird because we always have a plan. We never don’t have the “what’s next” mapped out in front of us to the Nth degree. But we left all our stuff in America anyway, crossed an ocean to the Virgin Islands anyway. And we did all that knowing only this: in over 1 year we’d gather in St. Lucia with the ARC Rally of boats traveling around the world. That’s all we knew.

So, Will and Dottie, what happens between November of 2018 and January of 2020? Hmm?

[trotting out my best Big Lebowski, eyes squinting a bit]

Yeah, dude. I mean, you know man, we’re gonna like hang low be cool and sail some wavelets, yo! It’s gonna be chill, padre.

However romantic this Lebowski lifestyle seems, it just would not work, could not work. We actually needed a plan because June - October is hurricane season in the Caribbean. Plus, the previous year in 2017 Irma and Maria waded in like a couple of drunks in an Irish bar and landed a one-two knockout punch of Cat 5 hurricanes, completely devastating the place.

Plus, our insurance would cancel our coverage from June to November if we stayed in the hurricane exclusion zone. So, we had to get out of the Caribbean by the end of May 2019. BUT, this was complicated by the fact that the Round The World ARC rally started back in the Caribbean in January of 2020.

So, to get out of the hurricane zone, we had basically 2 options:

1) Go south, all the way to the bottom of the Caribbean chain to Grenada. Once you’re down there, you have to stay put bc you can’t go further north, per insurance.

And South of you is Venezuela, which was a chaotic pit of despair at this time. There was a lot of piracy down there at this time so, yeah, we’d need to just sit tight in Grenada for 5 months.

2) GTFO to Europe. Spend time in the Mediterranean. See ridiculously old ruins and eat food informed by centuries of little round mommas scolding their passel of children for not eating enough of their pizza, paella, and pita.

The only thing standing in the way of us and the Mediterranean food, culture, food, wine, and food was an even longer passage across the Atlantic. This was about 1,000 to Bermuda, over 2,200 to the Azores, and another 1000ish to Lagos, Portugal.

If you tally all that up, it’s officially a long ass way.

Because of this, we experience much Caribbean rum-induced wavering, hand wringing, and backing and forthing on the decision: Grenada vs The Med, Grenada vs The Med, hmmmmmm, what should we do?

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

Finally, it was decided to go to the Med, which is great. But if you can’t have Scotty beam you and your boat over there (and for those of you children and other neonates who are too young to get the reference …. um, if you can’t use Harry Potter’s floo powder, or Dr. Strange’s circular portal of sparklers), then you’ll have to just sail there. And you can’t just sail straight to it, because that’s a whole lot of water to cross.

But the clouds broke, silver linings appeared, and angels sang the hallelujah chorus on high, because the same ARC Rally taking us around the world in 5 months had a similar event going from the Caribbean over to Portugal in May!

But wait, there’s more. They also had another covey of cruisers coming back to St. Lucia in November. So we’d arrive just in time for the January 2020 Round the World Rally.

Hallelujah indeed!

So for the next 5 months we prepped our Amari girl for her 4,000+ mile journey. During this difficult time, we suffered through the ubiquitous Caribbean rum drinks, constant gorgeous weather, liquid emerald seas, and friends we dearly love who came to visit and play with us before we shoved off east.