Roger's First Post

I'm Roger, husband of Ilene, the woman, as contrasted to ILENE The Boat. I will be adding my typically verbose musings from time to time. Ilene tends to write about her impressions and emotions while I tend to stick to the facts about the sailing. She is my sails; I am her keel.



This blog is intended to chronicle our planned voyage to and in the Caribbean, now scheduled to commence on Thursday, October 21, and end in late May. I will share our plans, though I have recently learned, the hard way (running the boat onto rocks is the hard way) that the most dangerous item to carry on a sailboat is a fixed schedule. In fact our plans are so undetermined that as of May 2011 we may have sailed home to the New York area, ending this planned adventure of a lifetime, or, if (1) we can arrange insurance coverage and (2) Ilene tolerates and indeed comes to love Island Living as much as I hope and think she will, we will leave the boat in drydock in Trinidad in May 2011, fly north, spend the summer boatless, fly back this time next year, and spend the winter of 2011-12 sailing back home. (The reason for Trinidad is that it is south of the official summer hurricane belt, just as New York is north of it.)

Our first leg is from City Island, in Long Island Sound, New York, to Hampton, Virginia, near Norfolk, about 300 miles. We plan to exit New York Harbor into the Atlantic and hug the coast until we enter the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Ilene and Dennis, a new friend who is an excellent sailor and a retired physician and who has this week helped doing the myriad things needed to get the boat ready will join me for this leg. In Hampton we plan to join the Caribbean 1500 -- a flotilla of over 50 boats going from Virginia to Tortola, British Virgin Islands, keeping in radio contact, though we may not see each other because it is a wide ocean. In Hampton there is a plan for inspection of the boat by the event organizers to assure that all safety equipment is in tip top shape, lectures, demonstrations, parties, repairs, and provisioning the boat with food for the next leg, which is the longest leg -- ten days in the ocean, from Virginia to Tortola.

That leg is scheduled to begin in the first good weather window on or after November 1 and to last about ten days. For this leg, I will be accompanied by four male friends while Ilene will drive our car home and then fly down to Tortola with our cats, and the guys will fly home. After Tortola, we are rather footloose and fancy free. I am excited with anticipation -- high as a kite!