Chris – “North-er”

This week, we have traveled about 130nm north of St Marys, and have landed in Port Royal, South Carolina. We were aiming higher up the coast for our first stop, but after one particularly rough night at sea, we decided to stop and get some good rest and to wait for the weather to behave a bit more. Still, this is the farthest North we have been on our boat. Winning!

Arriving in Maryland represents, what my mind would consider, the “end of a cruising season.” Meaning, that we will be resetting, deciding what big projects to tackle (if any) before next year, and setting new goals/dreams for NEXT cruising season… my head is not fully ready to deal with that yet, but I am trying to get there. We are torn between intense gratitude for what God has given us the strength to accomplish, so far, and by dreading the thought of getting back to in-depth boat work. I actually made a list (mostly for my own benefit) of what I would say our boat needs, if I was not the one doing the work… or paying for it, and I decided against sharing it here because I don’t think it is really helpful to share it with everyone… it would sound too much like whining or begging for help. I just needed to do the exercise with the mindset that money and time were no object, so I could be honest with what needs to be done. As impossibly long as my list seems, God has done impossible things before, and I believe it will all happen if that is His plan for us.

On top of the to-do list, I’m beginning to understand why many cruisers take breaks from full-time boat-life, and I wonder if my crew might be ready for a break from the boat… or would that be a terrible idea? We love many things about living on our boat, but there are also many uncomfortable aspects that muck up the lenses of my rose-colored glasses. But I don’t know how to step away. Where will the boat be? Where will we be, if we are not on the boat? When will the work happen? When will the boat be ready to go back out to sea? I want to be sensitive to the needs of my family, but I also don’t want to accidentally cut off boat life, prematurely, by stepping away from the boat for too long without a clear plan to come back to it. As I say it, I realize that this is a futile fear. God’s calling on our life is not so fragile that it can be snuffed out by accident. Every morning, I give it back to God… as long as He wants us to be out here doing this, I believe the door will stay open. As long as He wants us to keep pushing forward, I believe He will give us the grace to deal with discomfort or to learn how to take a break without losing our drive. One of the best things about our boat-life is that these types of discussions can’t be relegated to private, parent only conversations… everything becomes a group discussion. We get the opportunity to process, in real time, WITH our children. The practical, and the spiritual aspects of life-decisions have become common topics of discussion. I am not always proud of my decision-making processes, but I do believe the version of family life that we are doing now is going to profoundly impact our whole family. I know I am changing, and I believe my children are becoming some of the strongest people that I know. I am immensely proud of them, and thankful for this opportunity.

For now, the next step still feels like, “Go North,” so that is what we are pushing for. We are hoping to get another 2 or 3-day push this coming week. We will see how much latitude we can gain. I hope you are all doing well. Let us know if we can pray for you this week.

~Chris

Crystal - “Questions.”

Questions.

I have more questions than answers this week. We left St Marys feeling called to get out there, not necessarily with a great promise of smooth sailing but a promise that God was with us. Posy was reluctant, as she tends to be about passages. I try to be sensitive to that because I know she’s sensitive to the Holy Spirit. But this time the Spirit reminded me of the Israelites when the scouts came back and most of them were scared into paralysis even though Joshua and Caleb encouraged them to go and conquer the land. I told Posy it was time to be bold and courageous- she heard and she stepped up. The storms came and she was SO strong. Our crew was so incredibly unflappable. I could pretty much only pray and barely hold myself together. I wasn’t feeling well and the chaos of the storm made my momma’s heart tempted to look at all the scenarios in which we were in terrible danger. But Jesus said “Eyes on me, don’t look at the storm”. I literally couldn’t look. My perception sounds so dramatic when you read the kids’ accounts. I still don’t know what our boat is capable of; only what is failing on it and that the ocean is not a tame place. I was able to find peace though, that I know came from God telling us to go.

The questions I have are to do with what’s next? We have no clear picture. We have a boat that is being held together by the Holy Spirit which is miraculous and we’re grateful but also, I don’t want to be on it when the season’s grace ends. Things that we’ve allowed to slip because there are such bigger issues pressing are becoming bigger issues themselves. How long can we keep up? How long is being on the boat God’s best? I have 2 adult children and I really like them. I really want them to thrive and excel- they are incredible men and have so much to offer. But I don’t want to not share meals with them and hug them good morning and good night. I know. I feel like if we end this boat season, that might go away too. There has been talks of taking a break from the boat for a time and I can’t imagine we’d all come back and my heart can’t go there. I know. I’m praying for my kids’ people. For our tents to grow and for the whole lot of us to continue doing life and living a grand story together. Lord knows.

Questions. Are we even really boat people? We started with a warning not to quit early? How will we know when we’ve finished? Are we safer to trust the derelict boat held together by the Holy Spirit than a boat that we’d initially envisioned? What are we contributing? What does any of this have to do with the Kingdom and how can we be better at living well in this time? There’s so much of our time spent wondering what we’re doing that we sometimes miss the doing altogether.

One day at a time. One storm. One wave. One prayer. Loads of thanks.

P.S.

I woke up this morning (the day after writing the previous bit) and realized that everything I hate about this boat is based in fear. As the sleep cleared from my eyes, I saw it all differently and with a new hope. God’s not done yet. He reminded me that where His Spirit is, there is freedom. In the past week, I have been choosing to carry around a burden of fear and sadness for what may be someday. Why do we do that?! We miss the splendor of what is by imagining a future that hurts.

What are you carrying around that isn’t doing any good? Ask God to give you a new view and only carry what He hands you.

~Crystal

Ellis - “My favorite part of living on a boat”

My favorite part of living on a boat is how much time we have. Back when we lived in Montrose, it was a struggle to fit everything. Work, sports, CrossFit, church events, and other land-people stuff—we always had something going on, and most of our friends were even worse. Most times it was a struggle to get together with friends for a dinner, let alone hang out on a regular basis. Now we don’t have any of that. I like having people around, but I’m more than happy to entertain myself. We happily work when we need to, do things as a family, and fill in the rest with our hobbies and learning stuff. We’ve all gotten used to it but I think that if we were to move back into a house, it wouldn’t take long for us to fill the days back up. But, I’m tired of the boat. I’m tired of stuff falling apart faster than we can fix it and of us living with all the broken things. I’m tired of always having a clock running till the next time we have to get fuel, water, and food, or get rid of trash. I suppose you still have to deal with those things when you live in a house but it feels harder on a boat. I can’t tell if I’m actually just stuck in a “grass is greener” mentality though. Maybe I’d miss the simplicity of boat life if we moved back now.

~Ellis

Conrad - “South Carolina”

We are now anchored by Port Royal, in southern South Carolina. When we first came into the Port Royal Sound, we were only really planning on staying the night. (A sound is basically like a bay, but it has multiple openings to the ocean) During the passage we went through a pretty rough storm, and we were all a little bit worn out. Fortunately, we didn’t break anything during the storm, and we didn’t lose anything major, so it wasn’t really that bad. Anyway, once we were in the sound, we looked at forecasted passage weather, and decided to wait out the week before moving on. Since there was some weather coming, we decided to go a bit deeper in-land to a more protected spot in one of the creeks.

Port Royal feels pretty similar to Georgia but its marshes feel a little less marshy and its mud is less muddy. From what I’ve seen, Port Royal is a bit of a strange little town. The roads have a pedestrian lane and either one or two car and bike lanes. Also, a lot of the buildings are pretty old looking and have a very zen vibe. I don’t actually know if it’s really that small of a town but it feels small where we are. We walked over to a big observation tower which felt a little out of place in the rest of the town. It was a pretty cool structure with five layers made out of wood like the boardwalk that it was built into. The view from the top was pretty cool too since the terrain in South Carolina is so flat.

~Conrad

Oliver - “We’ve Had Worse!”

Last Sunday, the 14th, we left St Marys and headed North for either Charleston or Georgetown. According to our weather apps, we had a weather window that wasn’t perfect, but it was the best we had gotten since we arrived in St Marys. We didn’t feel like waiting for another one, so we took it. This passage was about 200 nautical miles, which is about three days and two nights. It went very smooth for the first few hours, even though the wind was pretty dead. We caught a Spanish Mackerel on a “spoon” lure. Later, when the wind picked up, we were able to sail at 5+ knots with just the headsail. During that time, we caught a Bonito, which is kinda like a tuna; we kept it, but we haven’t eaten it yet. After about 20 minutes of sailing, we had to furl the sail because of some grumpy looking clouds and too much wind. Soon after we battened down everything and got inside, the rain started flying. Sideways. There was a lot of lightning, so Dad and Conrad, who were on shift, wore welding gloves to hold our stainless steel steering wheel in case of a lightning strike (who knows if the gloves would have actually done anything, but we felt safer). Nothing terrible happened, and that storm cleared before dinner. Then, at about 7:30pm, during me and Jasper’s shift, we hit another storm. Our wind instruments don’t work, but my guess would be 30-40 knot winds. Sometimes, the waves would come over the rail of the boat. Again, nothing catastrophic happened, so I count that as another win. The night shifts were thankfully, pretty chill, although very sleepy. The next day the weather apps had finally updated and it looked like more storms for a while, so we decided to turn in early. We are not very fast, so even getting to Port Royal, (a much closer anchorage than either Georgetown or Charleston) took nearly the rest of the day. Unfortunately, we traveled only 130 miles instead of 200. It’s still movement in the right direction and nothing fell apart. Sadly, we lost a nice pair of gloves and our best winch handle due to the storms. We did not have good weather, but the Lord protected us and we handled it alright. Thanks for all your support, have a great week!

P.S.

This week, I painted a rooster, and I am working on a new painting. If you have done any drawing or painting recently, I would love to see it!

~Oliver

Jasper - “Long day(s)”

Have you ever gone through an entire day tired, bored, and not feeling very well? These days always just take the longest amount of time, and they make days feel like weeks, right? Well, the unfortunate thing is that this past passage felt exactly like that. On the 14th of June, we hoisted anchor at about 8:45am, and for the next 3-4 hours we motored through the St Marys channel. The ocean didn’t feel that wavy at the start but when we started going parallel to the waves, we started rocking much more. Often, a rogue wave would cause us to heave probably more than 15° to each side which made cabinets much more precarious to open, leading to a broken glass bowl. After about half of the day (mostly sailing!) It got really stormy and windy and we had to pull the sails down. After the rain started we headed inside and tried to stay away from metal for fear of the lightning. But just before dinner, it calmed down and we were able to get some air flow. Then another storm was upon us. The furious winds made our boat heel over and the waves were like nothing I’ve ever seen before, but I just went to bed and fell asleep. When dad woke me up for my night shift, the storm had abated, and the air was actually quite chilly. I could barely stay awake through my shift, dad had to keep nudging me. In the morning we changed our plans, we had looked at the weather and it looked like it was going to continue to be yucky. We were going to go almost 70nm (nautical miles) less than we had planned! But it was necessary, we were forecasted to get water spouts! But back to the story. After lunch sometime in the afternoon, just before getting in the channel, I was able to shoot my new bb-gun. It was pretty fun, but I was a terrible shot. Then I was on shift for the next 2 hours. We anchored at around 7 O-Clock, and after dinner we slept heavily.

And that’s it, we are still here, and happy. See you later.

~Jasper

Posy - “Visiting with friends”

Recently, there has been a lot of moving our boat around. Fort Pierce to Jacksonville, Jacksonville to Saint Marys, and Saint Marys to South Carolina. Saint Marys was amazing both times, and I'm sure someone else is going to talk about the passages. So I'm going to write about seeing the Piljays again, (they are the friends that basically took us in last year.) We went to the Piljay’s house, bringing with us some games, and also some lemon bread. When we first walked in, they were finishing washing dishes. Soon they were done and Henry wanted to play tag, play with stuffed cardinals, or let us look at a box of shells he had collected. We did a mix of the last two, since Jasper's knee was hurt, so we didn't want to play tag. We played while Ellis, Oli, and Conrad re-stringed a u-bass (ukulele bass) we had brought with us. Once it had all four strings, they tuned it. After a little bit, it was dinner time; the food was awesome. After dinner, the kids all played a little video games and ate lemon cake. Haddie and I got bored, and my brothers wanted to do what the Piljays wanted to do so we stopped playing video games and went outside, and played tag and ghost in the graveyard. We played outside for a while, but it was really hot, so we went into the house and went up stairs so that we didn't disturb the parents, who were sitting at the table talking seriously. While some of the kids played Hanabie (which is a Chinese firework card game), I played ukulele. We stayed at the Piljay’s house for about five hours, and then we left. That doth be all, farewell.

~Posy

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Chris – “Everyone/ Place deserves a second chance”

Saint Marys, Georgia… If you were around, reading our blogs while we worked on getting our boat ready to launch last year, you know how we felt about Saint Marys. If you weren’t following our story at that point, I will reiterate our previous impression of Georgia… we didn’t like it very much. Now to be clear, we met amazing people here, and we love them, but we could not wait to get out of here. Now, we have spent time away, and we have seen more places from the perspective of living on the water, and we see things a little bit different. When we lived here, for 10 months of 2025, we lived primarily in the boat yard. Our days consisted of dirty boat yard, dirty boat work, bugs, and discomfort, and somewhere along the way, I started blaming St. Marys for that. This time around, we see the good that is here a little more clearly. We came excited to see friends. We came here excited to spend a bit of time with a vehicle to run errands with. We were reminded that the sunrises and the sunsets here are amazing! We were reminded that the anchorage here is SO much quieter and peaceful than the Florida anchorages that we experienced. Without the struggle and frustration of the boatyard, this place is actually really great, though I will say that the bugs are still awful, and I sweat about 100% more in the Georgia heat, somehow.

Life is like that sometimes. We hate the wrong thing, because it’s easier to hate than the thing that is actually getting to us. I hated working on the boat in the boat yard, but I felt like I wasn’t allowed to hate it because I had chosen it. I felt like I owed it to my family, or you guys (our readers) to be upbeat about getting started in boat-life. I felt like, if I admitted that it wasn’t amazing, my family might give up and ask to move back home. I was beginning to live the dream that I set out from my home to go live. Easier to say that St. Marys was the worst, than to say that my dream wasn’t very fun. Now, to be fair, I don’t think I really hid my distain for the boat-yard-life that much; I think everyone knew that it was not fun. But, I needed to project some of my despair towards something else, and Georgia took one for the team. And, I didn’t really hate the dream, but there were definitely moments where I felt like it wasn’t worth it. I do believe it is worth it, and at the moment, I am so grateful that we are doing this… but things are good right now. If things get really hard again, will I retain the optimism that I feel right now, or will I begin questioning all my life choices again. I hope that I am becoming more stable; less able to be shaken by difficulties.

We have been so blessed, in our short time here in St Marys, to get to enjoy, and give back to the community this time around. Instead of only needing help, we have been able to help others. Instead of needing ALL of the prayers, we have been able to pray for others. And, instead of looking for the nearest exit, we find ourselves sad to move on. Its amazing what a few months can do. I am grateful that God brought us back here to show us the things that we missed on our first visit.

We are still gearing up to push for the Chesapeake, and I am excited to take our boat to new places. If you are praying for us, pray for safe travels, and smooth boating… we have a lot of miles to go still!

~Chris

Crystal - “Dear Church”

Dear church,

I think you’ve misplaced the joy of your salvation. The misery of sin is welling up into fury, and you are forging chains for the people who come to you for freedom. The easy, light burden you were given to bear has been adorned and adjusted, materialized and produced into a ridiculous, unrecognizable rig. The Jesus who never missed a spontaneous conversation with a stranger on the street has been formalized and bullet-pointed into rigid, formal expectations.

It is no secret that the world is broken. There’s no scarcity of evidence of the consequences of evil. I admit that we are easily misled with twists of truth and undeserving idols. But I think most of us know the brokenness of our nature. I think most Americans have heard some version of the gospel. But the meat of the gospel- I believe, gets sifted by scheduled services, and volunteering with overcommitted fellow-believers.

Dear church, you do a lot of things right, and with intention. But you’re missing the good part. The freedom, the peace that surpasses, the joy, the love, patience, kindness, the lovely and excellent.

As a parent, I imagine the church as a child sitting at a table coloring. The child is full of agitation and doubt. Scribbling and trying to scratch out, crumbling up papers and huffing in frustration- unwilling to hear encouragement or praise. The lines are hard and jagged. When, instead there is the option of a child who rests in knowing they have nothing to prove- doodling, creating, exploring, creating beauty and glowing with assurance.

Church, wake up! It’s good. God’s good. You’re chosen and your job is not to make people realize their brokenness, it’s to help people realize their salvation, and their citizenship in God’s family, their excellence not because of the picture they colored but because they are adored by a good Creator and given right standing by a finished sacrifice.

We have been connected and engaged with the Church but adjacent to the four walled church for a while now. There are certainly many things we could have done better. We have missed opportunities and squandered moments but we’ve also spent a lot of time praying and digging through Scripture, leaning into the promises and conviction we’ve found there. We are feeling like God’s calling us to re-engage and connect more with a group of believers in the coming season. I can find myself slipping into the irritated scribble kid but I want to be the one humming happy songs creating beauty.

I was thinking just this morning, unrelated, that we are so incredibly adaptable. People are so weirdly capable of shifting expectations and normalizing things. In a short time, we are able to overcome abhorrence, or fear, and make it happenstance. We are able to take thrill and novelty, and be bored. Pain becomes bearable. Excess becomes baseline, scarcity becomes expectation. We adjust to experience. My point here is that, as we enter back into the (c)hurch, I hope we can bring more of the freedom and joy we’ve found, to the body, regardless of the experience that we find when we get there.

Dear Church, I love you. Let’s choose Awesome.

~Crystal

Ellis - “Guitar Skills”

Lately I’ve been working hard to improve my guitar playing; working out scales, learning to play with a pick, picking up little things from YouTube, and learning to play different genres. I’ve been mainly teaching myself, and with no teacher to feed you new material from the things they’ve already learned, it’s up to you to make up new things to practice. Sometimes this lack of outside instruction can give birth to really cool, unique techniques, but it’s also very easy to work yourself into ruts. I’ve wondered how much I would benefit from a teacher, but for now, I am still making progress on my own. I come up with little riffs and play them all over the fret board, I come up with picking and fingering patterns, I find new ways to put chords together, and try to make my fingers stronger and more independent. I’ve come up with all these different things and they make me excited, but I’m a bit lonely in my musical interests. Me and Oli were talking earlier and I thought that it’d be fun if we were all really into one thing even if it wasn’t music, but it’s probably healthy for us to have different interests. As much as I wish someone else in my family was as committed to music, I really do enjoy the art and things that they make.

~Ellis

Conrad - “⅕ Swallow and Counting”

According to sailing tradition, a tattoo of a swallow signifies five thousand nautical miles of logged sailing. That is about five thousand seven hundred and fifty regular miles. The quantity of swallows and other tattoos tell of a sailor’s accomplishments. For example a nautical star, which is a symbol for always being able to find your way home, or an anchor, which means that the sailor has crossed the Atlantic. As of our last passage from Jacksonville to St Mary’s we can get ⅕ of a swallow tattoo, that is, we broke one thousand miles of logged travel. Technically not all of it was sailing, we’ve used our motor quite a bit. I’m not really sure if I really ever want a tattoo, but I do want to earn a swallow or two, even if I never ink them on.

Since we made it to St Mary’s, we have stayed here for over a week. Though, the plan is to be leaving this Sunday, which is going to end up being two days after we post this blog. It’s been really nice to have a car again, at least for a little while. It was pretty weird to come from sailing for a few months back to driving on the road. It took Dad a minute to be consistently driving fast enough, because in sailing you barely ever even get close to going ten miles per hour. Our first time driving around we had a bit of a tail of cars growing. Unfortunately we will be leaving the car again soon, though the plan is to try and bring it up to Annapolis when we get there.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

~Conrad

Oliver - “We’re Home!”

We don’t want to get stuck here in St. Marys again, not for any length of time. But, we’ve previously spent a lot of time here in Georgia. Coming back kind of felt like coming home after a long vacation. We have travelled just over 1000 nautical miles during all of our passages and daytrips. To get up North to Annapolis will be another 700 nautical miles. That number sounds a little scary, but we are going to break it up a little bit. Instead of doing one 14 day passage, we can do 3-5 smaller passages.

We may start the first one on the 14th, but finding the perfect weather window is impossible. When the waves are manageable, the wind is un-sail-able. But when the wind is perfect, the sea state is rough. If you think about it, please pray for a good passage with good weather.

Since I last talked about art on the blog, I’ve done two main acrylic paintings. The first one was a red-eyed tree frog, which turned out pretty well. The second was a black and white jerboa, while messing around with a picture of the frog, I turned it black and white. That is what inspired me to actually paint the jerboa in black and white. I think there is room for improvement, but it turned out good. We are now back to a place where we could mail paintings, so I am open for commissions. Acrylic or watercolor, any size up to 9” x 12”. Have a great weekend!

~Oliver

Jasper - “Someth1ng n3w”

This blog is about last Thursday. That Thursday, I woke up and did something I had never done before. I teenaged. It was my birthday!! So here is the story of the day that I was extra-really-super blessed and happy.

Suddenly I awoke, all dream thoughts were erased by the realization, it was my birthday! Soon after waking, mom and dad came in, and quite suspiciously, kept me in my room for the next 5-10 minutes. Once out of the room, we dined on monkey bread, courtesy of Mom. They were delicious, and my taste buds rejoiced! I went to brush my teeth and found that there was a strange piece of paper in my toothbrush case. it lead me on a lengthy chase around the boat, there was many clues but they ran out leading me to find a present box that had been stole from me by the evil stuffed animal unicorn. It finally led to a box that was weirdly heavy… it was… a pistol BB gun!!!!

The next thing on the agenda (we had the whole thing planned out) was going on a walk in the woods. We headed to land at about 11:30, and drove 30 minutes to a path called Gum Branch. But unfortunately it was way too buggy there and we had to turn back quickly.

Back at the boat we stuffed ourselves full of sushi, and headed to this place just down the road from the city dock that had 5 pool tables!! After two games, the Piljays arrived to hang out. We played so much pool! A little while later, we (me, Posy, and our friend Henry) went over to a different table to play air hockey. After a bit, we had to go so that we wouldn’t have to eat crazy late. The air hockey team played tag at the city playground while Mom started some dinner on the boat, but when it started to get dark, we headed to the boat too. The tacos mom made were very, very tasty but I made sure to leave room for something even more tasty, cake! The day was beyond a huge blessing! It was beyond anything I could have Imagined! I went to bed an extremely happy teenager. Oh! Also I got a ton of presents. Here’s a list: A BB gun, 3 card games, 3 sunglasses, 3 sunshirts, a pair of shoes and an amazing go-pro. I also got the gift of being with my family and hearing my family tell me about all of your texts. Thank you for all of the birthday wishes! And that is the whole day, thanks for reading.

~Jasper

Posy - “Skim boarding”

If you guys have been reading our posts, you know that Conrad is graduating, but if you haven’t been, now you know. That is kind of a big thing, so on Tuesday we decided it was time to celebrate! We dressed in beach clothes, but still tried to look nice, because on the way to the beach there’s a place called Surcheros (which is basically Moe’s, or Q-doba, or Chipotle). It tasted pretty good and the rice was great. It was about an hour drive but that’s okay, I don’t mind car drives, so it wasn’t that bad. When we got there, I ordered a normal burrito bowl with no condiments but cheese. After eating, we all got back into the car and drove a tiny bit more to the beach. There, we set up our blanket and Ellis got out the guitar that we had brought with us. Me and Mom went on a run. It wasn’t very long but it still made my legs feel weird. We walked back and Mom found a pretty big shark tooth. When we got back from our walk, Dad was skim boarding, Jasper was watching Dad, Ellis was still playing guitar, and Conrad and Oli were on a walk, collecting shark teeth. I decided I would join Jasper and Dad, I walked over and saw Dad skim board perfectly twice in a row. I wanted to give it a try, and Dad was leaving to go boogie board with Jasper anyway. Before he left he told me how to throw, and get on the board. Mom watched me get better and better at throwing the board. Once I was good at throwing the board, I started hopping on, but then immediately I would hop off out of instinct. Eventually I got two okay slides, but towards the end, I got another one but this one ended with me slamming my hip onto the ground. I did not get any more slides but I did get more practice. Then we rinsed off and got into our car. When we got back we ate some graduation-cake, and went to bed. That is all that I have for today. Bye.

~Posy

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Chris – “What we’ve learned from our first 1000”

First thing is first; today is Jasper’s birthday! Happy birthday Jasper! Thirteen… our fourth teenage boy! Jasper is a force of nature; full of joy, always ready to play, kind, and intelligent. We are blessed to know him, and we hope he has an amazing birthday. We are giving the kids a break from writing this week, but please join us in wishing Jasper a huge “Happy Birthday!”

Last Saturday, we completed our 200+ nautical mile passage from Fort Pierce, to Jacksonville. We planned to spend only 1 day there, and then push on to Saint Marys, Georgia on Monday, but due to a careless mistake on my part, we completely destroyed our starter, and spent the day, on Monday diagnosing the problem, and swapping out the starter with the spare that we had on board… So thankful to God that we had a spare on board. Back when we were troubleshooting a previous engine issue, I had bought a new starter, because I thought that might be the issue we were having… it wasn’t, but because of that purchase, we had a functional spare starter on board, so we were only down for 1 day, instead of having to wait for a new one to ship to us. Due to this delay, we left on Tuesday morning instead, and arrived in St Marys on Tuesday evening. This is a full-circle moment for our crew, since we initially launched our boat in St Marys, and began our journey, on the water, from this location. It is noteworthy that, on our passage between Jacksonville and St Marys, we logged our 1000^th nautical mile, aboard the good ship Agnes. So, this feels like a fitting time to reflect back on what we have learned over those miles, and months, aboard our floating home.

I remember taking off from the boatyard, and setting our first anchor. We were terrified. Moving the boat made me nervous, anchoring made me nervous, every noise made me nervous… just constant, excited/ scared nerves. Now, we have made our way into dozens of different anchorages, some of them multiple times, and we have hit a bit of a rhythm. That is not to say that I don’t get nervous when we are coming into a new area, and I have to pick the spot to drop the anchor, hoping that it holds, and that we have enough room around us to swing. But, I trust the “process,” and I trust my crew, more than I did at the beginning. My wife and my children have become an amazing team. When we come in to set an anchor these days, I know that they will do their part, and I know that, worst-case, I will pick a bad spot, and we will have to pull the anchor back up, and do it again. I have a better feel for how the boat maneuvers, and I have a better feel for what a strong anchor holding feels like when I back down on it to drive it into the seabed. Trust makes it easier to anchor, and we are gaining trust in each other.

People that hear that I rebuilt our engine often say things like, “that’s awesome, now you KNOW that you have a good, strong engine.” I did not feel like that. To this day, I thank God every time it fires up. I KNOW that I didn’t know the first thing about rebuilding an engine, and I have trust issues with my own abilities. Probably incorrectly, I would assume that an engine that ANYONE else had worked on would be more trust-worthy, because they probably knew what they were doing, but MY work… who knows if it is good. But I am learning to trust it more, and learning to trust my ability to fix problems that do arrive. On one of our offshore passages, there was little-to-no wind, and we ran our engine for 46 hours straight! No complaints, just millions of revolutions, pushing our 30-ton home through the Atlantic Ocean. Trust in our boat’s propulsion makes it easier to leave land, and to believe that we will have the means to get back to land when we need to.

I have learned that sailing across miles of empty ocean, so far from the cares of land life, polluted cities, and crazy people is not as peaceful as I once thought it would be. Being swept away with the beauty of the water’s movement, and taking joy in watching the open sky shift and change its colors and textures, takes intentional effort on my part. The ocean is scary! The idea that this vessel holds all the people that I love most, on this planet, and we are just cruising on the surface of something as powerful and unpredictable as the sea, makes me feel a little bit queasy when I think about it. Being out on the water CAN be peaceful. There are moments where I am struck by the insane beauty of the ocean and the sky doing their endless dance together. But I have to trust (there’s that word again) that this chunk of corrosive metal, with a rebuilt engine and hand-me-down sails, will keep on floating as we make our way slowly on the surface. I am learning to trust more. I thought I would love being out in the middle of the ocean right away… I didn’t, but I am slowly learning how to. We are also learning to pick our weather better. The big, open ocean, is a lot easier to enjoy when the waves are small, and the wind is manageable. We have learned that we are fair-weather sailors, and we try to avoid going out into the ocean, if it looks like it will be terrible out there. Weather is hard though, and I do NOT trust my ability to read the weather accurately… at least, not yet. We are learning.

Above all, holding all the broken pieces that I mentioned above together, I am learning to trust God to bring us through. So many times, I have reached a point where I felt like I couldn’t possibly keep doing this. I would reach the bottom of some issue that felt like life-or-death, and I would say to myself, “this is where the dream dies,” but then God shows up, and brings us through it. He gives us a heart, and a desire to keep going, and we keep going. I am learning that it WILL happen, if He is there with us.

We are still aiming at Annapolis, for summer-time… we will likely double our nautical mile count, getting that far North. But, if God is in it with us, I trust that we can do it. It feels huge, but it’s just another 1000. God brought us through it once. He can do it again. Thank you to everyone that cheered us on through our first 1000. Thank you for still being here.

~Chris

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JASPER!!

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Chris – “New Stories”

As of today (Friday, May 29^th), we are offshore, heading North. We left Ft Pierce, FL on Thursday morning, and pointed our bow North, with a 10-12kt breeze on our stern. Thursday was the best full day of sailing that we have had on this boat. Last week, I tasked my three oldest with figuring out how to use our whisker pole, and we deployed it for the first time on Thursday. The whisker pole is a 4” diameter pole that we can deploy from our main mast. It holds our headsail out, so we can head directly away from the wind without the wind catching the back edge of our sail, and folding it up on itself. We set up the whisker pole and headsail off to our port side, and we set up our main sail and mizzen sail off on the starboard side. The waves were gently pushing us in the same direction as the wind, so we spent a very comfortable day sailing downwind at 5-6 knots with little-to-no adjustments needed. The wind gave out as the sun was going down, so we furled all the sails, and fired up the engine. We were traveling past Cape Canaveral, and there was a rocket launch scheduled for Friday morning; this means that we were not allowed to be in the ocean within a specific “restricted zone” as of 5:30am on Friday… no time to go slow through the night. We needed to get above the restricted zone, so we motored on through the night. My crew is getting really good at taking night watches, and we did 2-hour shifts with 2 people on watch at all times. Our autopilot is still not working, so we have to hand steer our boat at all times; people on watch are not just for show, they are fully “on-duty.” The fun new twist that Agnes chose to throw at us this passage is that the chart plotter (the digital map that we use to navigate) at our helm decided to not work anymore… so not only is my crew steering by hand for our 200+ mile passage, but they are also steering to visual/ compass bearings mostly. During the night, we used a phone as a chart plotter, because it was too dark to see the compass, and it was too overcast to steer by the stars. I don’t think my kids know how cool they are that they navigate this 30-ton chunk of steel through the Atlantic Ocean using mostly technology from a previous century.

Friday, so far, has brought zero sailing wind, so we are continuing to motor north, as we slip slowly up the East Coast of Florida. We are planning on spending one more night out on the Atlantic, before we tuck into the Saint Johns River, and anchor at Jacksonville, FL for a short stop-over. So today we are just catching naps, wrapping up this Blog, and listening to music… oh yeah, and hand-steering the boat. Thankfully, aside from the chart-plotter, the boat systems are working well, and I have had much less time spent “putting out fires” on this passage. Lord willing, the blessing continues, and this will go down in the books as my favorite passage to-date.

Coming back from our time in the Bahamas, which felt like a vacation, I have been praying about what is next. We have been planning on spending some time working, and refilling the cruising-fund, on the practical side of things, but specifically, I have been asking God about the “why” of our lifestyle… meaning, aside from just living the best life we can on a boat, what does God want us to be doing to make the world around us a better place. And we have been feeling like it is time for us to find a community of people to invest in; to develop relationships and be real, available friends to the people that God brings our way. It is easy to get disconnected out here; to be self-contained, and satisfied with our little world, but God asks us to be “salt and light” in the world. Spouting words in a weekly blog, and posting pictures and videos online, are not enough. God says it is time to reach outside of our bubble. It feels like being present for a job will be a part of being physically present with a community of people, but beyond that, I am still looking for ways to answer this call. I look forward to seeing where God leads us, and what happens in this next season of our story.

What new story are you beginning, this Summer?

~Chris

Crystal - “42”

42 little bitty years. Time. What is time? And who are we to think we can assign a measure to it? Time is ever-increasingly fluid. Some minutes last beyond what we think we can endure and some years slip by without recognition. Night watch minutes are much longer than the months of 2025. Anyway, I turn 42 tomorrow. I haven’t spent much time in the presence of mirrors lately.

Side note- I realized this week that the younger three kids have been in a building once in the last 3 months. That’s crazy! I have been in 3. Does that make us feral?

Anyway, back to mirrors and 40 something. I don’t know if it’s the lack of reflections, or the unavailability of routine and products, or maturity, but I have come to a place where I welcome the marks of life on my skin. The scars of honest mistakes, trial and error, and survival. I welcome the sun to etch measures of time and emotion on my face. I hope to continue to grow, and really live, until I no longer own this body. I want to improve, and learn, and act on new knowledge, and build from here. I want to spend my time trying to light up whatever places, whatever communities, whoever I can. My 41st year put some wear on this body, lots of new lines, a few dings, an overspray of new freckles (pronounced “age spots”). It has been incredible.

I looked back over my journal from the week because I wasn’t sure what to write about- we were just at anchor since we got to Ft Pierce last week. But actually a lot happened. God did a lot in our quiet times and He’s moving us. Today, we’re on passage making our way north. Guess what?! The plan is indefinite, and the vision is vague at best (surprise!), but we’re stoked to be here.

Standout things from the week-

-lots of BIG turtles hanging in the river around us

- big sting rays- swam under Jasper at the back of the boat, and jumped at least 6ft in the air near another boat

- an unmanned derelict trimaran quietly floated by us in the night- in the space of 75 yards between us and the mangroves and grounded just downriver- grateful we didn’t catch it.

- we saw the tallest single masted ship on the planet roll in like a boss up the river. Mirabella- M5. WOW!! The mast is 290ft tall and her beam is only 7 feet shorter than our length. Massive, and really beautiful.

- we saw a movie proportioned explosion. The Blue Origin put on a devastating display while we were rounding Cape Canaveral. We were a few miles offshore but nothing was between us and the blow. It shook us. Reports say no one was hurt- praise the Lord. There were coast guard announcements this morning about reporting but “not touching” shrapnel in the surrounding waters.

- we are all starting to get a little better at being on the way…or maybe God’s just been really making things favorable on this passage. Maybe both.

- after being isolated in paradise, it was a little abrasive coming back to a crowded anchorage. We kind of like the un-people-y places. I told the kids we should probably change that attitude- after all, they are the image of God and He loves all of us. I meant it. It only took a few hours to remember why it can be hard to live that way. Everyone, and their drunk uncle, goes boating for memorial day in Ft Pierce. I’m gonna keep working on it.

Have a great week, friends! Thanks for being here.

~Crystal

Ellis - “

It’s Friday morning the 29th as I write this, and we’re currently on our second day of our passage from Fort Pierce to Jacksonville, FL. So far, it’s been pretty good. Yesterday we were able to sail at around 5kts for most of the day but the wind died down in the evening and we have been motoring since then at about three and a half knots. No fish yet. Nothing really that notable at all has happened except for last night at around 8:50, as we were passing Cape Canaveral, the family all saw a huge mushroom explosion come from the launch center. I somehow slept through it (I had gone to bed early because I had a shift later that night), but they told me it first sparked up a bit, then exploded and lit up the sky, and then a second later they said that they heard and actually felt the blast like a huge gunshot and a puff of warm air even though we were around 10 miles out! I can’t believe I didn’t wake up. At first Oli said he thought we were getting bombed, but we found out later that it was a malfunctioned Blue Origin rocket. They weren’t even trying to launch it, just one major oopsie. That’s all we know so far though. But, the station must not be too damaged, or they have another one, because they were able to successfully launch a Star Link rocket just this morning at around nine. Crazy stuff. Other than that, life on passage isn’t much to write about. We’re on a rotating two person, two hour shift schedule around the clock so each person is usually on shift for about 6-8hrs a day broken up into 3 or 4 shifts. In between shifts, we usually just sleep, eat, read, or whatever but we’re always on call to adjust the sails, or help out in any way. Today’s a four shift day for me with two night shifts so I’m going to try and take a good nap and maybe, if the swell keeps down, I’ll get out the guitar and play some music. If things keep going well, we are hoping to arrive at Jacksonville before lunch tomorrow—which, is Mom’s Birthday! We love our mamma and are excited to celebrate her tomorrow! If you think about it, shoot her a text!

~Ellis

Conrad - “Graduation”

It’s a pretty unique experience to graduate from high school while living on a sailboat. I technically finished school sometime in the first week of the Bahamas, but it didn’t really feel official until we took Graduation pictures during the last week. Even then, I’m sure it didn’t feel like it does for most people when they graduate. For one thing I don’t really have any plans for leaving the boat any time soon. For a lot of kids graduation is one of the last steps before moving away from their parents. I’m glad that that is not the case for me. There are people that are excited to move out from their parents house, and who can’t wait to get away from their families, but for me, my family is really amazing, and everyone gets along really well. Ellis has been graduated for two years now and he’s still living happily with us. I figure I will follow suit for a while. Even if we weren’t living on a boat I would still want to stay as long as I could find a good excuse. I’m glad my graduation is far from normal, but also I wonder how many of my friends from Colorado, my peers, I will never get to see again. I wasn’t the most outgoing kid, but I did still have a few good friends, and I’m sure we will stay friends. Happy graduation to all of my peers who may be reading this and to all of my friends back in Colorado. All of the ones who are graduating anyway.

Thank you for reading!

~Conrad

Oliver - “Day & Night”

It feels weird here in quiet Fort Peirce after a whole month of adventuring every day in the Bahamas. As soon as we got back, we had to fight to not slip into a long routine in which we stay here for a long time. Fort Pierce is a nice anchorage, but it likes to stop people and hold them tight. We’ve met multiple people who came here for a short stay and ended up living in Fort Pierce. Lucky for us, we have a plan. I wrote this on Wednesday, and we left on Thursday so I ended up typing it on Friday while I wasn’t on my shift steering the boat. Leaving Fort Pierce, we were all a little nervous, since last time we were off this coast we ended up getting towed back in through a thunderstorm with low-to-none drinking water, a torn headsail, and a “broken” engine, after three nights and four days at sea. Despite the length, this has been one of my favorite passages so far. A stark contrast from our passage going from St. Augustine to Fort Pierce. On this journey we sailed almost a full 12 hours with an average speed of 5 knots, we used our whisker pole to sail wing on wing for a while (with a sail let out to either side) and then switched to motoring during the night at an average speed of almost 4 knots. We have tried and failed to catch a fish. As we were passing Cape Canaveral a Blue Origins spacecraft malfunctioned or something, and literally blew up the entire launch station. Me and Jasper were on watch, and I was using the space station as a landmark to keep our course when the sky lit up with the fire and the largest explosion I’ve ever seen made a large mushroom cloud with sparkles like the most expensive firework ever had just been set off.15 or 20 seconds later, a slightly warm blast of air and a heart-stopping POW! hit us. As far as we know, no-one got hurt, but we aren’t sure. Later in the morning, a different station launched a rocket into space successfully, but we weren’t looking until it broke the atmosphere, so it wasn’t that exciting. We still had 80+ miles to go when I finished typing this, so who knows what else is gonna happen! Have a great week! Mom’s 42nd birthday is on Saturday so give her a text!

~Oliver

Jasper - “Legendary Extraordinary Great Outstanding(LEGO)”

This past week, since we no longer are in the Bahamas and we can’t just swim any time we want to, we have been making a lot of new Lego builds. But, since we didn’t bring any of our 6-18 gallon totes full of Lego, our options are a lot more limited than we are used to. The Lego we brought with us all fit into a 1½ gallon tub, but since then, we have gotten more Lego throughout this trip. We picked the Lego pieces we brought by making things that we thought we would build often, like cars and planes and even a tank. As it turns out we picked out our prices extremely well!! We are building incredible new things, and I feel like my personal Lego building skills are improving quite a bit.

On the other hand, on the boat, we are on another passage. This one is two nights long. We are headed away from swimmable waters of Fort Pierce, up north to Jacksonville. We are currently about 5 miles off of land and the buildings along the coast look extremely tiny. But we can see them. We are arriving hopefully at some point tomorrow, on Mom’s Birthday.

Well that is all that I have got for this week.

~Jasper

Posy - “The biggest single-masted sailing vessel in the world!”

This week, while we were still in Fort Pierce, we saw the biggest one masted sailing vessel in the world. (At least that is what the internet said.) We did some research and we found out a lot. It’s Ballast (which is a large weight in the keel of the boat) weighed 60 tons! For reference, our whole boat weighs 30 tons when it is fully loaded. The boat’s mast is 290 feet tall, And ours is only 67-ish. Weird fact, the counters inside of the boat are completely made of Jasper, (the rock, not my brother.) It has six spreaders on it’s very tall mast. The biggest boat lift in the US (which is in Fort Pierce) could not lift it. It’s draft is 11.4 meters. Ours is 7 feet. Another fact is that it’s beam (width) is 45.4 ft. The guy who owns it is 72 and also is a plane pilot with 22 historic planes; there is actually a float plane ON the sailboat! All of this is according to the internet. Really, that’s all I have to say about that huge boat.

So since that was a pretty short blog, I’ll tell you about my experience of the rocket explosion. Thursday night we were on a passage up to Jacksonville, from Fort Pierce, and we were passing Cape Canaveral, and there was a big fire next to a rocket that we could see (we don’t know why there was a fire), and we were all just watching; Ellis and Conrad had already gone to bed. Then, all the sudden, there was a big mushroom cloud. The bang was so delayed that we thought we might have missed it. Then the loudest KAPOW that I’d ever heard made my heart jump. Nobody got hurt, but the fire kept going for at least two hours. I was a little shaky for a while, but eventually I calmed down.

~Posy

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Chris - “Home again, Lickety-Split”

Well, we made it safely back to the USA. The Customs and Border Patrol people let us back with zero fuss, and we celebrated by placing a Walmart Order, immediately… there’s no place like home. We’ve been out of fresh fruit and vegetables for a while now, so we are excited for produce. The trip back from our time in the Bahamas ended up being a little more than a 100-mile sail, from Mangrove Cay to Fort Pierce, and it felt really good to set our anchor in American soil ...er… sand. Every time we do a larger passage, like that, I hope that it will be a super easy, chill time and that we be like, “let’s go do that again!” … But that has not been the case so far. We picked, what was supposed to be, an idyllic weather window, but still we found ourselves bobbing around in the ocean, uncomfortable and missing our relaxing island-life from the Bahamas. We arrived thinking, “I hope I don’t have to do that again,” but in reality, we are already making plans for our next trip out the inlet, and into the Atlantic. All-in-all, the crossing from the Bahamas actually was pretty smooth, but still not “fun.” I wish I was one of those people who just LOVE being out on the open sea, but so far, I am still more comfortable living in more sheltered waters. Maybe after a few more passages, I will actually get some sea-legs. We have logged nearly 800 nautical miles on this boat, but the reality is that we are still babies in the world of experienced sailors. I am pretty proud of my crew and their resilience.

Last week, I said I wanted to write about our “story” in the Bahamas… what we actually did there, but that still doesn’t feel like today’s blog. But I will tell you a bit about what I experienced there. As expected, the Bahamas are beautiful! SO beautiful. The sky is amazing, in every direction, with so many layers and colors of clouds that it defies description… and photos are a cheap replica (though my phone still has dozens of pictures of the sky on it… pictures are still better than nothing.) The days were slow and warm, and filled with good memories. We rarely spent more than a few days in each place, not because we got bored, but because there was always another island, just a few miles away, so why NOT go check it out. We moved because we were excited to move… and sometimes because the wind direction would shift, and the waves would start rolling into our previously sheltered anchorage… but we didn’t mind; the next island over was sheltered in a different angle, and was filled with new beauty to explore. We headed to the Bahamas with an unofficial “bucket-list” of things we wanted to see or experience, and with God’s blessing, we checked so many of those boxes. It felt like our prayers and our hopes from the last few years were being answered in rapid succession, and I am still adding new items to the bucket list for next time. When I wasn’t in the water or sailing to a new island, I would sit and feel my spirit thank God in ways that my words can’t express for loving us THIS much… and more. Experiencing the fruit of so much labor just made me realize that God deserves all the glory… my efforts would have fallen short if not for God’s faithful provision and leading. My response was gratitude. My response still is gratitude.

As much as we would have loved to just keep going; to postpone returning to our native country, we felt like it was time to return. My prayer is that I can continue to live in gratitude, while we pursue the next leg of this journey. I feel like I can always see the end of our resources, these days… like, “maybe this is as far as we are going,” but God keeps providing ways to keep going. I feel like there is more to come, but I guess we will see.

~Chris

Crystal - “Bahamas and Back”

I’m sitting in Ft Pierce, anchored essentially in the same spot we spent weeks waiting to get up the nerve to go to the Bahamas. We did it!! We made it there in spite of a catastrophic rigging failure. We HAD the parts to fix the issue! We lost one dive bootie, a few clothespins and our generator gave up but we basically just soaked in grace and provision and blessing and beauty for a solid month. I’m not bragging. I still haven’t had a shower since February, I think. We didn’t eat out once, made all our food from scratch and did all our dishes in tubs, scrubbed the little laundry we made by hand. It wasn’t luxury, it wasn’t perfect, but it was.

God did miracles in our preparation and provisioning- we made the sweet delivery lady giggle with how much food we bought. The money to provision came just a couple days before we left. But down to the meal we had plenty. 2 Corinthians 9:8 “And God will generously provide all you need. Then you will always have everything you need and plenty left over to share with others.” We didn’t have much opportunity to share, but we did when we could. We came back with empty fridges and freezers and I’m nearly certain God knew I’d need the shove to get me to leave. Things were just staying full until it was time and then it felt like suddenly they were low. He knew I’d have renewed that 30-day Bahama permit if we had the food on board to do it. Not right now. So anyway, He blessed the food and kept it from spoiling! Hallelujah! And He brought us to the end of our ration just in time to get us on our way.

The passage home. We were all a little nervous about another passage. Moving around has gotten much less daunting because we did it a lot in the islands. 11 different islands in 30 days and some of those we repeated on the way out so we got anchoring by hand pretty well worked out. But the bigger distances we’ve covered have been rough in the past- lost our engine on our first bigger jump then lost part of our standing rigging on the way over. We were praying this would be the one that gave us all confidence and boosted the team. The weather looked good but as we left the waves started rolling. It was a lot of action in the boat- luckily we did a better job of lashing and stowing things this time. Nothing broke. No one yacked. The stars were out and the sun came up on puffy clouds. There were dolphins. The crew performed really well in spite of not sleeping. We were able to keep the motor off for a good portion of the trip (by choice!). All in all, it was good. Funny though, in the moment, it is so easy to freak the heck out. When things are thrashing around and your body isn’t quite sure what end is up, it’s easy to want to shut down. Can’t do. I am a little ashamed at how easily I can get to a “maybe someone wants to buy our boat….or… just take it” mindset when things get a little stressful. It’s not the seasickness that gets me but the edge of how serious consequences can be out there. I see it. And I stop and breathe for a minute and realize that EVERYthing is terrifying. But I also look at what He’s done and see beauty and protection and mercy and redemption. What a world. What a world.

I’m still trying to sort through and file away all the good and growth of the past month…maybe the past 2 years really. We are looking forward and seeing more big passages ahead. Oh Lord, help us and lead us.

~Crystal

Ellis - “No Catastrophes or Throwing Up! That’s a New Personal Best for Us!”

—That’s what Mom said to me when we arrived safely back in the states this morning and it’s true! We haven’t had a great track record as far as passages go, but this last one was pleasantly uneventful. We’ll spend a few days here in Fort Pierce FL restocking supplies and making a few minor repairs and then the current plan is to head up to Jacksonville. I think it is going to be quite the challenge for us to sail up to Maryland. We will need to make sure that we are careful and safe but we’ll also need to be sure that we treat each other well. Stressful situations, sleep deprivation, and discomfort puts a strain on all of us, and I for one tend to get irritable and that’s not good for anyone. Even though doing passages still isn’t very much fun for any of us, I always thank God for how tough my family is. We could’ve never done all this if we weren’t willing to support each other and just push through. And thank you to everyone who has read the blog, reached out, and supported us in any way!

~Ellis

Conrad - “Highlights”

Over the past month we have been busy making memories and living on a boat in what felt like a month-long vacation. Mom did an amazing job of provisioning before we left the states, and we ended up with the perfect amount of food. Fresh produce doesn’t last a full month usually, so we ended up buying two tomatoes and three heads of lettuce but besides that, and drinking water, we ate completely from our fridges and freezer. We also managed to catch a couple of decent fish but does that really count as provisioning? Anyway, because of Mom’s skill at being ready for off the grid living, we were able to do some amazing things, and go to some pretty awesome places. I think that for me, the best moments were probably while snorkeling on a wreck or reef somewhere in the far east of the Abaco islands. Either that, or when the wind was dead and the water became smooth and the horizon faded until you couldn’t tell exactly where it was. When the water became glassy it was like you could see anything in the water around the boat down to a single blade of sea grass or a tiny motionless fish in its little sand cave. One such time there was a big barracuda hanging around our boat, it was pretty interesting to see it so clearly even though it was twelve feet underwater while we were out of the water. We also got a taste of buddy boating with the family of six that we met here in Fort Pierce, which is where we are now. Anyway, thanks for reading!

~Conrad

Oliver - “Bye-bye Bahamas”

This week, on Wednesday the 20th, we set out to return to our home country after a whole month in the Bahamas. This last month was awesome! It felt like we were finally, actually doing it. After more than a year of traveling, searching, praying, and working on the boat, we actually took our boat to the Bahamas. That trip wasn’t just cool because we got to go to a really cool place, and do really cool things, with really cool people, it was also amazing because of the entire journey leading up to it, and our story. To me, the Bahamas trip felt like the happy ending to part one. Unfortunately, we have to leave the Bahamas for now. I am really glad that we have a good story to tell, and that God has a plan for everything. We didn’t try fishing on the way back because the boat was rocking too much, and our license for the Bahamas had expired. Thankfully, the trip back was pretty chill with no big hiccups. We are all excited for fresh produce and tasty drinking water. Thanks for reading!

P.S. We finished the huge family painting, and are planning on hand delivering it on our way back up the coast.

~Oliver

Jasper - “Exu-co’s”

We have just arrived in our old spot, the anchorage just by the mangrove islands in the river of Fort Pierce. In other words we left the Bahamas; we have finished this trip. On our last trip to the Bahamas (before we had our own boat) we had two weeks. One on land, in an air conditioned VRBO, and the other on a catamaran exploring the waters in the Exumas. In those two weeks we came to love The Bahamas, like a lot!! So when we had the opportunity to visit the wonderful islands again but on our own boat for a whole month, it was awesome! This week I’m going to highlight some of my favorite parts from each trip.

The Exuma’s

• Remember how I said earlier that we had one week on land and one on water? Well while we were on land I enjoyed the evenings when we went on walks around the neighborhood, collecting shells and watching the sun slowly slide out of sight.

• This next one is actually probably the one I miss the most. When we got on our rental catamaran, we never liked sleeping in our cabins, so we always went up to the front of the deck and slept there under the stars. With the light breeze, it was always just the right temperature.

• The fact that there were lots of bommies (underwater coral towers) was an annoyance and a delight, first because you have to avoid them to not bash your hull, but secondly, they often were home to several different species of fish, which made them fun to snorkel around.

The Abaco’s

• We sailed there all by ourselves! Meaning we went on our own boat on our own time, only one family on board. Also that means we have done our first Atlantic crossing!(partial)

• We were able to dive on several different types of wrecks, such as: sailboats, barges, even an airplane!

• Also there are tons of octopi and sharks around! The sharks that we have seen normally stick pretty close to shore and are pretty easy to see. The octopi are just as easy to spot, all you have to do is snorkel around little rock islands until you find a pile of cleaned clam shells. Next you find a hole nearby, there you have it. Hopefully at least.

And the best of both

• The best part of both trips was the fact that I was making memories. Memories of, and with, my family. It has been great to meet new people to hang out with too. We have been super blessed to have a journey like this!!!

Well that is all I’ve got time for. See you next time!

~Jasper

Posy - “Top 7 Anchorages”

Since we left the Bahamas on Wednesday I decided I would write about my favorite anchorages that we stayed at (on this trip that is). But it is hard to decide which one is my favorite, so I’m just going to list the ones I think are the best, and why I think they are so good. Number 1: Powell Cay (pronounced key). The place was pretty cool, we had a beach fire with our friends and ate s’mores. Number 2: Allen’s Pensacola Cay. It’s beautiful to sail around, and we caught a large fish called a Cubera Snapper, though it wasn’t a great place to stay because of the waves. Number 3: Nunjack Cay. That place has lots of cool reef Islands you can snorkel on. The islands were covered in coral and octopus. There also was a little bay that had lots of friendly sharks and stingrays. Number 4: Wood Cay was nice and calm. It also had a pretty island near it but we couldn’t get on it because of how rocky it was. But it had really clear water. Number 5: little Abaco had really neat places to snorkel, little rocks that were lodged into the ground that had turned into reefs, and we saw a big barracuda. It was also a cool spot to walk on and we saw our first octopus. It was my favorite. Number 6: No Name Cay. There was a cool lagoon full of ginormous sea stars, but on the downside, there was lots of pigs and we still have flies on our boat from them. Number 7: Great Sale Cay. There was a cool coral beach with a lot of fish swimming beside it. There were also two big bull sharks. It was a cool snorkel spot but kind of cold when we were in the water. Anyway, that’s all I got for you.

~Posy

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Chris – “30 days already??”

We are in our final week in the Bahamas, at least, for this trip, and I’m not going to lie… I don’t really want to leave. It seems like it is time to go. Our 30-day permit is expiring, our food stores are nearing depletion, and our boat could use some maintenance/ repair time… but I am not tired of cruising here. I could just keep on going, I think.

Before we started living aboard full-time, I would hear full-time sailors say that sailing life was so much work, and so many hard things, but that the good parts, made it all worth it. I always secretly thought that they were just dramatizing things to make themselves feel better about how amazing their lives were, sailing around beautiful anchorages, and dodging a normal work/life balance, but it turns out, they were speaking the truth. I am hungry for more of this, and I am already scheming about how we can get back to it as soon as possible, and to do it for longer. But I am dreading the work that it will take to get back to it. Dreading to think about how “deep” the maintenance and repairs might have to go on this boat. Do we need to pull the boat out of the water again? If so, for how long, and where? Do I need to hire a welder? A rigger? Both? Do I have the energy, and my crew’s blessing to tackle what needs to be done?

As you can see, it is easy for me to spiral a little bit, but I have been doing my best not to. Not really a helpful process, and it only robs me of my joy, here in the Bahamas, with my family, doing what we love doing. And when I pray about what is coming next, I only feel God telling me to look around and see His goodness, and the beauty that He created, around me. He tells me to watch my children delight in the water, and the wildlife, and delight in their own lives, as they grow and test their own limits. That IS a good pastime, and it fills me with joy to know that is what God wants me to be doing with my time.

So here I sit, writing this blog, waiting for the tide to come in a little bit more, so we can leave the anchorage we are at, currently, and move to a new one. We will spend another night, looking at the amazing sunset, star-display, and sunrise. It is a good life, and I get to live it for a few more days! Thank God.

Our first stop, when we head back to the States, is going to be Fort Pierce, again. There we are going to restock the boat, and look for a good opening to head further North. I am interested to see how different it is crossing the Gulf Stream, going West and North… going with the current, instead of fighting against it. We are hoping we can hit a favorable weather window that will give us a tail-wind, as well. If you think of it, pray for a great weather window to open for us, and for a trouble-free crossing. We don’t have a good track record with offshore passages, at this point, and I am hoping the we can get some positive experiences under our belt to keep my crew from deciding that offshore is just going to always suck.

I have a log book of all the places we have anchored, and where we have traveled to, in the Bahamas, but I hope to organize a better “story” of our time and adventures here, before the memories fade too much. It has been a great time, and we are determined to soak up as much of this goodness as we can, until it is time for us to leave.

~Chris

Crystal - “Shared Misery”

“There are no bonds so strong as those which are formed by suffering together.” Harriet Jacobs wrote these words in 1861 and there has been scientific research done that proves its validity. Psychological and even neurological change happens when people experience hardship together. We build almost instant bonds with people who we endure with. Illness, natural disaster, loss, hardship…even really intense workouts will build you bridges to strangers in a hurry. The military intentionally puts their recruits through such for the sake of comradery and loyalty amongst the squads. We all try to replicate these bonds through stories and end up one upping the other guy instead of building the bridge. Sailors are exceptional at bonding over the awful. Everyone wants to tell you about “the time they lost their ______ and the weather was _____ and so and so broke the _____ and it cost $.” We do it too. I’ve done it here! But just this morning, I was thinking about what we’ve learned in our time here, in paradise. It hasn’t been all perfect and rosy but we have developed this way of enduring with eyes up. God has brought us a long way. He’s spent a lot of time chipping away at bad attitudes and fear, maybe mostly my own. Enduring hard stuff together does make strong bonds- but doing it with a collective hope and some lighthearted banter definitely makes it more fun and probably more productive. I always come back to how great my family is…but that’s what I’m experiencing.

And paradise IS mostly perfect and rosy…We are so blown away at this beautiful place. So many of our dreams come true. So much glory on display. So much beauty that I can forget about some of the things that could be the one uppers.

Do you have a tribe to suffer and rejoice with? How can you build better bridges instead of trying to come out on top?

1 Corinthians 1:10-“I appeal to you, dear brothers and sisters, by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, to live in harmony with each other. Let there be no divisions in the church. Rather, be of one mind, united in thought and purpose.” - We are supposed to work at living in peace and harmony, UNdivided.

I’m not the best at building bridges or even at bringing the lighter comedic relief in tense moments, but I’d like to get better.

PS. Conrad is officially a high school graduate! We are super proud of his hard work over the years. The last two have been even more unconventional than the first 11 (including K). So excited for him and so grateful we get to keep him for now! We got to take some pretty epic graduation pics this week. If you’d like an announcement and we don’t have your info- get it to us! We can’t really do a typical grad party but we want to celebrate him well!

~Crystal

Ellis - “Eleven Hundred Miles”
Now that we’ve turned back west, and are working through (probably) our last week here in the Bahamas, I’ve been thinking about what’s next. I’m going to miss the clean water. The water’s clarity has lived up to its reputation. It’s not only beautiful and fun to swim in, but it also makes anchoring and moving around so much easier and safer just because you can see what you’re doing. Snorkeling has also been wonderful, but heading up north where the water is dirty and cold, I think I’m going to miss bathing more. All the wildlife, eating fresh fish we caught, no projects we have to work on, no crowded anchorages—there have been a lot of lovely things here but I haven’t settled in. God has blessed us with provisions in plenty but even so, our fridges and freezer are starting to feel a little roomy. I’m also looking forward to revisiting some more familiar places. I think it’ll be fun to reconnect with friends we’ve made along the way. It’s come up a few times recently in conversation but we’ve realized that we’re not actually very good sailors! Ironically, our favorite parts of living on a boat are just hanging out at anchorage and getting together with familiar people—when it comes to actually moving the boat around and sailing, we all tend to drag our feet a bit. That being said, we have upwards of 1,100 miles to travel between here and our eventual, planned destination of Annapolis, Maryland, so I hope we can learn to enjoy it soon!

~Ellis

Conrad - “We’re a sailboat again”

This week we have been making our way back west, though pretty slowly. We’ve got some longer passages coming up since we are getting close to the end of the Abaco islands and the spots that are good anchorages are fewer and farther in-between. We have basically been operating as a big, deep-drafted, motor boat so far, but this past week we got our front stay and furler fixed, and now we can start sailing again. In fact this Monday we sailed up to Spanish Cay from Nunjack Cay which was around twelve nautical miles. We didn’t get the main sail up because it’s the hardest one to handle but we got the jib and the mizen up and with the motor off managed up to four knots of speed in light wind. Now that we have the sails ready, I think that we will use them a lot more for getting back to the states next week. The wind is usually going north and west this time of year which makes sailing into the Bahamas hard but coming back easy. Anyway during our sailing passage this week, we tried trolling for fish but only ended up catching a big barracuda and a little checkered pufferfish. It’s too bad you can’t eat barracuda, because that one would have been a great size, unfortunately they have a lot of mercury, and often carry ciguatera, which is not very pleasant I am told. Since then we have done a few smaller passages but we haven’t gotten the sails up again.

Thanks for reading.

~Conrad

Oliver - “To paint or to swim… that is the question”

Since we left Florida, I haven’t had a whole lot of time or motivation to paint. It is usually hot and humid, so you end up just wanting to go jump in the water instead. But during our passage from Manjack Cay to Spanish Cay, me and mom did some watercolors. That was one of my worst paintings in a long time. The reason being that I didn’t have a plan when I started, and I haven’t painted in too long. That experience inspired me to start practicing more. We are still working on that huge family painting for our friend in Jacksonville, and I started an acrylic painting of a red-eyed tree frog. I am going to try to be more consistent.

Other than that, we have done a bunch of snorkeling. Close encounters with octopus, stingrays, sharks, barracuda, pufferfish, etc. We also got to actually sail from one island to another. On our most recent passage we even caught a 15 pound Cubera snapper. We had just pulled anchor and prayed that we would catch a good fish to eat. Posy and Jasper wanted to let out the trolling lines, and as Jasper started letting it out, the rod bent over and the line went out crazy fast. Unfortunately, the reel got really tangled so I had to wrap the line around a chunk of bamboo that we had found on the beach. It was kinda like a really slow hand reel, and by the time we got the fish on board, we had been dragging it for a long time, and it wasn’t fighting very hard anymore. We ate it that night with rice and Old Bay. It was very good! It tasted a little bit like salmon, (So far, salmon is my personal favorite). I’m hoping to catch a different kind of fish on our next passage. Have a great week!

~Oliver

Jasper - “Mother’s Day”

This past weekend was Mother’s Day. Many of you know this already and you might be wondering why I said this simple statement? Well, this week we were extremely lucky to honor our mother, who is amazingly talented, and has taken care of us super well. You know her by Crystal, but we know her as Awesome Cook, Kind Mom, Loving Hugger, Helpful doctor, Smart, Strong, always smiling, mother with a great laugh. That morning I woke up and I made a splendid (or so I think) Mother’s Day card, then I got up and gave my mother a hug and told her “Happy Mother’s Day”. Throughout the day we played cards with her, and swam with her, and dad even cooked all of the meals. That night we feasted on some delicious burgers and watched a movie with cookies. But though that was the end of the day, we still have two more special days coming up… me and mom’s birthdays! Well that’s all for this week. See ya’ll later.

~Jasper

Posy - “Fish On!”

Since we have been in the Bahamas, I’ve learned a lot about fishing. Oli has been teaching me what fish are edible in the Bahamas. We have both done a little bit of research as well. Still the only things we have caught on this trip are: four barracudas, three bar jacks, two lizard fish, two tuna, one cubera snapper, and a puffer fish. All four barracuda were pretty large; the second one was so big it ripped a big hole in our net and wriggled its way out. So, with the third barracuda, we put it on the deck instead of putting it in our other unbroken net. So far, we have only kept one of the bar jacks, that had a barracuda bite mark on it, and the cubera snapper, but that’s alright. Bar jack is supposedly clean and buttery tasting, and the snapper tasted pretty good. Our dream fish to catch is a mahi-mahi, and then a wahoo. Mahi like fast moving lures that are pink and blue, or at least that’s what the internet says. Wahoo kinda look like barracuda. I’m not sure what types of lures they like, but we’ve seen two wahoo. In the Bahamas we’ve seen lots of snapper. This past week we caught and ate the cubera, which is a type of snapper. But the other types of snapper we have seen were too small to eat. Blue striped grunts are also another common species, but also have been too small to make a good meal for us. There has also been some pretty big grouper that we have seen while spear-fishing, but they are fast so we haven’t got any yet. That’s all I have for you today.

~Posy

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Chris – “Taste and See”

The moon put on quite the show when it was full last week. It was HUGE, orange, and played with the clouds like a second sunset. Since then, it is slowly ebbing away a little bit more each night. The sky gets a little bit darker, and the stars grow a little bit brighter. The water sitting underneath that darkness, sparkles with bioluminescence and life. Every time I step out under that display of stellar beauty I am humbled, and grateful! Daily life has been a little bit the same. Everyday, my head feels a little bit clearer, and the beauty around me feels more and more evident. I was SO TIRED of trying to get here. So tired of trying to live like THIS, on our boat, and failing. It is healing and encouraging to realize that God has brought us through it all, and we are actually here. Things still break, even in paradise, but, since there are not really any parts to be had where we are, we just adapt to the new “configuration” of our boat and we go swimming again. The slowness, and the richness of each day of exploration are food to my hope and my joy. My family is drinking in the goodness, and we are thankful. We have seen some of the best snorkeling that I have ever experienced, just in the last two days. Astounding numbers of fish, all congregating around colorful clumps of coral and rock. I have watched my children go from “fairly acquainted” with swimming, to being strong swimmers. Practice really does pay off, and they are getting a lot of practice.

Everything that catches my eye is driving me to praise God for His goodness. Praise Him for the beauty of creation. Praise Him for His love for us… He knows what brings us joy and He leads us into those things, in abundance. Every time I open the Bible to read, scriptures confirm the songs of thanks in my heart.

Psalms 31:19 “How great is the goodness You have stored up for those who fear You. You Lavish it on those who come to You for protection, blessing them before the watching world.”

That’s how I feel, blessing being “Lavished” on me. And that is how I see you (reader), and everyone else that sees us on social media, or in person; God is blessing us “before the watching world” to show everyone how good He is. It is a good life to live.

We have been tempted, and still are tempted, to extend our stay in the Bahamas for another month, but for the time being, we are just soaking up the good days that we are having. There are big boat-projects looming on our horizon that I do not have the motivation to want to tackle, but for now, God says, “taste and see that I am good,” and I intend to do that with my whole heart.

Cameras do not do a good enough job capturing creation to really do it justice, but I hope the pictures that we include can help you see the joy that we have in this part of the adventure!

~Chris

Crystal - “I’m getting used to this….”

If I could just convince some of our favorite people to come be here, I don’t know that I’d be all that interested in leaving. I know this is not sustainable but I love this place. My skin would look 89 years old by next season but I love the salt and sun. I love the beautiful display of divine artistry at every angle. There’s a tinge of danger and expedition everywhere too. The water comes in as many shades of turquoise as currents of cool and warm. There’s a new island to explore every morning, even if we haven’t moved. The ocean changes and flexes and stretches and heaves and relaxes. It is a constant display of creation evolving. God is an artist and so much of the beauty is just for beauty’s sake.

Before we left Ft. Pierce, we had all but given up on making it here this season because the money wasn’t there. Then it was. We had enough for provisions of food and fuel and to pay for permits and visas. Not much more but we took the leap feeling God encouraging us to trust him. I prayed over every list and purchase we made to stock up and I’m telling you, God has blessed us so incredibly. Once we got here, He provided more than we expected. I know that we worked really hard for this, we’ve given up a lot…but this experience has me feeling so undeserving. I keep wanting to get up before the sun to stretch the hours of experience but the days have been so full that gravity wins that battle of will in the morning. Still, I have seen the sun rise and set most days and there is something different here; something awe-full, the layers, the colors, the intensity of it.

I realized that as much as I love this place, I know almost nothing about the people. In the last year and a half of travel and transit, the people have been the highlight….and we haven’t engaged these people really at all. We don’t eat out, we aren’t doing the touristy tours and we just haven’t really gotten into the towns. Now our time is getting short and I’m wondering how can we appreciate all the goodness? I don’t think we can. I think there may be more in store. I don’t know what’s in store. I know I’m really grateful for all that God has done in us to get us here and I’m praising him already for writing us a good story moving forward.

Without saying too much, I also want to share that God has been making it very clear that the enemy wants to steal our joy and peace with comparison and fear and he will twist and jab at any little opening you give him. Receive God’s good story for you. Don’t look around with hungry eyes. As Chris said this week “I want to be a hype friend” not hung up on other people’s wins because we feel like we aren’t winning in the same ways. When I live in my moment, I am grateful for each of them. But I can quickly forget and get lost in frustration when I start trying to match my story to someone else’s. Live your moments. Call out your blessings.

Sending our love and gratitude for all the prayers and support that have gotten us here.

~Crystal

Ellis - “Introducing “MuFaBa” … (Mullen Family Band)”

Earlier this year for music “class” we gave ourselves an assignment where everyone was supposed to come up with lyrics for a song and then put the song into a hat for someone else to randomly draw out. Then, everybody was supposed to come up with chords and music for the lyrics that they got while not knowing who wrote their song. It was a fun exercise and even though most of the songs didn’t stick with us for long, we’ve fallen in love with one of them and it’s become a favorite for us to play. Earlier this week we posted a video of us playing this song. With us all sitting in a little circle and the phone and its little, tiny microphone duck-taped to the ceiling, we knew it wasn’t going to be a “perfect” recording, but I thought it actually sounded pretty good all things considered. I really like the idea of having a family band and I hope that this is the first of many songs that we make and play. It’s not really everyone’s dream though-no names mentioned! I’m super happy that everyone is practicing and contributing and I don’t want push anyone too hard, but I am far from satisfied! I’ve got plenty to work on and practice myself. Excluding the family band, I’ve nearly always been the least skilled person in all the groups I’ve played in. I don’t need, or necessarily even want, to be the most talented person in the group, but I hate not being able to keep up. It could be that that feeling never goes away though, in which case I would need to learn how to be content, but I think it’s a good thing to always work on getting better. But, to anyone who has ever wanted to learn an instrument but has never gotten around to it because it feels insurmountable, you just have to start! Sure it takes some work, and a lot of time, but even if you take it slow, just a little practice every day, I promise progress will come!

You can go watch the video of our song HERE. Its a song about our ocean passage between St Augustine, and Fort Pierce… the one where we lost our engine!

~Ellis

Conrad - “Reefs and Wrecks”

We are wrapping up our third week in the Bahamas. At times it feels like we just got here and time is flying super fast, but we have also done a lot and sometimes it feels like we’ve been here a month already. Fortunately we still have about a week and a half. We started making our way back in the direction we came from, but we have been staying in cool spots for a few days before moving on. We are currently back to Manjack Cay, but in a different anchorage and the snorkeling here is some of the best so far. Of course every spot has something, but this spot seems more geared towards us. Just today, we found a bunch of octopuses, and yesterday we swam around a really cool little reef island with a lot of marine diversity. One of the cool parts about reefs, and reef Islands is that often they are more than two hundred yards away from the shore which makes them acceptable spots for spear fishing. It’s strangely difficult to find fish for spearing that far away from shore, fish like to gather around and under things and away from shore there is almost nothing but sand and sea grass. The only times you can really find fish out there is if you can find a rare rock or coral, or (more commonly) a man made reef. That is, any heavy chunk of trash that has been sunk. We have explored a boat wreck, a car wreck, an outboard motor graveyard, a construction barge wreck, and lots of other smaller things. It’s a little bit saddening to see all that trash that has been dumped into the ocean but it’s nice to see that not all of the trash that gets dumped in the ocean is only hurting the environment. Unfortunately the stuff that floats doesn’t get used and just ends up in piles on the beach.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

~Conrad

Oliver - “Bucket List”

I am writing this blog from a hammock on the back of our boat (rough life, right?). We are motoring our way back to Manjack Cay. But this time we are headed towards Florida instead of away. With only 12 days left in the Bahamas, we need to get closer to Florida again. But it feels a little bit too soon. We have done really cool things while we’ve been here and I feel like we still have some cool things to do. We have crossed off a bunch of bucket list items. But, there are some that I would still like to do. We have seen and swam with sharks, turtles, stingrays, crabs, lobsters, octopuses, and fish of all kinds. We have buddy-boated, and had a beach fire with friends. We ate fresh coconuts, and caught a few fish. We took our boat to the Bahamas and swam in the beautiful water. We have snorkeled on shipwrecks, car wrecks, an outboard motor graveyard, and seen a sunken motorcycle, some sinks and a few other little artificial reefs. But we haven’t sailed since we’ve been in the Bahamas, there’s almost always been a headwind. We haven’t caught a Mahi-mahi yet, which has been a goal since we did our first charter in 2022. We haven’t speared or eaten any fish. And we also haven’t really met anyone in the Bahamas. I am sure that there are other experiences and memories that would be even better than these. Thanks for reading. Bye!

~Oliver

Jasper - “Lobsters and Lagoons”

I’m going to start this blog off by asking a question: how many starfish have you seen that are a foot in diameter? In this week alone we have held dozens of them! We found most of them in a lagoon that we went to this past Tuesday with our friends (Posy wrote about them this week). We had just finished looking at the local wild pigs and we were all ready to swim around so we decided to see what the neighboring lagoon looked like. Our friends (who, sadly, were leaving the next day) came with us. The water is constantly surprising us with how stinking clear it is. You could see the starfish at the bottom in 10 feet of water easily. As we went deeper into the lagoon, there began to be more and more “upside-down Jellyfish” as we call them which can sting you even if you don’t touch them. We learned this from the internet not from experience. After a little while, I got tired of swimming so I got on one of our smaller paddleboards and used the double-sided paddle to zoom around. Unfortunately it was starting to look like it would rain so our friends decided to head back to their boat. We stayed for a little while and then headed back. The next day, Wednesday, we were swimming just off of the boat when Ellis and Oli came over and said that they had found a clearing with a bunch of sunken outboard engines scattered throughout it. So a few minutes later, we all went over. It was 10-15 feet deep, but again you could see clearly. There were spiny lobsters, lionfish, spade fish, and tons of different tiny fish. Both occasions were amazing. Full of life. There were things that would make any 12 year old gasp in awe and delight. And guess what! We still have two more weeks left in the Bahamas. Join us next time as we continue our journey in the clear water country.

~Jasper

Posy - “Goodbye to our Buddy-boat”

We met a family of six on a catamaran and became pretty good friends with them. We started buddy boating with them when we got into the Bahamas, our friendship has grown since. Their second oldest called Jasper his “bestie”, they are about the same age. Anyway, we have been chasing them deeper into the Bahamas, but we have a thirty day limit here so we are planning on heading back to the states, but they are heading further south. So we had to say goodbye on Tuesday. So we went over to their boat for the last hangout that we would have in a while. So me, Jasper, and the younger three boys went up to the front of the boat and played a game called heads down-thumbs up, which was fun, but got boring eventually. So we played freeze tag, but that got boring too, so we played ghost in the graveyard but Mom said to stop running so we did a game where we played basically hide and seek where the seeker couldn't move and he had to spot us. We played that for a while but then went inside to play apples to apples with the others. The dad of the other family won, hard! It was pretty late so we said goodbye, and got hugs and left. The next day we saw them off. That is all, see you next week.

~Posy

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Chris – “We have arrived!”

It is crazy to think that it has been nearly two weeks since we arrived in the Bahamas. We have done, and seen, so much that it feels like it would be difficult to give a detailed account here in this blog. I will try to move fast though.

Our crossing was stressful… again. We were motoring into the wind, and against the current, which made for very slow progress. We left around 9:00am on Saturday, from Fort Pierce, Florida. At around midnight, we noticed that our alternator belt really loose, and had to hoist our headsail, to keep us steady while I re-tensioned the belt. At about 2:00am that night, in the middle of the Gulf Stream (a strong ocean current that runs South to North, off the East Coast of the US), we experienced a serious rigging failure. The forestay, which is a cable that supports the front of our main mast, and also holds our headsail, became slack, as the support cable below the deck, called a bobstay, broke loose. The headsail has a furler, which the sail rolls up on when we want to take the sail down, but without the tension of the bobstay below, the whole furler assembly was bouncing up and down, bending hardware, and threatening to come completely loose, which would turn our furler into a terrifying wrecking ball, and potentially cause our main mast to collapse. On top of that, without tension on the furler, it was incredibly difficult to roll up the sail, because the pressure of the sail was causing the furler to bow out of shape. We finally managed to wrestle the sail back on to the furler, and Ellis and I lashed the forestay and furler down to the toe rail at the front of the boat. We carefully motored ahead. I laid down to try to get some rest, and 10 minutes later, our engine temperature alarm went off! I shut the engine down, and went below to try to figure out what had happened. The alternator belt had completely snapped this time. I replaced the belt with a spare, and we motored the resto of the way in, without issue. We anchored outside of the Bahamas Customs office in West End, at 11:00am on Sunday. We were able to make repairs to our bobstay, with spare parts that we had on board, and while it doesn’t look any prettier than it did before we left Florida, it is stable again, and holding our mast up like it should.

Our customs check-in to the Bahamas went really smoothly, and we were immediately rewarded with a beautiful, calm night at Wood Cay, just North of West End.

The next day we hurried to get into the shallow, sheltered water the Little Bahama Bank, because weather was coming in. We made it as far as Mangrove Cay, soaked from rain, just before the heavy winds started. We spent the next day, rolling in 3’ waves, but safe and sound in our floaty home. We spent another windy day motoring into the wind to the shelter of Great Sale Cay, and then settled in to wait for good weather. This is where we finally began to experience the real Bahamas life.

Since Great Sale Cay, we have motored less, swam a lot more, and seen so much beauty and wildlife. We have shared quiet meals, beautiful sunsets and sunrises, and we have been truly revived. Praise God! We are so blessed, and thankful, for all these good times, after being led through so much hard work to get here.

Our next big blessing has come in the form or friendship. We caught up to our friends that we met in Fort Pierce. This family, from Texas, has been a catalyst for getting us to finally pull the trigger, and come here to the Bahamas, and they continue to be an encouragement, and inspiration for us. Plus, we really enjoy hanging out with them. We have shared beach fires, meals, drinks, and games together, and we have also explored some of the most beautiful spaces together. Between our two boats, there are nine kids… youth, I guess is more appropriate, since two of mine are technically adults… 8 boys, and one little Posy (our daughter). We made an impression everywhere we go, and there is no shortage of shenanigans happening, at any given moment. Beautiful chaos, after all that grit.

God has done it! There have been so many times, since we left Colorado, that I felt like, “that was it… I think we are done trying.” But God has strengthened us each-and-every time, and now we are here. We have come to the type of place that we hoped we could get to, on our boat. I am full of praise and thanks, each day, as we get to stop “trying” so much, and we get to start “doing.”

So many people, all of you, have encouraged us, and celebrated with us, and I want to genuinely say, “Thank you.” We appreciate every bit of love. Let us know if we can pray for you, in anyway. We would love to hear from you.

PS: There’s only so many photos, and videos, we can share here. If you want to see more images of what we are doing, you can look us up on Instagram, or Facebook, where there will be a little more. I’ll post those links below. Thanks.

Facebook Link Instagram Link

~Chris

Crystal - “ We’re LIVING in the Bahamas”

Chris joked the other day about how we could just buy the little house on the shore and live in the Bahamas. Posy looked at him confused and said “We have a home and we DO live in the Bahamas”. It’s interesting, the clarity that kids can bestow without even meaning to. She’s right. This is home. It’s temporary and it’s not stationary…but it’s home. I’m befuddled by my ability to make this paradise feel common. This place is so full of wonder and stunning creation and I can still get ruffled by the clock or “what are we going to eat for dinner?” Gratefully, provisions are holding nicely and no one timeline here is governed by a clock. If anything, schedule is determined by the weather, which is unpredictable. So I am learning some more from this boat life- this time, about how circumstances have little to do with how a person is. I know without a doubt that my peace is a gift and our provision, covering, protection, blessing is all straight from the Lord- I still have to choose it. When I coast, the enemy is quick to jump in and start poking at anything that gives.

We have been here for nearly 2 weeks and checked so many boxes! We have been so dang blessed. I can’t express how much I am hoping that all this sticks. I don’t feel like we are processing it all in real time- there’s so much to savor. Our horizons are expanding, the depth of our appreciation for all we have and all the preparation that has brought us here, is spreading.

Parts of me sometimes feel proud of what we’ve done but when I really take a look I realize how much it was all God’s hand. He directed our steps on paths we’d never have had the foresight to take. He taught us things in “classrooms” that seemingly had nothing to do sailing. He provided timelines we never would have signed off on- but gave us what we needed and taught us how to be creative in situations where we’d have settled for an easier way if we had more money to throw at it. He saw all that before we had any idea of what we were doing- we still don’t, but I think I’m starting to see what He’s already done more clearly.

I don’t know what’s next. But I hope that I can carry the lessons I’m learning. I pray that God seals them in our hearts and builds them into our foundation. I hope that you can read about choosing and about God’s goodness in hard preparation and times that feel needy and know that He’s good and that He knows what He’s doing. I hope that today, you choose to see whatever beauty surrounds you. It may not be the Bahamas but just know that no matter where you are, complaining is possible but, so also, is reveling in what’s good.

My highlight reel:

-the first day, after a rough night of passage, pulling into pristine waters, greeted by Bahamian dolphins at the customs anchorage

-clear, beautiful, warm, water teeming with life

-the clouds here are epically beautiful! So many layers and so much depth and color.

-seeing my kids in the water- sometimes it stresses me out A LOT because there are also sharks! But I love how much they love just being in the water, they don’t need anything but a snorkel-mask to enjoy it.

-biggest crab I’ve seen nestled in a coral wall

-first octopus!!!!

-sting rays and sharks begging like puppies for handouts

-seeing the 5-6 foot bull shark swim by our boat 20-30 feet off the beam( where we had been swimming the previous day) even though it made me anxious about being in the water. He had no interest in us, just cruising by.

-watching the nearly full moon set in the west as the sun rose in the east this morning, enveloped by those glorious colors above and below

-meeting people- many that we have a lot in common with and at the same time are so extremely different from- appreciating the dichotomy and unity that the sea life brings

-having Starlink and connectivity has been really nice- I can’t imagine not having communication and the ease of technology.

-getting to do it all with my crew- I am so grateful to call them mine.

~Crystal

Ellis - “Livin’ the Dream”

The other day we were paddle boarding down a mangrove river that was crystal clear and teeming with sea turtles, huge sting rays, and thousands of funny upside-down jellyfish. . . but I was bored. I told Oli so and he said, “uh oh, I guess we’re getting pretty hard to entertain if this doesn’t do the trick.” It made me think, it did sound bad; in my defense, we had been in the sun, going hard all day and I was burnt out, but we were basically living “the dream” and I didn’t want to sound ungrateful. Don’t get me wrong, the Bahamas have been amazing. The water and wildlife have both lived up to our expectations and we’ve had tons of fun enjoying both. But the truth is, sometimes I like it better when we stay home and entertain ourselves with art, music, and each other and just chill. As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that they’re both good things that we’ve been blessed with, and that I should just be grateful and focus on being in the moment that I’m in. It’s interesting, how easy it can be for us to miss the good things we have by wanting, or expecting, something else.

~Ellis

Conrad - “Island Hopping”

It’s been a little bit over one and a half weeks since we made it to the Bahamas. In that time we have anchored in eight different places. Prior to our visit in the Bahamas, we would usually stay in an area for at least a week or a month, but recently we’ve been moving almost every other day. Sometimes we stay in a spot longer, sometimes shorter but overall we are moving much more frequently. We actually seemed to move more frequently when the weather wasn’t great because we couldn’t swim as much then. We had a bit of bad weather earlier on, but since then it’s been pretty amazing, it’s only just starting to get choppy again. The wind is the main thing that separates acceptable weather from bad weather. When the wind picks up the waves get rougher, and then it’s not only uncomfortable, but the water gets all cloudy with disturbed sand and sediment. Fortunately, if we are able to find good spots to anchor, we can be mostly sheltered from the wind and almost entirely sheltered from the waves.

Overall our passages have been pretty comfortable. After our long passage from Fort Pierce to West End, our front stay and furler have been in a slight state of disrepair, and we need to do a little bit of work before we can sail again. That being said, we have really only been motoring in the Bahamas so far. I don’t think fixing the furler would be too difficult, but the wind hasn’t been good for sailing anyway and we are just enjoying our time swimming, and hanging out with friends. Despite having no operational sails we have made it pretty far with just the engine. We are currently near the eastern edge of the northern most group of islands in the Bahamas. We are anchored by Green Turtle Cay right now.

It’s been an amazing couple of weeks and the Bahamas do not disappoint, though not everything has been as expected. So far my favorite thing in the Bahamas (besides my family) is probably just time spent under water, especially when the water is about ten feet deep so that you can dive down freely but still see and interact with the seafloor.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

~Conrad

Oliver - “Fishing is reel!”

When we were in Florida, anyone over the age of 16 needed a license to go fishing. I’m 15 and we didn’t have a license, so I became the main fishing guy. Now, in the Bahamas, we have a boat license, which means that anyone on the boat can fish. Even so, I am still the guy that initiates fishing and puts out lines while trolling. In Florida, I started to think that fishing was pretty much made up. I prefer catching over fishing. But catching catfish was getting boring. Now, we’ve caught 7 fish since we left Fort Pierce. The first was a 14 inch Bigeye Tuna, we threw that one back in, but regretted it later. A 3-foot Great Barracuda, that one had cool teeth, but due to mercury poisoning and ciguatera, we released that one too. Posy caught a little lizardfish while casting, we tried to use it as live-bait, but it didn’t work. Then we caught another lizardfish while trolling in between islands, they are a small but aggressive species that hide on the bottom. We’ve also caught three different Bar-jacks, we kept the biggest one, but we haven’t tasted it yet. It was about twelve inches long, we probably wouldn’t have kept it. But while we were reeling it in, a Barracuda kept attacking it. So it wouldn’t have made it even if we released it. Anyway, the water here is AMAZING!!!

Snorkeling is way more fun when you can see through the water instead of seeing the water itself. Have a great week!

~Oliver

Jasper - “Flying Disks At Dark”

This week, we have done many new things in this wonderful place called the Bahamas, and for the record, this place is totally beautiful and I am loving it!!! This week I’m going to talk about one thing, in specific, but beforehand, here are some of the other amazing things we experienced, some of which I expect you will have already read about in the other parts of this blog: underwater ship-wreck exploration, sharks, turtles, stingrays, an octopus, and eating fresh coconuts!!! But the thing I’m going to tell you about is the night we had a beach fire.

Remember our last typed blog where I wrote about our friends? Well they actually came to the Bahamas as well, so we have been buddy-boating, or in other words, we have been following each other around around the Bahamas, seeing new things together. Anyway, last Monday we wanted to get together again, so we decided to go to the beach and have a beach fire. You know how in this blog I said that this was going to be about the beach fire? Well it is not really about that, since I wasn’t by the fire very much, it is about the “flying disks” or… frisbee!

I’ve never been very bad at frisbee, just never really good either. But, whenever I play I have fun, so I joined in the game they were playing quickly. It turned out that they were playing a combination of football and frisbee, called ultimate frisbee. Both teams are trying to get touchdowns, like football, but unlike football, once you catch the “ball” you have to stay still. So only passes. If you drop the frisbee, then it’s the other team’s turn to gain yards. Well anyway, while we played I improved my techniques a lot; enough to get the score to 4-4 game point. But at the last second, the other team caught an incredible pass and won the game. Since we were so exhausted, we didn’t even feel that sad at losing. Anyhow, that is my tale of the beach frisbee game, of sweat and large spiders*. See you next time.

*Oh yeah, there were large spiders all over the sand. Fun, am I right?

~Jasper

Posy - “Swimming with sharks”

These past few weeks have been crazy. Lots of moving, but no overnight passages since the one to the Bahamas. Beside moving we have done a lot of snorkeling. It’s extra fun because you can see twenty feet down, seriously you can see the bottom in detail. Plus in the rivers we stayed at, me and Jasper couldn’t take of our life jackets because of the current but here in the Bahamas it’s like it’s always slack tide. So now we swim on our own. Also we saw our first octopus, he was hiding behind a swirl-ey shell. We found pretty cool rocks lodged in the sand. Most of the rock bottom had become reefs. (Real rocks not mud blobs like in Florida.) Speaking of rocks we found an underwater cave with a nurse shark sleeping in it. Then we went with our buddy boat friends to a shore that had lemon and nurse shark’s swimming all over. Even huge stingrays were there. The stingrays would come up to you and tickle your feet with their wings and then they would lift their heads expecting food. So that is all, have a great day.

~Posy

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Our trip to the Bahamas back in 22’ was a huge inspiration for this whole adventure of ours, so it is an amazing, full-circle, feeling to be back here on our own boat! Since we left Fort Pierce, Fl on Saturday the 18th, there have been so many things to see and do so we thought it’d be fun to put together a video-blog for this week. We hope you like it!

Thank you all for the prayers, encouragement, and support, we love you all! God has protected us, and blessed the trip so far! See you next week.

-Ellis

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Chris – “Is it Friday Already?”

I have hauled SO Many loads of stuff with our dinghy this week. That little boat has been earning it’s keep, for sure. Tomorrow (Saturday), we are planning to be on our way to the Bahamas! Yes, Lord willing, we are actually doing it. In preparation, we have provisioned our boat with many things this week; mostly consumables like water, diesel, and food. We have been really busy doing this prep work, and I have not really made time to write about things, so this will likely be a short blog post from me. We spent a lot of the week just trying to decide if we were going to make an attempt at going to the Bahamas, so it felt like a lot of the week slipped by in a holding pattern. Now, I am tired, and I still have a to-do list that needs my attention before we can pull anchor and head out the inlet, but it feels good to be headed in a direction. There have been so many people that have reached out to encourage us to get our butts over to the islands, and I thank you all for your encouragement. We hope to have new blog-fodder for this coming week, with all the newness of traveling to a new area. Fort Pierce has been a really good (albeit longer than planned) stop-over, but I can feel our time here drawing to a close. I am excited to see what is in store for our next adventure.

I hope you have a great week.

~Chris

Crystal - “‘84 was a Good Year

This is week 84 and I was born in 1984. We decided to leave for the Bahamas kind of all of the sudden…after. 84. weeks. of prep. I say all of the sudden because it feels like we had almost settled for it not happening. But a combination of peer pressure from some new friends and a moment of boldness (hopefully from the Lord) made me say “ Tomorrow Night! Let’s leave tomorrow night!” - this was yesterday morning. I spent the rest of the day just ordering food and calculating intake ratio to storage capacity. Sometimes I feel like food is all I do, but after getting three dinghy-fulls of food put in fridges, freezer, and pantries, I feel pretty accomplished. It was not a fun transaction to make $$$$ but I am super grateful to have it on board and praying God keeps it all fresh and multiplies whatever runs short. Anyway, we have actually decided that a morning departure will be better so we are leaving at sunrise, Lord willing.

I feel like my head and heart have been all over the place in the last couple of weeks and it seems worth sharing but for now I should probably be doing some more voyage prep. I know we’ve been prepping for 84 weeks but…we are thinking of all new things we hadn’t even considered and also very intentionally forgetting some things that we thought were important.

We’re nervous, barely funded and already hot….but we’re even more-so; grateful, expectant, and stoked for clear water!!

Thanks to Starlink we should be able to keep you posted on Bahamas happenings here! Much love from the Mullen fam!

~Crystal

Ellis - “Away From The States (Hopefully)”

Sometimes it’s easy to get something down but sometimes (like today), it’s really hard to find something to write about. It sounds like we might be going to the Bahamas in the next few days, but we’ll see. I’m excited to go. I’m looking forward to the clear water mostly. I hope that we can anchor somewhere without too much current and some cool coral nearby. I am curious to see how different it will feel from our charter trip a few years back. It still feels sort of like a vacation but also, not at all the same. We’re fairly used to living on a boat now and while the familiarity of our boat could make it less stressful, we really don’t have any outside supports this time, so it’s all on us to stay provisioned and keep the boat functional. I’m interested to see how hard it will be to get provisions (water, food, fuel, ect.) there. We are trying to mostly pre-provision here before we go, but with seven, trash-making, people to feed and a still-not-figured-out-water maker, it feels like we’re gonna need to get to shore at some point. But like I said, we shall see.
In case we do go, and anyone tries to reach out to me, I may not have service while we are away from the states. Dad and Mom should have coverage though.

~Ellis

Conrad - “Bahama Charter 2023”

Back in August 2023 we went to the Bahamas and had our first family-only sailing experience. Now, three years later, we are very seriously considering going back on our own boat. Last time we were there we chartered a forty-two foot Bali catamaran, which was a very spacious boat compared to most. That trip was one of the main things that helped us to decide to try this crazy lifestyle. We didn’t decide we could live on a sailboat just because it was great in the Bahamas. It was great most of the time, but our first night on the water helped us to experience a little bit of crazy as well as the beautiful and amazing. That first night we ended up anchoring in the middle of one of the worst storms I’ve ever seen. It was dark and raining like it sometimes does in the tropics which I wasn’t used to, and the wind was pretty heavy, at least for anchoring for the first time on that boat. The worst part though was the lightning. We could see lightning strike the water between us and an island that was about two to three hundred yards away, and it even took out some of our navigation instruments.

Anyway, while that storm helped us decide that we could handle the hard parts of sailing, the rest of our Bahamas experience is what is motivating us to go back. We went in the wrong season for the Bahamas and it was better than anywhere we have sailed since. We went during the summer which is extra hot and usually worse weather, but fortunately, for the most part, we got pretty good weather. Now if we go back it will be the right season and we would be buddy-boating with the family of six. Buddy-boating and the water clarity are probably the two leading motivators for going. In the Bahamas at one point land was out of sight and we could still see the details on a starfish on the seafloor. We have all been craving clear water and good snorkeling conditions since we left Montrose almost two years ago. The closest thing we have come to that was probably the cold springs in Florida but the Bahamas are so much bigger and more diverse.

It’s crazy how fast we went from probably not going to the Bahamas to spontaneous “we are going to aim for in a couple of days.” We might be leaving tomorrow.

Thanks for reading!

~Conrad

Oliver - “Projects & Provisioning”

It feels like since we’ve been in Ft. Pierce, we have been writing about the same few topics over and over. I don’t really know how to get out of that groove, and we didn’t really do anything super “blog-worthy”. So I am going to give you a list of small fun or productive activities we did this week.

1. We went to the Marina and hung out with our friends.

2. We have been diving and jumping off the side of our boat, even though the water has been grosser recently due to the storm.

3. I rigged up a “mast” and sail for the dinghy, it can only sail directly downwind so far. I am still trying to figure out multiple directions.

4. We used some cool seeds we found on the beach to make a musical shaker.

5. We immediately took apart the terrible sounding shaker and made a bracelet instead.

6. We hauled 65 gallons of liquid and two people on our 12’ dinghy. Four diesel jerry-cans, four gas jerry-cans, nine 2.6 gallon waterbags, one 4 gallon shower-bag, and dad and I.

7. We decided that, Lord willing, we are travelling to the Bahamas.

8. Dad and Posy worked on our watermaker, which is unfortunately still broken.

9. We sanded more of our wooden handles.

10. Dad and I changed the water pump in our main outboard for the dinghy, which has been running very poorly. It fixed most of the problem, but it still isn’t super reliable.

11. We got a TON of groceries!

I am not sure why, but I haven’t done very much art this week. I want to do more, I just haven’t made enough time for it. That is all for this week! Happy Friday!

~Oliver

Jasper - “Pong Ping”

This week, since “The Storm” (notice capitalization) has calmed down considerably, we were able to figure out a time to meet up with our friends. (the ones that had to move to the marina during The Last Storm) We were going to an island that we had been to twice before with them. The last time we were there we played my favorite sport… Soccer!! It was a ton of fun last time and I was very excited to play again. But then I noticed that the water was much too high to get even an alright sized field. I was slightly saddened. But! There was enough space to play a game of Tug-a-war. We arrived at the beach before them so we had to wait for a little while, but soon enough they showed up. We war tugged (tug of warred) until everyone was tired or bored. We walked around the island and then went to their boat in the marina to hang out/play ping-pong in the marina lounge room. After I beat everyone at Ping-Pong we headed to the boat and played tag on the front. We were quickly exhausted, so we sat down to a game of “Grounded For Life”. It was sort of like “Apples to Apples”. It was fun, but I was not good at it!! But time really flew and by the time we left it was already 10:00! Everyone was tired and we fell asleep quickly.

That’s all for this part of the blog, see ya’.

~Jasper

Posy - “If wishes were “The Bahamas”

Last time we were in the Bahamas, it was great. I would like to embrace it even more. Like, try to explore more, snorkel/swim more, you know? The Bahamas is ridiculously expensive. You have to have a fishing license because it’s illegal not to have one (it costs $300 and it expires in 30 days), plus all the other fees add up to about 1,000 dollars. Because the food in the Bahamas is so expensive we filled every nook and cranny with food. So we are hoping, and praying, for God to give us a miracle. If we do go, here’s my perfectly painted picture: hours upon end of exploring new islands and caves, climbing things, catching animals, and fishing. But most definitely snorkeling/swimming, but I already said that. Also finding new ways to make my Mom happy, and if I really was stretching it, I would say having some really close friends to hang out with. Okay, that was a really perfect “perfect” picture. Things probably won’t go that way or exactly as planned, but I know that God’s got us, and he won’t forsake us, I think he’s going to make it amazing!

P.S. Adam! The lobster painting is done, it turned out pretty good. (At least I think.)

P.S.S. Have a good week everybody. Posy out.

~Posy

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Chris – “A little case of Cabin Fever”

I am writing this week’s blog on Thursday. Normally, I wait until Friday to write. Partially, I do this because I am procrastinating, and partly, so I can see what other people are writing about, and try to fill in any gaps. But, as I am writing this, we are hanging out inside our boat, sheltering from a multi-day storm and I don’t have much else going on. The bad weather rolled in Tuesday evening, and the wind and rain have been nearly relentless! Back in Western Colorado, we get bad winds in the Springtime. As the snow begins to melt, the winds can become pretty fierce but this is next-level. I can’t believe the Atlantic hasn’t run out of wind yet. It has been RIPPING through this anchorage non-stop for the last 48 hours, and it doesn’t look like it is done yet. There have been close to 3” of rain in the last couple of days too… I know that may not sound like a lot to you depending on where you are from, but if you are from the high-mountain desert of Western Colorado…. and you live on a boat with rain-water leaks… that feels like a lot of rain! We have been hiding out inside, and just waiting this one out. There are a few projects that we can work on inside the boat, but not that many, so we have been spending more time twiddling our thumbs than usual. I spent the first day pacing and feeling caged, but then I realized that I was stressing everyone out, so I have taken to playing music, reading, board games, and now writing, to fill my time. In theory, these are things that I want to spend more time doing, but in the real world, I still put a lot of value on what I can accomplish in a day. To get to the end of a day, and NOT be able to check things off my to-do list gives me a mild case of depression, but I have been reminding myself that I am choosing this. It has helped. I really enjoy hanging out with my family, and when I slow down, I do a better job at that. Some days I need to play music with my kids or lose at chess, to really connect with them.

Thankfully, in spite of some truly ugly weather, our anchor has held fast all week. Praise God! There have been moments in this inlet, where we are anchored, that looked more like the open ocean than a protected harbor. When the current in the river is headed East at 3-5 knots and the wind is headed West at 35 knots, the water gets rough, and the parts of our boat in the water are trying to go East with the water, while the parts of our boat above the water are trying to go West with the wind. Its fun. Thank God that He has been looking after us.

We have an invitation to “buddy-boat” over to the Bahamas, with some friends, at the next favorable weather-window. While we are not quite sure if we can swing it just yet, we have been trying to accomplish the boat projects that would make this a possibility. For me, that has meant trying to get our water-maker working, and trying to update our AIS (a boat identification/tracking feature). Posy is going to write about the water-maker, so I don’t want to spoil anything on that front. She has been my helper this week, and she is doing amazing. We don’t have it running quite yet, but we are finally making progress. AIS stands for “Automatic Identification System,” and is used to broadcast/ receive the position of your boat, and other boats/ ships around you. This makes you pop up on other-peoples screens, even if they aren’t using radar. The Bahamas has made it a requirement for all visiting boats to have AIS functioning while in the country. Our boat came equipped with AIS… but we still showed up under our boat’s old name (Get Nauti), and that wouldn’t do. I had turned on the AIS when we were near shipping channels, or operating at night, in the past, but I had to answer to “Get Nauti” over the radio a couple of times, and I didn’t like it. This week, I was finally able to locate the software that I needed to get our information updated, and corrected our information. It was such a simple victory, that changed no visible part of our boat, but it FEELS like the boat is more “our boat” now that it is done. Hopefully we can be able to produce our own clean water soon, as well. I am tired of hauling water. We will see.

It looks like the weather will clear up in the next few days, so we are all looking forward to being able to enjoy our surroundings again. Hope you all have a great week.

~Chris

Crystal - “A lot has happened and not much at all”

We haven’t even stepped off the boat since Tuesday. But we weren’t at sea….just hunkered down at anchor, heeled over in sustained winds and rolling in the chop. I didn’t even know there was this much wind to blow on earth. We used to think Colorado was windy in the spring. Y’all don’t even know!

Before the storm, we had a really great Easter. Sunrise on deck taking turns reading the best story of love and war in history. The weather was perfect. A young guy named Mike, offered to take us out to islands that are right up the inlet but too far to reach with our little outboard engine. It was yet another display of how awesome people can be. A 22 year old guy who is making his own way, and we just met, took a few hours out of his weekend to take a family of seven out just because we were nearby. I’m still shocked by availability. Living “normal” doesn’t afford those kinds of opportunities. We used to set up dinner dates with old friends 2 weeks in advance and half the time something would come up. Mike called Chris and said “I can be there in 5 minutes”. It was a fun adventure. Sushi and a movie rounded out the night.

By Monday the weather had started to shift. Our friends had postponed their passage to the Bahamas and we were starting to brace for some big wind and rain. Tuesday, we stocked up knowing we may not be able to get to shore for a few days. That evening got pretty wild. We stressed each other out and spent a bunch of time looking at this weather app and that landmark and this anchor monitor. By the end of the night Oliver, in sage wisdom said, “ I think if we could all just not be so afraid of the wind, it could be pretty fun”. We are sailors.

Wednesday we woke up and the wild just kept coming- walls of water raining down and prevailing winds that kept us at a solid lean. But the vibe was different. God was answering my prayers again to give us peace, not by changing our situation but by changing us. I took a shower on deck…in the rain. Glorious.

A lot of little things moved in me this week. Things that have been stuck. The irony that it took being stuck inside with no ability to go or do much of anything is worth noting. Today the sun is out and the sky is blue. My head and heart are clearer too. I think it’s just about time to go be sailors again.

What’s your storm churning up in you? God can make it good, no doubt.

~Crystal

Ellis - “‘Life at Anchorage’ They Said. . . ‘Peaceful Bliss’ They Said. . .”

In preparation for life on a sailboat we did a bunch of sailing classes and work books before we left Colorado. One of the big topics was anchoring. Simply put, the goal was to find a cove, sheltered area, or even the leeward side (the not windy side) of an island where it was only around 10-25 feet deep. Once you had that, you’re supposed drop your anchor and seven times the depth in chain (say you were anchoring in 10’ of water, you’d want to put out 70’ of chain), and then go into reverse to dig the anchor into the sea bed. You, and all the other boats in the anchorage would simply “hang” whichever direction the wind was blowing. Maybe life at anchorage really is that simple when you anchor out in the ocean in costal coves, but for some reason the books never said anything about anchoring in rivers. . . Everywhere we have anchored so has been in a river connected to the ICW (inter coastal waterway) which means that there are tidal currents that change nearly four times a day. The tides/currents switch roughly every six hours (and at every high tide and low tide is a “limp river” which is when the water stalls for a short period of time in-between swings. This is our favorite time to go swimming because you don’t have to worry about getting swept away). So now, instead of our boat only being under the influence of the wind, the wind and currents have wrestling matches over who gets to toss our boat around every day and that conflict makes for a much less peaceful/predictable anchorage that what I expected from the books and classes. Also, spring weather here in Florida turns out to be equally, if not more, unpredictable than back home in Colorado. We’ve learned a few tricks to help keep things under control but it is always a relief when either the wind or currents give up for a little while.

~Ellis

Conrad - “Island Soccer”

This is my third attempt at writing a blog. I don’t know why it’s so hard this week, it’s not for lack of topics. This has been a pretty eventful week, but it feels like all of the topics are too similar to recent blog posts. One thing that seems notable to me is when we played a game of soccer on the beach with the other boating family. The beach was a big slightly sloped strip of sand on an island that came out at low tide. It was an especially low tide that day, so there was a pretty substantial area for a soccer field. The sand was moist enough to be pretty tough and was hard packed so it was more like running on slightly lumpy, soft concrete than running on sand. Drawing the borders of the field in the sand, though it seems simple, took a few tries and was ultimately far from perfect. The teams we went with were me, Ellis, and their oldest against Oli, Jasper, Posy, and their two middle boys. Their youngest occasionally joined the big kid’s team but overall, the teams were actually pretty even. In the end the team with more people won, but only by one point. After that we went and caught crabs and chatted with the parents. I’m not a big soccer player or really any sort of ball sport player, but that was pretty fun, especially since everyone was at a similar skill level.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

~Conrad

Oliver - “Abandoned Tree House Island”

Last week on Easter, one of our new neighbors took us out to some islands about two miles north from where we are anchored. He has a small-ish motor boat that he uses as a dinghy, and we all fit on it pretty well. He started out kind of slow, but when we left the no-wake zone, he put the throttle all the way forwards. Going really fast was fun, even though it was raining all the way there. The first island was pretty cool, there were lots of mangroves, lizards, and a few hermit crabs. Unfortunately, it was also pretty sheltered from the wind, so there were lots of bugs and it was a more popular beach with many people. The second island was probably smaller than a soccer field, but it was way cooler than the first. There was nobody else, there was a sick tree house, no bugs, and a few cool shells. If I had to choose an island in this area to get stranded on for a few days, that might be the one. I didn’t do any swimming at the islands, but even with the crazy wind, we have had some really good swimming days. When the tide is slack, and the water is clear-ish; you can easily dive to the bottom and see what is down there, it isn’t super exciting though. The bottom is mostly mud with a thin coat of sand, a few shells, and the occasional fish. It is still fun.

The huge family painting is still progressing, but not super quickly. We are still far from being finished. That is all, Happy Easter!

~Oliver

Jasper - “Happy spring br-downpour”

This week (like the last one) has been very windy, but unlike last week, we did not run aground, or drag anchor. It only rained. But with fresh treats (Happy Easter), and lots of work and school to do, we have been kept busy. This week I am going to tell you what life on a rainy boat is like.

This week Dad and Posy have been working long, hard hours on our broken water-maker. Posy is dad’s new water-maker assistant. Together, they cleaned dirty strainers and changed bad hoses, but still it is not working!

On the other hand, we are working on finishing up this school-year so we can focus on having fun and relaxing, or just having more time to work on the boat. Anyway! This semester for math I am doing Algebra. And as far as I’m concerned, I’m never going to use even half of everything I’m learning when I grow up, unless I’m a math teacher which I really don’t want to be! But even though it’s really hard and it feels like the progress that I’ve made is basically nothing, I am still hanging out with my mom a lot (best teacher ever!) and learning things that maybe will help me later on. Even though it is ridiculously easy to slip up and miss the tiniest detail, I’m learning to pay more attention and figure out techniques instead of trying to guess the answer.

Also one last thing. If you have any book series or good books that you think that I would like please put a comment below. I like fictional, really, long books.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for today. Happy Spring break!

~Jasper

Posy - “Agua de deliceoso”

This week, Dad and I did a lot of work on the water maker, because it’s not working. I’m still not sure how I made myself the assistant water-maker-fixer. It was probably my enthusiasm, (it’s kind of fun.) Getting back on track, this is the work we did: We had a broken water pump that we took apart and fixed. We needed to re-attach the pump to the water-maker, but it was missing some rubber feet that stop it from vibrating too much. I knew where some were, so we attached them and reinstalled the pump. We ended up having to replace a hose that was too short, as well. After switching out the hoses to the, pump we finished the mounting process. Then, Dad told me more about the system. We called it a day after that. The next day we worked on the sea strainers in the engine room. The sea strainers take water out of the sea and takes the big chunks out and then the water proceeds to the rest of the filters in the water maker. The strainer for the engine cooling system was pretty clean. We still had to wash it out though. On the other hand, the one for the water maker was mind-bogglingly gross (seriously, my mind was boggled, wink wink.) It was like there was Saint Marys river mud but with a green tint in it (just so you know, St. Marys River mud is GROSS). So we got ourselves ready, washed out the filter, and used like twenty paper towels to get the muck out. After getting the general grossness out, we filled up the strainer with sea-water and used a squeeze bottle to get the dirty water out, until it was clean-ish. Then we closed all the valves on the water maker/sea strainers. Next day we tested it, it worked but not quite how it is supposed to. How I understand it, is that the wiring is wrong, so Dad is researching that now. BUT, now I know more about the water maker than any of my big brothers, and maybe, maybe my Mom too (who is really good at everything, and I bet if she tried she would be way better than me at working on the water maker.) Posy out.

~Posy

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Chris – “Hitting Bottom”

This is my second attempt at writing this week’s blog. I began to write a detailed account of last weekend’s storm, but at this point, even though we drug anchor and had to do some pretty intense evasive-maneuvers during that storm, so much has happened this week, that it feels like focusing on that one event won’t really be sufficient. So here’s a quick recap on this last week’s shenanigans:

Last Saturday, a storm hit Fort Pierce, which consisted of lots of wind, and some rain. Sunday morning, we woke up to at least 5 other boats in the anchorage, loose or grounded. It was a crazy scene, but around 10:30 on Sunday, our anchor also broke free of its holding, and our boat drifted into a scary position between two other boats. Due to the crazy wind and current, we ended up motoring in reverse for 4 ½ hours before we could finally position our boat in a way that we could safely pull up our anchor, and go try a new anchor-spot. We have moved anchor 3 times since then, and run aground a couple times. Our boat and our crew are fine and intact… my pride… we took a healthy couple notches off of that. It was a bad storm, and a complicated anchorage to manage, but still… On top of anchoring woes, we have had issues with our rear bilge-pump and we have run into issues with getting our water-maker up and running. Our deck could use some welding and paint. I have felt pretty discouraged, and a little stuck.

But there have also been some really good things. During all of our anchor-woes, I have been filled with gratitude that our engine has been working perfectly. I pray a “thank you, God” prayer every time I hear it fire right up. Also, our new friends, the boating family that we mentioned last week, have been a huge source of encouragement, comradery, and entertainment for our family. It is good to have friends, and we have been praying for buddy-boats that would help make the journey feel less lonely. “SV Waves of Wisdom,” you guys are the best! Thanks for the good times. Also, I am thankful for my crew; I am constantly amazed and blessed by my family, and their ability to make amazing “lemonade” out of some truly sour lemons. During the stress of re-anchoring, in less-than-ideal conditions, they work together, and they do it well, encouraging each other, and celebrating the small wins along the way. When we tried to set up the water-maker for the first time, we found that one of the water pumps was not working. I tried to find a replacement, but found that the old part was not available anymore, the spares that were on the boat were all bad, and the company that makes the unit is just one guy; and he is out of the country and unable to help me until he comes back. The one pump that was recommended to us as a replacement costs over $500, and has a 1 ½ star rating in the reviews… but Oliver delivered a speech this week (part of his school work) about how we, as a society, really need to get back to fixing things, rather than just buying replacements and throwing away repairable things… so, I disassembled the old pump, and I was able to repair it in an afternoon! Rather than buying a new pump for hundreds of dollars, I was able to just fix it. I am always blown away at the wisdom and perspective that my children bring into my life… not ALL their ideas are good ones, but they have a lot of good ideas! Not all of my ideas are good ones, either. I am also happy to report that the rear bilge pump is also fixed… I think.

This has been one of the weeks that have tested my resolve and my faith a bit. But this morning, I am resetting my hope on God and His ability to do the things that I can’t do for myself. I am confident that He is still calling us to walk this path, and I am doing my best to keep rolling with the punches.

It is Good Friday today. This year, we are in such new territory, that it is hard for any holiday to feel “normal.” This can be a good thing. It is forcing me to think about what we are actually celebrating, rather than just going through the motions of tradition. I feel like all the drama of the week is trying to crowd out my ability to think through these things, but I am pressing in to the story of Jesus, His life, death, and resurrection. Trying to figure out how to understand the mystery of the good news of this gospel. I’m actively being thankful that, while I don’t often understand WHY things work the way they do, God really does work all these things together for the good of my life when I put my trust in Him. I have hope, in a world where there is little hope. And I have hope even when most people would look at my situation and say, “well, that sucks.” I hope you all have a great Easter, but most of all, I hope you all get to know that God has offered this same hope to all of you. I’ll leave it at that for now, but if you want to talk more about this, reach out to me. I don’t know a lot, but I will share what I do know.

~Chris

Crystal - “Eyes Up”

My mom has always said that her grandmother told her not to break my strong will when I was a little spitfire, testing her patience. I guess I’ve always been a bit stubborn.

Another mom-motto is “ if you don’t have anything good to say, say nothing at all”

Honestly, I wanted to stop there.

There’s been a lot of wilderness this week. I was made aware of things that I was never thankful for, but should have been. Things like how my house never moved without me knowing it, and how other houses never threatened to blow into mine. Realizing how little I thought about the weather, and how incredibly *#!@ed our weather patterns are.

We’ve spent a lot of time looking over the front end of our boat this week, checking, pulling, setting, and assessing our anchor. It’s an exceptionally rough spot of the deck. During one of those inspections, Chris leaned slightly on the guardrail and the stanchion, where it’s bolted to the deck, ripped a hole in the surface of the deck. All the bits of assurance I had built up in Agnes’s sturdiness, through our trials at sea, were sunk. I suddenly felt completely vulnerable. It’s not unfounded- there are real weaknesses in our structure, but the scale of my dismay was a little dramatic.

I was genuinely wondering how we could get out of this whole thing, and feeling like we had no business being out here. Then I walked out on deck, under a full moon, during one of the brief moments of calm, and it was beautiful. The kind of beautiful that stops anxiety, and makes you take notice.

It’s a good thing my mom didn’t beat the hard out of my head as a kid. I’m a big sissy, and I would have given up.

One of the few things God said really clearly before we started down this path, was “Don’t quit early”. I don’t know when quitting time will come, or how we’ll know. We’ve run out of money more times than I can count- God’s come through on that front every time. All I know is that the time is not now. He’s still moving.

We had fun hanging out with new friends. Truly, that was a highlight, and I’m grateful for the reprieve. They are heading to the Bahamas next week, and we’re praying for some big mountains to move, and doors to swing open so we can go with them.

We want whatever God’s got for us. And, for all the stuff I complain about- there’s more to be grateful for. I really believe with all my heart that he works all things for our good, and he gives good and perfect gifts. He was broken to make us whole. Wounded so we could be healed. He endured so we could receive. I know there’s more than what we see.

“So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.” 2 Corinthians 4:18

Have you looked up from what’s going on in your world lately? He’s good.

And He’s RISEN! Happy Resurrection Day!

~Crystal

Ellis - “I do like playing music… thanks for asking”

I started playing piano when I was thirteen, it started off slow. I had an online class with a classical teacher for a semester but I didn’t like it. It did teach me some basic music theory though which was very helpful down the road. That summer, I turned to YouTube and learned a couple of tutorials which gave me enough confidence to try out for our youth group’s worship band, that’s where things really took off. Looking back, I can’t understand why they passed me after auditions, I was terrible, but they did and that led to five years of playing on both the youth and church bands. During that time, I took a few theory lessons from our good friend Jean, which helped me to have a much broader understanding of how music works. Up until I was 18 I had only played piano and a bit of cello, but that year I went on a mission trip with my youth group to Mexico and our band leaders asked me if I could play guitar while we were there so during the two months leading up to the trip, I gave myself a crash course on guitar and did my best to learn the set list. It was a sub-par performance, but it opened up some new doors. Then, later that summer we packed everything up, put the piano in storage, and moved out. And since a guitar was really the only instrument I had access to for a few months, I worked hard to get better at it. It stuck and now, over a year later, I’d take a guitar over a piano any day. I’m always trying to get better, I practice playing by ear, finger style, flamenco-ish, and things I see on YouTube, but sometimes it can feel like a slow climb. Singing is still a real challenge for me too but it’s all stuff I really enjoy. Anyway, that’s enough talk from me, hope you all have a wonderful Easter!

~Ellis

Conrad - “Another wild week on a boat.

Last Saturday, a big, and long-lasting storm hit Fort Pierce. It started late Saturday night, around bedtime. Mom and Dad stayed up to keep an eye on the boat, making sure she didn’t go visit any neighbors. On Sunday morning, we woke up to a significantly emptier anchorage. There was a private dock on the other side of the river that had four boats drag anchor and run into it, making a big, unfortunate pile of boats. At some point during the morning, we started dragging too. Pulling up anchor was a very difficult and long process. When we finally did get our anchor up and reset, we had some other problems. The next day and couple of nights were comparatively, very chill and stationary. During outgoing tide when the wind and current are going opposite directions, which usually makes us swing uncontrollably, we swung into shallow water and ran aground. Fortunately it was a soft grounding and served to keep us still. Unfortunately, it probably wasn’t great for the boat so we re-anchored again, this time, with less difficulty.

The real bummer part is that even though the wind has calmed down a bit, it’s still a little windy for my liking and it’s only really supposed to get better for about a day next Monday. Then, it’s going to get worse and stay windy for a while. Also, with the wind always in the east, the waves outside of the inlet are five to ten feet high which is a little bit too wild for a comfortable passage. We probably won’t be leaving until the weather clears up a bit. Fortunately, we were able to give the new engine repairs a good five-hour-long test so we know that our engine is in good condition.

Thanks for reading!

~Conrad

Oliver - “The Never Ending Stormy”

We had a pretty large storm blow through this week. Not very much lightning or rain, just a lot of wind blowing right up the inlet. Our boat fought against the currents much differently than other boats, causing chaos, and some close calls. Then, on Sunday, we woke up, and there were boats piled up against docks, sandbars, and marinas. Many had drug anchor during the night, and drifted until something stopped them. Fortunately, we held during the night. After breakfast, Dad went outside, only to realize that we had started to drag! We decided to pull in the anchor so that we could re-anchor. After a bee sting (on my hand), constant prayer, and five hours of fighting the wind and current, we managed to get the anchor reset in the river. Putting the anchor back down only took about 15 minutes. Unfortunately, the next day, we realized we had picked a bad spot. We were too close to the mangroves so every low-tide (which happens twice a day), we gently ran aground on the muddy sand. Not a huge problem, but not ideal. Luckily, re-anchoring again the next day was way smoother. Our new friends on the catamaran drug their anchor too, they didn’t hit anything, but they fought through the storm with us. On Monday, they moved to a local marina to do some repairs. Other than that, we also started a huge family painting, a commission from a friend we met in Jacksonville. It is pretty much the biggest we can do since it is about as big as our table. I have been enjoying working on a bigger piece. Have a great week! Bye!

~Oliver

Jasper - “Don’t Try This At Home”

This has been a wild week! We have done several things that I would strongly advise not doing ever again. We woke up Sunday morning ready to do a normal Sunday, only it wasn’t normal. It was going to be an extremely windy day, strong enough to make us drag anchor. Dad noticed it first, he saw that we were in a very different spot than we should have been in. He didn’t freak out, he just started the engine and told us to prepare to hoist the anchor. This might come as a surprise to some of you, but we pull up our anchor by hand. No buttons. For those of you who have never been on a boat before, there is normally an electric winch, but not for us. This time it took us 5 hours to raise the anchor instead of the usual 5 minutes, that’s 295 minutes difference. During that time, I also got sunburned! I went inside while they dropped anchor (they didn’t need me for that part), and I was extremely surprised to see that it was already 3:45! At the time we hadn’t even eaten lunch! But we were safe again and we were all exhausted. And then the next day we found that every low tide we were sitting on the river bottom. In other words, we were grounded. So on Tuesday we had to pull up the anchor. Again. But this time went much quicker and was much more efficient.

Well that is all that I’ve got for now. See you later!

~Jasper

Posy - “Ping-pong, ice-cream, and friends!”

This week we drug anchor, and then our friends, the ones we talked about last week, also drug anchor, and by morning they were gone because they had moved to a marina close by. Until the storm is over, I think they might stay in the marina. Anyway, to the point, which is that they moved farther away, plus the storm made it harder to meet up. Thus, we dinghied the long distance, from our boat to the marina to meet up with them on Wednesday. The boys were all at the pool, so everyone, excluding both dads, went to the pool. When we got there they wanted to go to a place that had free ping-pong and shuffleboard. So, we went with them. It was super fun. We did a ping pong tournament. I could beat the youngest boy of the family solidly, but but I didn’t beat anyone else. I also was pretty bad at playing shuffleboard. Then, we went back to the their boat and ate dinner; it was steak and potatoes. There was also ice-cream for dessert. Afterwards, we went back and played some “king of the world” ping pong. I still wasn’t great, but that is okay, I still had fun. When me and the two youngest of our friends got bored of playing ping pong, we scootered around the building. Then soon, we went back to Agnes.

Ps. Adam, your painting is almost ready. Thanks again. Have a good week. Thanks for reading.

~Posy

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Chris – “Date Night??”

The fuel system is getting better, we have begun the process of trying to get our water-maker up and running, and the family began restoring the teak handles on the outside of the boat. But the real story of the week is the slow(ish) passage of warm days. We can feel the sunshine energize our winter bodies, and our solar panels. The water is cool, but warm enough to enjoy swimming in. When the gentle breeze blows, the bugs are swept away from our boat. And the realization that we are “really doing it,” is sinking-in a little deeper. We still feel like we do not know what we are doing, and we are still entertaining multiple ideas of where we are going next, but today, I am going to get on our little inflatable boat, drive it through a beautiful river, “park” it at the city dock, and walk through a town I don’t live in to run a few errands. Life is different than it used to be, and it is good. The rhythms of our daily life are slowly adjusting, as we pass the 3-month-mark since we began living on the water… three months!

We met another family with kids, that just arrived at this anchorage, and, while we were getting to know each other, they asked us if Crystal and I ever get to have date-nights. I was stumped for a minute. We have always been more of a “stay-in” type of date couple, more than a “go-out” type, but we were always consistent in spending SOME time together, alone, nearly every night, when we lived in Colorado. But, since we began living in such close quarters, bedtime has become standardized for the whole family. If one person stays up doing stuff, it keeps everyone else awake, so we just go to bed at the same time. But this morning, I realized that Crystal and I were still finding that time together, without even realizing it. The kids are normally awake and getting out of bed around 7:30 – 8:00am. That is when the light starts waking them up naturally… or sometimes we wake them up around that time because they are ignoring the light. But, Crystal and I have been setting our alarm for 6:00ish. We wake up, make coffee, and then we both spend some time reading the Bible and praying; sitting side by side, trying our best to set our mind on good things, at the beginning of each day. Then, as we wrap up our prayer time, we talk. We talk about what we read, talk about conversations that we have had, we talk about what we are learning, we encourage each-other, and we pray together. We talk about boat work and groceries, we talk about hopes and dreams, we talk about our children, how they are doing, and how we can help them. And, we maintain our unity as husband and wife… we do date! It just doesn’t look like the “typical” date. THAT is what we were looking for though. A different way to do life. Different from the ways that the world tells us to do life. Everyone says that healthy marriages should prioritize “dating” to maintain “the love,” but I would argue that these slow, quiet mornings spent together contain more value than most dates that are spent at fancy restaurants, or movie theaters, or trivia nights, or bars, would provide. I hear you all thinking it, and yes, I should probably take my wife out, off the boat, as well, but I am grateful for these days of rest and togetherness that God has given us right here, and now. I am grateful that Crystal is my partner in this crazy journey; grateful that God gave us a foundation that continues to endure through changes in our lives.

Honestly, though, it feels like we have lived on the water for longer than three months. Some days I feel grizzled, and salty, and untamed; especially when I see regular, land folk, with their regular showering and laundering, driving around their shmancy cars, and going to their adult-jobs. Sometimes I forget that what we are experiencing is not “normal life” for everyone. But most of the time, I still feel like an imposter, living among REAL boaters and sailors; trying to understand how everyone else is “doing it.” But we are building a new lifestyle, and the foundations that we make for how we love each other well, in this new life, are far more important than getting boat-work done to improve the convenience of our boat-life. If we can learn how to be a healthy, thriving, family in this new environment, we are increasing our chances of success exponentially.

We are still anchored at Fort Pierce, Florida for the time-being, and enjoying it. We hope you all can find a rhythm of connecting with, and loving the people in your life. Find the thing that works for you, and don’t worry if it looks different than what is advertised to you.

~Chris

Crystal - “We’re all different, we’re all the same.”

This week has been a lot of what we signed up for. We had a lot of fun doing the things we dreamed up. We did boat work and then jumped into the warm, salty blue. We paddle-boarded after school with friends. We grilled breakfast, lunch, and dinner surrounded by sea turtles and dolphins and seabirds. Skies were blue, sun was shining.

We tried a new church. It’s an open air ministry geared toward people who are seeking but might not feel at-home in a more conventional setting; vets who are struggling with mental health, addicts and homeless, estranged folks. The speaker was a guest to the stage but a regular attendee. His approach was fresh and full of battle-born conviction. He began with a repeat-after-me prayer. It was powerful. He spoke to the broken past, and call it out as dead. He spoke to redemption, and claimed it as already won. He went on to tell his testimony. It wasn’t polished speaking but it was a powerful message and I really enjoyed it.

There have been lots of new boats in the anchorage coming and going. One has a family with 4 boys- they have been fast friends for our kids. Posy and Jasper, especially, are so happy to have some buddies. There’s been lots of swimming, exploring and paddleboarding, showing and telling- and a game night! We’ve dreamed of finding a buddy boat and for the time being, it may only be days, we found one. Actually, they found us.

Different but the same. I had a hard time when we first met them and saw their boat. It’s the boat we thought we’d end up with. Big catamaran, fly bridge, ample space- beautiful. She’s an interior designer so it’s cuter than I envisioned but still, it felt hard not to compare. But shockingly, we’ve had a bunch of similar hurdles to get over, and while they have a different kind of hard, we both feel like what we’re doing is really hard and really wonderful too. It’s interesting to get perspective from different angles. People are weird, and wonderful, and so unique, and so basically the same.

When you meet people as a family, I feel like it kind of gives you this new view of your people- at least I kind of try to perceive them as if I were the newcomer and realize that there’s more than what I’ve been seeing. I really like my people.

We’ve only hung out at their boat so far- I honestly struggled to want to invite them into Agnes. Our boat, in comparison to theirs, is a run down shack. There really is no comparison though. We’re living differently. I’m trying to realize that different is just different. I like our life on Agnes and I shouldn’t waste energy guessing at how people are going to judge our home. Who cares anyway? It’s not usually what people think of us that affects us, but how we let it affect how we think of us, that wrecks things. They are coming over this evening.

More growing to do. But, I’m so grateful God meets me in the morning and gently reminds who He is and who He says I am. I’m grateful he’s not insulted when I ask hard (or ignorant) questions. He’s good.

Thanks for reading guys! ❤️

~Crystal

Ellis - “Home Grown”

Me and Dad were talking to a friend the other day about what he and Dad did after high school, and their thoughts on college and what not. Our friend (Justin) has four younger boys, and they’re doing homeschooling on their boat; he was saying that he didn’t think it was a good idea to rush straight off to college after high school and to take a couple years to just try and figure some things out first. I can’t imagine deciding to spend 4+ years and thousands of dollars on something I thought I wanted to do right out of high school. I had no idea what I wanted to do two years ago. Sometimes I think people are a little surprised when they find out I’m twenty and still doing this whole adventure with my family, and I’ve got mixed feelings about that. On one hand sometimes I feel sort of ashamed, like I’m one of those people who are too lazy or scared to leave the provision and familiarity of their parents. Or like I’m just coasting through life when I should be making the most of these years. But on the other hand, I know I’m growing a lot as a person and I think I’m learning a lot about family and my faith. Things I might miss if I were busy with a world of my own to take care of. Things that I’ll need down the road when I have my own troubles. It’s been food for thought for me this past week.

~Ellis

Conrad - “Fort Pierce… Still”

It’s been another full week and we are still in Fort Pierce. We will have been here for a full month this Saturday, which doesn’t really feel right. It only really feels like a couple of weeks since we first came in. We are a little bit unsure what to do right now. I think that we decided against going north right away. We would like to maybe go south but the next inlet is closed down for a boat show and the next one after that is pretty far. We might be able to go to the closer inlet after the shows over or we could make another bigger jump. Either way it might not happen for a while. We are getting in better shape for a long passage though.

Dad has been doing a lot of good work, besides having the engine running again. He added a twelve gallon day tank for fuel so that we don’t have to worry about clogging the engine’s system again. He’s also working on getting our water maker working so that we can desalinate and filter drinking water straight from the ocean. If he got that running, two of the main difficulties from our last voyage would be basically taken care of. The only other big thing is the weather. We can’t really control it, but we can pick a better weather window with more comfortable conditions. I’m sure there will be plenty of surprises and other problems but I think we are looking good.

In the meantime we are doing some upkeep on the boats outside. So far we are just sanding and re-varnishing wooden handles along the top of the deck house and the cockpit. We need to do some rust mitigation soon, but right now we don’t have any white topside paint to cover the spots that we treat. There are lots of projects that we could be doing, but we are taking it slow and enjoying the area. Also, with school there is only so much we can do in a day without burning out the crew.

Thanks for reading.

~Conrad

Oliver - “The good old days”

Back in St. Marys, I worked for the sanding crew with Ellis. My job was to go up on the boats and sand all the visible wood, so that they could be re-varnished. This week we decided to sand and re-varnish all of our wooden handles. Fuzzy fingertips, sweaty armpits, and smelly varnish dust, I remember it all. It’s nostalgic, but in a “I didn’t really enjoy that” sort of way. Now, it isn’t so bad; we get to decide when to stop and we have a river to jump in afterwards. Mom and Dad have been working on the water maker, (still untested). We also set up our gymnastic rings and hammocks on the dinghy davits over the water, and we’ve done a lot of paddleboarding. There is a new family-boat with four boys that is anchored right by us. They have been super cool and fun to go paddleboarding and fishing with. One of the things that I like most about the boating community is that you can meet someone for the first time, and on the same day get invited over to their boat to hang out. At least for us, that didn’t really happen back in Montrose. I think everyone should have a little more of that in their lives. That’s all for this week, see ya!

~Oliver

Jasper - “Excellent Week”

This week has been a good one. Even though we didn’t do a whole lot of work, it was still nice since we didn’t have to spend much time thinking of what to do for our “one-things” (chores). Why? Well, because we have been sanding and varnishing our many outdoor handles. If you are wondering why you haven’t seen them before, they were under blue cloth covers. The handles were under their covers because they were ugly, but they are getting much better.

Another upside of this week is that we met a new boat that has four kids on it. We made friends immediately and they were really fun to be with. We have been doing meet-ups for the past couple days. They invited us over to their boat Tuesday night, we played games, fished, and just talked. I enjoyed hanging out with their kids and playing with them. It was all great fun. Well, that’s all I’ve got for today. See you soon!

~Jasper

Posy - “Hobby”

Ever since we left land, Conrad has not had any specific hobby’s to do. He used to weld, and do woodworking, and make nun-chucks, and stuff. He’s not the only one; Mom and I don’t really have anything to do, either. Anyway, the point is, I sometimes get bored for lack of likeable things to do. Though I don’t think I should only blame it on not having a good hobby, because sometimes I just have too high of hopes and when we don’t do or accomplish what I wanted to, it makes me sad. I believe that I should try to be better with my attitude. Anyway, this week we met a boating family with four boys; their ages are 6, 11, 13, and 14 (almost 15). They are really cool, and I haven’t been bored since they got here. Monday night when they arrived Justin (the Dad of the family) texted and said they would be here a few days. On Tuesday we went over to their catamaran. That was so fun! We caught a super, duper big catfish. Super excited to hang out more. Anyhow, they are super fun and like paddle boarding and fishing. So this week we has been a blast. Have a good week.

~Posy

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Chris – “80 is a lot of weeks”

Welcome to Grit and Chaos blog for week #80!! That is a whole lot of weeks! Leaving our home in Colorado still feels like a very recent event… until I realize that was one year, and seven months ago… 19 months! If you are doing math in your head right now, I realize 80 weeks doesn’t add up, but we didn’t start typing our blog until September 13^th, 2024… we left our home in Montrose, CO on August 19^th, 2024. For bonus points, you can go back and read our week #1 post here, https://gritandchaos.substack.com/p/week-1?r=1fngi. We were such babies… we had no idea what we were in for, but also, there is a consistency between what we declared at that point, and where we are today. That consistency is God’s plan working, always, for our good, and He is still doing it. It is fun to look back, from our current perspective, and see the things that God was doing in our story back then, but also a little convicting, when I feel like I am still trying to learn some of the lessons I thought I was learning so long ago… I had better commit these lessons to heart, now, so that I am not perpetually caught in arrested development.

Last week felt like a much-needed break, full of rest, and full of enjoying the place that we are anchored right now. But this week, we have felt a little more trapped. Anyone living on the East Coast knows that this last week has been full of crummy weather, and while we have been sheltered from the worst of it, we have been a little more “shut-in” than we would like to be. To be fair, it is not THAT bad; we COULD still go out and hang out in the wind and rain… but we tend to just hunker down when the weather gets ugly. We are so thankful that our anchor has held fast, and our boat shelters us from the worst of the weather, but we do get a little stir-crazy when we stay inside too much. The latest storm to “bless” the East Coast was everywhere too; so, moving to a different location would not have helped us avoid it. I don’t regret deciding to stay put through the bad weather, but I am feeling antsy now.

As of today, the weather is getting better, and we are planning our next move in a southerly direction. The next inlet down, the “St Lucie Inlet” at Stuart, looks a bit shallow and tricky, but like it could be a fun place to explore for a bit. We are still researching whether our boat is too deep to make it in there… any fellow sail-boaters, with experience at this inlet, should drop your wisdom on us. Our next option, a bit further South, is the “Lake Worth Inlet” near West Palm Beach. It looks a bit crowded for our taste, even in normal conditions, but this next week, there is a huge boat show in that area, so it will probably be even more so. Beyond that, we would be looking at another overnight passage. My goal, for this next passage, has been to make it a relatively easy one on my crew, and my boat. After our last, rough passage, I think we all could use an “easy-win,” and I would like to make sure that our repairs have been properly given a test-run before we put them through another long passage.

Speaking of repairs, I mentioned before, that we fixed a leak in our propane locker drain that showed up on our last passage, and was allowing sea water to accumulate in our engine room under the engine. This week, we found out that some of that water had entered our fuel tank via an abandoned hose in the engine bay. I got a quote from a professional fuel cleaning service to come and do a full clean, and filter, of our main diesel tank… they estimated it at $1200 - $1500! So, I have been working my DIY skills, and trying to get it done myself. I can buy quite a few filters for $1500, and I have more time than money, at this point. I have been running our fuel polishing (filtering) system each day, and we are no longer getting any water out of the fuel. The clarity of the fuel is improving, but I am still not quite ready to start running that fuel through my engine… maybe soon. For now, we are using clean, new fuel only, and running the engine out of a smaller, temporary tank. We will have to fill it more often, but at least it is clean. With diesel prices up around $5/ gallon recently, we are hopeful that we can save the 50 gallons that we have in the tank.

I had a bunch of great conversations with friends, this week, and it was so good to catch up. Keep it coming. We want to hear how you are doing. Hit us up, and let us know what is going on in your life. Take care.

~Chris

Crystal - “A Whole ‘Nuther”

It can NOT have been another week.

All I can remember happening this week is wind. There have been other things too, but mostly wind…at anchor. We are still in Ft Pierce. We haven’t felt a “Go” just yet and we’re just hanging here trying to be ready. Little things are progressing- Chris has been doing good work in the engine room again. The kids are making gains toward a finish on the school year. Agnes has been trying to make friends with neighboring boats in the weird current/wind switches… she runs back and forth and wags her tail violently. Or maybe she’s marking her territory?

Being a shut-in on a boat is next level isolation. Even with 7 of us on board. The chop and wind has just kept us mostly inside.

All that time has given us some free space to hopefully be shoulders for friends going through it, though. We have had friends reach out with all different kinds of burdens they are bearing. And honestly, it makes our boat hermit-ing sound just fine. There’s a lot of broken hearts out there. It feels like God has given us some hard things to endure logistically but he’s insulated us and protected our family so well. We are seeing relationships that have crumbled and left fractured hearts, addictions that are stroking old, still-raw wounds. “Family” is under fire. “Freedom” is being given up on as some unattainable figment.

I’ve been struggling with my back since just before we got towed in. Actually, it’s been on the decline since we got on the water. Ok, maybe it started in October in Maryland. My lower back has been a battleground for a majority of my life. I have raged against my own body at times, just pissed off that it doesn’t comply. I have claimed healing that I know is mine and walked in it. And then fallen back into bondage of brokenness. I’ve stuck to pre-hab rituals and strengthening routines and gotten a mixed bag of success and confused failure. Consistently, though, I see God in my back. I see Him carry me through the weak moments and I see His redemption power when I’m strong. I see how living redeemed in a yet broken world sometimes contradicts our understanding. But I’m holding onto hope. I believe with absolute conviction that Jesus paid it all for our freedom. I think it means now. Not just someday-I’ve said it before but it bears repeating-He said, “It is finished.” Debt paid. Curse revoked. Freedom given. Heaven on earth. Pretending everything is fine is not freedom. But receiving what’s yours to take and taking a defiant stand against the enemy who’s still trying to convince you otherwise- that’s not pretending.

Whatever your burden is right now-I want to say it’s not beyond redemption. Be stubborn toward Heaven on earth. Don’t give up the fight. Choose life.

Sorry that these things always get so “rah-rah” and preachy-It turns inward ‘most every time. I need to hear this stuff. I believe it, I know it to be true but I forget so quickly when friction rises.

Proverbs 4:23

Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.

~Crystal

Ellis - “Band?”

At the beginning of the year I talked Mom into making music a required school activity for the rest of the kids. Since then, me and Dad have taught everybody a few basics, and we’ve gone from there. It’s been pretty cool to literally see a band being built from the ground up. I can confidently say that they are all progressing much faster than I did when I started. We started out with a couple of covers but soon we all started writing our own songs—which is something I’ve been trying to push myself to do for years—and they all cranked out their first original songs after just a month or so! I am also learning a lot too, both in my personal practice and with the group. I have always dreamed of finding a band to make music with but I’ve never had much luck playing with people back in Montrose and I worried that I’d never find the right people, but I was joking with a friend the other day that instead of finding the perfect band, I’m just taking the people who are stuck with me and trying to make a band out of them. We might still have a long ways to go but I have high hopes of recording a family record and playing some shows and festivals in the next year or so.

~Ellis

Conrad - “War of the Art’s”

Our family is very artistic in a lot of different forms. Music, painting, drawing, building, crafting, we’ve got it all. Ellis and Oli are our two extremes. Ellis plays a lot of music and is getting pretty good at writing songs, while Oli does a lot of really high-quality painting. For a long time, neither would do the other’s art type but both wanted the other to convert. Ellis eventually started dabbling in sketching to try and get Oli to try music. That wasn’t really working until music became mandatory for school. Ellis is still doing some drawing, and Oli is doing music, but the art-war continues. Ellis doesn’t only pick on Oli though, he tries to get everyone fully invested in music. Oli doesn’t bother other people as much, except for Dad and Jasper every once in a while, because most of us do some painting or drawing anyway.

Dad was the original master of music, but Ellis has become very committed, and is at least equal with Dad by now. Me, Posy, and Mom do a reasonable amount of painting. Posy and Oli sell art commissions, but me and Mom don’t. Occasionally we will give custom paintings to people we interact with. I usually spend a lot of time on my paintings, which is one reason I don’t put my stuff out there. They usually turn out pretty good, it’s just that they take a lot of time. Dad and Jasper occasionally will do a little bit of drawing but neither of them are ever very excited about doing art. Jasper is starting to gain a bit of momentum with guitar though, and he seems to be enjoying it. Everybody at least dabbles in painting or drawing, and with school, everybody is doing music too. Probably, because of the whole mandatory school thing, music is currently winning the war of the arts.

There is a third art type that we do, it’s much smaller and harder to do on the boat though. Back in the boat yard we did a lot of crafting, wood working, welding, carving, and such. Now it’s a lot harder to build stuff. We don’t have as much material or as many tools, and we can’t use some of the tools because of the electric draw. We did recently make a PVC flute after seeing somebody selling flutes at a local farmer’s market. I do a reasonable amount of painting and music, but I like this art form best. It is a bit less pretty sometimes, but it is often more functional. I like it when it’s pretty and functional, but that’s not always an option.

Thanks for reading!

~Conrad

Oliver - “Happy Spring everyone!”

Last year at the fall Annapolis Boat Show, we decided that we might try to make it back up North for the Spring Boat Show. Now, with only thirteen days until the boat show work would begin, the chances of us being able to make it up to Annapolis in time are getting slimmer each day. Plus, we aren’t completely sure that we want to leave the clear warm water so soon. Fort Pierce inlet has been our favorite anchorage yet, and we don’t want to lose it. But we definitely don’t want to just sit in the same exact spot. So here is a list of pros and cons for going North, and a list for going South.

Pros for North:

• We would be able to stay in one place for a while, allowing for deeper connection with the area and also allows for more of a schedule.

• We would have an income to fund later Caribbean adventures.

• Many boats from the boat-show would be going down South with us. So hopefully we would be able to find a cool buddy-boat

• A whole list of little things; we would be near-ish to a climbing gym, we could hang out with friends, Granny might visit us more often, etc.

Cons for North:

• The Chesapeake Bay is pretty gross, and we are worried about what the bottom of the boat would do. With the slime, oysters, and barnacles, we aren’t sure that we would be able to move after a few months (that is an exaggeration, but it is nasty).

• We would have to leave the tropical snorkeling life for a long time before we could get back to it.

• We might not get there in time.

• We wouldn’t really be able to get in the water at all.

Pros for South:

• We get to continue living the beautiful tropical cruising life, snorkeling, fishing, swimming, etc.

• We wouldn’t be rushed in any direction for big moves.

• Our bottom stays cleaner.

• We could continue to invite people out to live on our boat for a few days.

Cons for South:

• We wouldn’t have a job.

• We also wouldn’t really have a plan.

I am sure that I am missing something, but these are the main things. I don’t know which one I want, but I am kind of leaning towards the South. His will be done, on Agnes as it is in heaven. I am still just playing around with acrylics right now. But I am open for art commissions, I can now do either acrylic or watercolor, but my page size is still just 9” by 11”. $30 for a custom, original painting.

~Oliver

Jasper - “Engine? Check! Sail? Check! Place?…”

For the past few weeks we have been preparing to go on another passage. Considering how our last journey went, you might think that we would be a little bit worried, but strangely I’m actually feeling pretty excited. But, we are having a little bit of a hard time finding out where to go; the options being going north towards Annapolis, or continuing south to the Florida keys. I’m going to highlight my personal hopes and dreams for both.

For Annapolis I have high hopes:

One of the main reasons I want to go is soccer. I’m not fully sure that it’s there, but one time mom said that there might be, so I got myself excited. I would love to be on a soccer team again

Another thing is that there is a Crossfit there. I have not been on a regular workout schedule for a while, and I really miss that!

The last perk of heading to a stable spot for a while, is jujitsu. Mom said that we could probably get a class. Jujitsu was pretty fun back in Colorado, so I don’t know why it would be different in Maryland.

Of course there is the option of heading south; towards sandy beaches, clearer water, snorkeling, and a life of sailing and fun. Personally, I’m leaning toward going north. What do you think we should do?

~Jasper

Posy - “A.R.T”

This week I had a boost of art commissions from friends. I didn’t have any art commissions for months, until Saturday, when I got three. That made me so happy! And on Tuesday, one of our closest friends called and asked for a spiny lobster; it turns out spiny lobster aren’t that spiny. Anyway, I have not quite gotten around to doing that one, because I was busy with three tropical fish: a lion fish, a sergent major, and a pufferfish. That was so fun, and I’m extra happy with how the lion fish came out. Other than that, we’ve just been hiding from the stormy weather. Monday night it dropped 21 degrees, and we played music, learning one of Dad and Oli’s songs and working on my fourth song. Other than that, we haven’t done much. So there’s my blog.

Ps. Thank you Nancy and Adam for the art requests. Bye.

~Posy

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Chris – “Friends, not Experiences”

This week has felt like a pretty great break from struggling. The prior two weeks had taken it out of me, but this last week has put it back in. First of all, the weather has been amazing. Highs in the upper 70’s and low 80’s, with a fresh ocean breeze blowing in, almost constantly, from the East. The sun has been out, but the water is 70 degrees, and cools you down immediately, if you get too hot. We have been swimming almost every day, and we love it. Next, boat work has been progressing well. We have completed, nearly-all, the repairs that we needed to make at this stop, even without a local shipping address. The propane locker leak is fixed… I think. The sail that we tore on our last passage has been repaired. The engine starts on the first crank, these days, and we have been able to secure a “day-tank” that will hold us over until we can come up with a permanent solution for our dirty fuel tank. The “day-tank” gives us the ability to run the engine out of a smaller, clean tank, which can be refilled with fuel that is filtered out of our main tank. Our hope is that, with this new tank in between the old fuel tank and the engine, we can keep the grit and grime from reaching the engine, even when the seas are rough. And, thirdly, we were able to host friends, on our boat, and in the water, for the first time… at least the first time overnight. We have the best friends, and it was a really special time!

The anchorage here in Fort Pierce has been more exciting than I would like, and I am daydreaming about moving to somewhere with less other boats around us. On Tuesday, Ellis and I jumped in our dinghy to go rescue a couple of neighbor boats. A motor boat, which had just arrived from the Bahamas, had just anchored next to us, when a small sailboat drug anchor and ended up drifting straight at the bow of the motor boat. We saw the drifting boat as it was within 20 yards or so, and jumped in our inflatable boat to go try to warn the two boats and prevent them from colliding if possible. We alerted the motor boat captain just in time for him to get a fender in place between the two boats as they came together. There was no one aboard the sailboat, so we waited and offered moral support more than anything else to the couple aboard the motor boat. After a while, two other neighbors came to see if they could help, and the sailboat owner returned to his boat. As a team, we were able to separate the two boats and they were both able to reposition themselves and re-anchor; as far as I know, there was no damage sustained to either vessel. And just yesterday, the wind suddenly shifted, putting our boat in danger of running into a different neighbor. They had anchored after us, and a little too close, in my opinion. Everything had been fine with the South-easterly breeze that we had been having all week, but as the wind swung around to the North, I looked up, and suddenly realized that the front of our boat was about to collide with the back of their boat. They were not aware, but I was able to fire up the engine and put our boat in reverse to avoid a collision. Oh, how thankful I was that the engine is back in an operational state! Thank God. We hung out with our engine on, occasionally reversing for a few minutes until the tide switched (about an hour), at which point there was more room between us. Later that evening they moved about ten feet further away… not far enough in my opinion, but hey, they tried I guess. Today, I am still monitoring our position relative to them, but so far, so good. It is a crowded anchorage, and a shallow one, so I really do not want to have to relocate if I don’t have to. There are no guarantees that a different location would be better.

We have not been able to locate a church that we can easily get to here in Fort Pierce, and so we have been streaming church services from our hometown of Montrose. It is really a blessing to have the ability to do that, but it is not the same, and I am hopeful that we can either find a way to connect with a local church community, or that we can relocate to another place with an accessible church community soon. Seeing new places is fun, but when we don’t connect with actual, real people in the area, I don’t feel like we have truly experienced it. I am not much of a tourist. I would rather get to know one person in an area than to see all the “attractions” that an area has to offer. Having a local connection makes the things you see have meaning in a way that I don’t really understand. As we’ve traveled around, the places that stick in my mind are the places where I now have friends. So, if you know of cool people in Fort Pierce that we should meet, let us know.

I hope you have a great week. If you think of it, give us a call, or shoot us a message to let us know how you are doing. We love to hear what is going on in your lives. And, go find friends, not experiences. Friends lead to the best experiences.

~Chris

Crystal - “

I am sitting here recollecting the week. There has been so much blessing. So many answered prayers. Some of them are topical and some have been brewing for years.

We are still in Ft Pierce just kind of soaking up sun and taking care of projects. There has been sail repair, a second wind generator installation, finding and implementing a temporary fix for our fuel system, fixing a leaking through-hull, and gathering a few items to improve our offshore preparation. There has also been lots of paddleboarding, and daily swims off the boat, some snorkeling, songwriting, and fishing. All these things felt extra big to me. After feeling so fragile, the ability to make tangible improvements, and get a taste of the “life on the water” we had in mind was so encouraging.

We had our first opportunity to host friends overnight and it was an answer to so many prayers in itself. When we set out to do this, it was always a dream to invite people into it. To bring people along and share the adventure. And then we got Agnes. We pictured a catamaran with shiny surfaces and maybe cushions you don’t put your feet on…and we got Agnes. She’s….a little savage. We’re growing to understand the quirks and appreciate her strengths but it’s easy to look around and find things to want to apologize to visitors about. Our friends were coming to visit and I was already finding ways to try to be on the boat less. They were coming from a couple hours away and wanted to find a room nearby so they didn’t have to leave early. They had a hard time finding a place. We decided to let them make their own decision about Agnes.

We had friends over for dinner when we were in Jacksonville and I struggled with the decision to host them, too. But it felt like God was saying, “This matters, you’re setting a precedent.” It was a pivotal moment where I would decide whether I would hide in shame or live in gratitude for the home I have been blessed with.

Anyway, the Miller fam came into it with grace and excitement. The time together filled up our family and they seemed to have a good time too. God used our boat to bring families together in a really special way. Answered prayers.

We are praying about our next steps.

We genuinely would love to hear from you if you’re reading this. It has been so cool to connect with folks whose paths we’ve crossed but never really engaged and to re-engage old friends from afar. Drop us a line or give us the whole story….we’re here for it!

~Crystal

Ellis - “Maybe Not Forever…”

This week has been pretty good, we had great weather and made a lot of progress on projects. We even had some very dear friends visit us for a couple days which was awesome, we love to bring familiar faces onto the boat! While they were here they asked me if I had any interest in doing something similar on my own down the line. Buy my own little boat and travel. I love what we’re doing and I think the memories and experiences will be well worth it, but no, not really. I think being a full time sailor is a great adventure for a time, a couple years maybe even, but I don’t feel like it’s a very sustainable lifestyle. Even if you can find a way to be financially independent via remote or seasonal work, you’re constantly forced to spend time and money just keeping your boat working and sometimes maintenance feels like a losing battle. Back home we never felt super close to many people and since we’ve left we’ve made some really close friends along the way but even so, we moved on eventually and this constant state of being on the move and only barely accessible makes it really hard to make meaningful relationships. We make new friends all the time but often we don’t know if we’ll ever see them again once we (or they) leave. Boiled down, I feel like we’re spending too much time, energy, and money on self-inflicted boat problems and I miss having friends around. But that being said, I don’t have any regrets and I’m looking forward to some more adventures in the near future.

~Ellis

Conrad - “Another Week in Fort Pierce”

This week has felt really short so far. We did some provisioning early on, which took up most of one day. We have mostly stayed away from the populated side of the river since then. On Sunday, we tuned into our old Colorado church for their online, live-stream. We couldn’t find any churches in the area that we could get to, without a half hour hike. We did go back to the city side to pick up, and eventually drop off, some friends who had come to visit. This was the first time that we’ve had friends stay overnight on the boat. I’m sure that will be a popular topic for other people writing this week so I will let that be.

On the other side of the river, we have been doing a lot of swimming, snorkeling, and paddleboarding. The water around here is pretty close to clear and isn’t uncomfortably cold so we have been taking full advantage of it. The spot we are anchored in is only about eight to ten feet deep depending on the tide. The river bed is mostly sandy with a few scattered weeds, shells, and abandoned anchors. When we go paddleboarding we usually either go to a larger, beachy island, or to the shallows around some smaller mangrove islands. We have found a pretty wide variety of wildlife on our paddleboarding adventures. We’ve seen, or caught, crabs, hermit crabs, a few types of fish, stingrays, conch snails, clams and oysters, and even a little turtle that had gotten stuck in a little puddle because of the tide.

Have a good week!

~Conrad

Oliver - “Finally”

On Monday, August 19, 2024 we set out on a journey to find a beautiful catamaran and sail it to the Bahamas, and from our huge, spacious boat, invite friends to come hang out for a few days at a time. When we bought a slightly broken, rusty, monohull, we pretty much gave up that idea. But this week we were able to host some of our friends for an overnight visit. We were worried that adapting to this boat life super quickly would be terrible and un-fun for them. But, we got to enjoy about twenty-four hours of at-anchor life with them. We did lots of swimming, snorkeling, playing cards and talking. It was a super fun and encouraging experience, and we are very glad we did it. Our guests enjoyed their stay, and were a little bit sad to leave. After doing that, I think we will try to do it again sometime. I am excited to see who comes out to visit next, and I hope it’s soon.

As far as art goes, I have done some more experimenting with acrylics, as well as a watercolor painting of an orca for our friends that stayed with us.

~Oliver

Jasper - “Mission: Find Deep Water”

This past couple of days we have had 3 friends over, they were old friends that we met in Montrose, but they moved to Florida after we left Colorado. They let us know that they wanted to come visit, and we were so excited to see our friends again. So we prepared our boat; the 3 oldest boys moved out of their room (they were going to sleep outside) and we tidied the boat till it had never looked better. And so, on Tuesday morning, we had our first over-night visitors! I’m going to tell you about what we did with them on the second day they were here… That morning we went on a paddle boarding trip around the surrounding mangroves. We paddled to where the current was less strong, and jumped right in. This has been the first river that we have been brave enough to jump into, it is by far the clearest too, but it was still a little murky as we snorkeled around. Swimming is so much fun! The only thing that was not that fun was that most of the water was only ankle deep. But we still had a ton of fun. We saw stingrays, pufferfish, and a Diamondback turtle. But we had to eat eventually, so we went back for lunch. It was great to see our friends again and swimming around was awesome. So I’d say that’s a win-win situation, right? Well that’s it, see you soon with our 80th blog.

Jasper

Posy - “Snorkeling”

I know someone else will have already talked about our friends coming over. But I’m going to talk about a specific highlight for me. We went paddle boarding to an island close to the spot where we anchored. I went with my Dad on my paddle board. That was fun, but it was surprisingly quick for the distance because the current was going with us. We beached all three paddle boards and the dingy. The little girl (our friend that was visiting) and I walked/snorkeled in the shallows. I gave her my snorkeling gear to try it out.

After a while we got out and walked around the whole island picking up sea shells, finding crabs, some small fish, and cool seeds that looked and sounded like marbles. Once we got back to the paddle boards and dingy I jumped in again. Sadly, soon we needed to get back to Agnes, after a splashy ride in the dingy I rinsed off at the back of our boat. Thanks for reading. Have a good week, see ya later alligator.

~Posy

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Chris – “Back Up and Running!”

I read a scripture this morning that pretty much describes our situation. I have added italics, and added notes in brackets, where I feel like it is particularly calling us out:

2 Corinthians 4:7-12 (The Message Version) “If you only look at us [our recent troubles], you might well miss the brightness. We carry this precious Message around in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives. That’s to prevent anyone from confusing God’s incomparable power with us [our “abilities”, or lack-thereof]. As it is, there’s not much chance of that [we look a little bit like idiots]. You know for yourselves that we are not much to look at [rusty old boat full of dirty people]. We’ve been surrounded and battered by troubles, but we are not demoralized; we are not sure what to do, but we know that God knows what to do; we’ve been spiritually terrorized, but God hasn’t left our side; we’ve been thrown down, but we haven’t broken. What they did to Jesus, they do to us – trial, torture, mockery, and murder; what Jesus did among them, he does in us – he lives! Our lives are at constant risk for Jesus’ sake, which makes Jesus’ life all the more evident in us. While we’re going through the worst, you’re getting in on the best!”

This has always been our hope. That what we experience would not only change and grow us, but that we can share our stories, and hopefully show God’s goodness and power to you, as well.

To everyone that took the time to read my mid-week blog about our passage last week, thank you for taking the time! It was a long one. I am going to leave most of the blog space for the rest of the family to catch you up on the latest news.

We have spent the last week, cleaning and repairing our boat. Drying out wet things, and catching up on sleep. On Wednesday afternoon, I was able to get the engine running again! Dirt and debris, from our fuel tank had been stirred up on our rough ocean passage, and overwhelmed our fuel filters. I had suspected this might be the problem, but in addition to that, the shutoff valve, located in our injection pump had been gummed up, and got stuck in the closed position. That is why, no matter how much I tried to restore fuel flow, while we were at sea, I was unable to get fuel to the injectors… now I know. Now, I just need to figure out how to keep it from happening again, in the future.

Thank you to all the people that have reached out, and checked in on us through this last week. We feel so very loved! Thank you!

~Chris

Crystal - “Crash Course

It might be too soon for the irony of that title to be funny to my husband.

It feels like it has been so long since we left St. Augustine. I feel like much of our passage reminded me of the infant stages of parenthood. Moments of wondering how our species has survived this long when so many things can kill you. Who said I was ready for this? WHERE are the adults? And when…WILL I ever sleep again? Things like hygiene become luxurious. Simple tasks require all the energy you can muster. Honestly, it didn’t take me too long to forget how hard babies are and want to do it again…I’m still in the midst of finding a stride here after our first multi-day passage but I am also finding so much gratitude.

Chris wrote out much of what happened in a midweek post earlier this week, so I will try not to be redundant but add to the account with my experience.

Leaving St Augustine on Tuesday morning, the cold air and nerves shook me physically. We weighed anchor by hand (because that’s how we do it) with no issues and made our way toward open ocean through the channel we had seen thrashed by incoming waves the day before. It was wild- the waves were so chaotic in direction and so constant in coming that it made the jetty white with spraying foam. When we got to that corridor, we found the state had not changed much. The chop beat Agnes into a violent stagger- anything that could move, flung with a jolting pendulum swing. We have a pair of rubber 35# dumbbells that tried to jump a ledge into our electrical panels and water maker. I found them teetering. Our kitchen was found wanting in stowage- the contents of all the cabinets tinkled and clunked- a couple spewed their insides. Our bed was covered in books. Posy and Jasper’s floor was covered in art portfolio contents and game pieces. 5 gallon jugs slid back and forth. A guitar fell off it’s hanger. It was so rough that there was almost no resituating things in the moment and being inside for more than a few minutes made our insides reel too. Once the sun rose, I breathed again. In all the battering, we only lost the contents of Chris coffee cup…you can send your condolences directly, and sadly a guitar tuning peg snapped off. Otherwise, we learned our lesson with a huge helping of grace. It could have been so much worse.

As a mother, my priorities are to keep people safe, fed, and feeling covered and connected. On that first day…safety was questionable, food was improvised and I think we all felt a little vulnerable. But we also felt like we were doing the thing we came to do. We decided to make a watch schedule. Two people at a time taking 2 hour shifts. When Posy and Jasper heard they got to do a night shift, they were giddy! Until it was night…We decided that the 2 youngest got a pass on night shifts. Sailing under stars is pretty incredible and that first night was calm and the dolphins came and escorted us. They seemed to be moving in slow motion for us, either making fun of how slow we were going or trying to make us feel better. Chris said in his last entry, that we decided to “sail as much as possible, and let the journey take however long it was going to take” - in my mind this meant maybe a second night. After that first night, I was rooting for an early stopover. Posy was ready to give up sailing entirely. Jasper was a trooper but hadn’t been feeling well since we got underway.

The second day I actually made breakfast while Conrad and Posy took a morning watch. By noon we ran out of wind and decided to have lunch before we turned on the engine to make some headway. It was pretty clear that another night out was happening whether we wanted it to or not. I had a sudden rush of anxiety because we had lost not only cell service but also VHF and Starlink at some point during the night. Not having checked in with anyone, having a change in plans and not knowing how the weather was developing made me want to head back to connection stat. When Chris tried to fire it up and it didn’t start right away, everyone surprisingly kept their cool. We were on our way within half an hour- Cap’n Chris bled the fuel lines and the engine sounded great. We made great time straight in until we could get in touch with my mom and get an update on weather and a rocket launch we needed to avoid at Cape Canaveral. As we approached the point where we needed to tack back out away from shore, the engine died. As the sun was setting, the wind was picking up and so was the sea state so we opted to sail overnight- which was the plan anyway, instead of immediately addressing the engine. Chris and I ended up covering most of the night watch on Wednesday- I could not bring myself to leave my kids, even though they are capable, out on dark seas that seemed to be trying to shake bodies free from their seats on deck. I was holding on to my seat- quite literally to keep from lifting off. The sky was clear and the stars were bright, again the dolphins came. We made almost 7 knots for most of our 5 hour watch. That doesn’t sound fast but it felt fast.

The next morning, after getting some sleep with older boys at the helm, the wind died again. The first order of business was coffee. I went to fill the kettle and noticed there were blobs of growth floating in the water bag. Then I checked another…and another. All our drinking water was fouled. Suddenly the timeline felt a whole lot more urgent. In hindsight we learned we should absolutely have some sealed emergency water, and water purification tabs just in case. While I was boiling our chunky water, we were greeted by a family of dolphins. There was one little guy who was clearly a toddler- I needed the comic relief at this point. He was doing all these funny awkward jumps and tail slaps, he would surface and just sit there still until one of the others noticed him and then tear off. He kept making fart noises with his blow hole- they all make kind of a gasping sound, this was not that…this was a little boy making an intentionally obnoxious noise! I loved that little guy! I saw God nodding.

After waiting for wind, and none showing up, Ellis decided this was our new existence. He decided to jump in while Chris tried again to troubleshoot the engine. Posy and Oliver wrote a new song together. The wind stayed quiet but the waves started tossing us again. Because there was no wind and no engine, there was no steerage. So we sat there or rather, we rocked from starboard to port, starboard to port, starboard to port. It was probably a 30 degree swing in either direction with each rock. Finally we got some sails up and found the slightest wind and it built from there to a decent pace through the afternoon. By the first night watch, Chris said “Don’t go too fast, we’ll get there too early in the morning”. We still needed an engine to maneuver into the inlet- some seasoned sailors would do it without an engine but we aren’t there yet. Because the wind was right on our nose we tacked (zig zagged) sharply, fighting for any southerly gains. By morning it was clear that we couldn’t just keep sailing with southerly winds, we might get there, but we needed water and sleep sooner than later. Chris called tow services and got some quotes and information. As we weighed our options, storm clouds grew and darkened. The reality that this might be the end of our whole adventure started to rise in my mind. Not knowing what was wrong with the engine and knowing how much the tow bill was going to run felt like a very possible hard stop. Posy was in tears thinking of having to go back to a boatyard. Chris couldn’t even consider it, in the moment. When the tiny towboat showed up- it was a confusing mix of relief and grief and gratitude for all we’ve experienced. The lightning started as we attached the tow rope. Chris standing at the outside helm trying to keep our 53’ steel beast inline with the 24’ inflatable that was pulling us. I watched the thunderheads coming in behind him, his hands on the stainless helm connected to the steel boat with the 65’ tall dual metal rods in the open ocean and started counting Mississippi’s. Suddenly one struck nearly in sync with the accompanying thunder and there was a literal wall of water closing in on us. Everyone moved inside. Chris contorted himself to see through the crackled windshield and over sail bags on deck for the next 5 hours to steer from our interior helm. The ride was wild. Wind and waves kept everything lively but the kids were so tired, they all found places to crash out. At some point I realized how hard Chris was working to see over the sail bags and decided to go out and move them during a lull in the storm. As I stepped out of the cockpit I realized that if I went over, there was nearly no hope I would be found. The time it would have taken to radio the tow captain, get the boats stopped, detached and try to spot me in the dark raging currents would have been futile. I held on real tight, stayed real low, and prayed real hard. When we finally arrived in the still anchorage we were all wired and spent. Not excluding our tow captain. He was understandably ready to get home and hurried through dropping us at anchor….duhn duhn duhhhh. (Check out Conrad’s blog for that story)

It was bedtime. We slept. The next day we got fresh water and just kind of enjoyed the still of Sabbath.

This is long already so I will let the kids do most of the telling of this past week.

Bullet points:

• We made some new friends and started learning a new language (ASL) to communicate with them! They are amazing and are also new to sailing!

• We drug anchor without warning in a very tight anchorage.

• We hit another boat- with a fender between the boats, thankfully. The owner was unphased- his tv show was on, apparently, and he couldn’t be bothered.

• We ran aground. Right by the beach full of children playing in the shallows.

• We got towed AGAIN!

• We swam in the river almost every day.

• We paddle boarded to, and around, islands.

• We were blessed by friends and family reaching out with encouragement and even financial support.

• God said we aren’t done.

• Chris got the engine running!!!!!

• We caught fish.

• We’re starting to think about another adventure….

Thanks for being here, friends, for ALL of it. We love you all and are so grateful for the amazing people God has rallied around us!

~Crystal

Ellis - “What. A. Week.”

*I wrote what is written below in preparation to post with last week’s blog, but we never got a chance to put it all together in time. I’m sure the rest of the family will fill in some of the details, but long story short—it was a rough passage, but we’re safe, and doing much better now! Thank you to everyone who checked in and kept us in your prayers!

*After much second guessing and debate, we decided Monday evening to leave St Augustine FL, and sail down to Fort Pierce. The whole passage was supposed to be around 180ish nautical miles, (about six times the distance we had ever traveled in a day!) which has entailed at least two overnighters so far. It’s Thursday morning (the 26th) now as I write this, and we still have nearly 60 miles left. It’s been a bit of a rough trip so far. We’ve battled 6 ft swells, sea sickness, alternating bouts of high winds and no wind, a finicky engine, drinking water gone bad, and seriously messed up sleep schedules. But that being said, we’re alive and we haven’t given up yet. I for one feel slightly more capable as a sailor, but truth be told, I’m not having much fun-I don’t think any of us are really, but I’m still holding out hope that it’ll be worth it. When things get hard I can usually buckle down and work hard, but I have a really hard time staying optimistic, and that tends to make me not very fun to be around, I think. It’s something I’ve been struggling to get better at: being able to take the hardships, inconveniences, and situations with grace. But that aside, we’re hanging on. We’ll figure it out.

~Ellis

Conrad - “Paradise at a Price”

What a week! It is crazy how much has happened since the last time we did a normal blog. Dad did summarize last week, but even still it feels like too much to fit into these past two weeks. Since Dad’s update, or at least since what he covered in his update, we have made new friends, and done some exploring. Also, as Dad said in his mid-week blog post, the tow boat dropped us in a tight spot in the new anchorage and we weren’t able to get very much chain out with our anchor. We were also uncomfortably close to a couple of other boats, which made us a bit nervous. A couple of days after arriving in Fort Pierce we drug anchor because of the current and wind pulling together against our insufficient amount of anchor chain.

It’s a really good thing that we drug anchor in the middle of the day, and not the middle of the night, because even though we failed to notice it right away we did catch it before running into another boat. Actually, we did run into another boat, but fortunately, we were ready and had some large fenders between the two boats. We eventually drug past that boat and ran aground, which sounds really bad but since we were moving so slowly and since the bottom was sand, it was more relieving than worrying because it meant that we weren’t drifting unchecked through the crowded anchorage. We got another tow boat to come and move us to a better anchoring spot. It was unfortunate that we had to get towed again, but at least we ended up in a better spot.

In our new anchorage we are much less crowded and we are pretty close to some cool mangrove islands. Also the water is clean enough, and warm enough, for swimming. There is quite a bit of wildlife around. I have seen dolphins, turtles, manatees, crabs, conchs, fish, and Oli, Mom and Ellis even saw a big manta ray jump. I came into the area hoping that we wouldn’t have to stay too long because I wanted to have the engine running as soon as possible, but guess what, it’s running! Now that it’s running I wouldn’t mind hanging out just because it’s a cool spot. It’s just the beginning of what we’ve been looking for, and we could probably spend a lot of time exploring it, but if we continue going south we might find even better spots. It’s a gamble and I think we’ll hang out here for a little bit, but we will see.

Thanks for reading!

~Conrad

Oliver - “The Good Stuff”

I have a feeling that most everybody else is going to write about how the voyage was terrible and everything broke and nobody had any fun. So I am going to make a list of the good and cool things that happened;

1. We are doing it! We were underway for 3 ½ nights and four days. We made a system of 2-hour watches (sailing during the night is pretty cool, but also exhausting)

2. Nearly all of our movement was done only using sails, our fastest recorded speed under sail was 6.9 knots. (about 7 mph)

3. We’ve learned so many details about our boat that we wouldn’t have realized otherwise.

4. We had so many dolphins visit us while we were out, probably over 15 pods.

5. We caught a fish, I had been throwing out at least 2 lines whenever we were moving, but that morning Jasper threw the lines out so I guess he gets most of the credit. It was a squirrel-fish, apparently the hook had some how missed the mouth and caught the underside… he was fine, when we threw him back in, he swam right off.

6. The water is getting so much clearer, even in the river we are staying at is swimmable. Still not perfect, but way nicer, it’s also way warmer than where we were before.

7. We zig-zag-travelled 232 nautical miles almost 3 degrees of latitude.

8. We got to see a Starlink satellite get launched from Cape Canaveral.

9. We are all still safe and well, we are enjoying the break from constantly moving though.

10. God’s still got us, and his plan is awesome, I am very interested to see what’s next for us.

Even though a whole bunch of things broke, I am still glad that we did it. It was gritty, and chaotic…

P.S. Art was really hard to do during the voyage due to the rocking, and the wind. But before and after I have done some, I did a boat portrait for our new friends here in Fort Pierce, and some acrylics.

~Oliver

Jasper - “Bully Ants”

By now, you probably know that we arrived in Fort Pierce this past Friday at about 10:50 in the night. We were running low on food, so Saturday evening, Me, Dad, and Conrad left in the dingy to wait for a grocery delivery on shore. As we stood there, my left foot started stinging, but thinking it was just the rain that was falling, I just left it alone. But soon it was really aching so I looked at it and saw that my pinkie, ring, and middle toes were all covered in ants!! I stepped away quickly and brushed (or mashed) them off. Dad told Conrad to take me back to the boat to get medic-ed. Back on the boat we got it cleaned up, and put some ice on it. The next morning I awoke and my toes were bubbly!!!!! And since then it has only gotten bubblier. But they don’t itch as much now so it’s less annoying. Hopefully my foot will be fully recovered soon. Well that is it for this one. Join us next time, as we continue our journey.

Also, I wrote another song:

“Clear Waters”
The waves wash up the seashore
Going to the beach is never a bore
The water is constantly changing the landscape
The sand and the water create a beautiful cape
Oh the water it’s so beautiful
Oh the seashells, they are bountiful
Oh the water covers the old things
And they uncover new ones
We experience something new everyday
We find a new place to stay
We enjoy the sun and the rain
Oh yeah and our boat weighs 30 tons
Oh the water it’s so beautiful
Oh the seashells, they are bountiful
Oh the water covers the old things
And they uncover new ones
Oh the water covers the old things
And they uncover new ones
Oh the water covers the old things
And they uncover new ones
Oh the water covers the old things
And they uncover new ones
Oh the water covers the old things
And they uncover new ones
Well we love to go to the beach
I’ll splash in the waves while my hair is bleached
The water will make my skin wrinkle
And our brass bell will tinkle
Oh the water it’s so beautiful
Oh the seashells, they are bountiful
Oh the water covers the old things
And they uncover new ones
Oh the water it’s so beautiful
Oh the seashells, they are bountiful
Oh the water covers the old things
And they uncover new ones

~Jasper

Posy - “Fishing”

After getting towed, which I am sure somebody else has talked about (it was very scary!), we found some new friends, they had two girls (7 and 9 yrs)! The girls invited me over to fish with them, so Ellis and I went over to their catamaran. The two girls taught me how to use their fishing poles. We went to the right side of the boat and that blocked our view of my boat. We tried so hard to make the hook go far out with our swinging fishing poles. After a while the younger one said that a motor boat was bonking on our ship. So me and Ellis watched as our boat got towed away to a different spot in the anchorage. But me and Ellis were still on the catamaran. It was not very fun for me to watch it because I was worried about our boat and family. Me and my new friends kept playing, but soon we got tired of fishing. So we decided to play a memory game; the younger one totally beat us. They got bored of that too, so we decided to do acrobatics on their net! It was so fun; we jumped onto cushions, which they had thrown on to make it more fun. The older one even decided to sit with their cat in the middle of it! It was a very nice cat, all black and white. Soon Ellis said it was time to say goodbye. Speaking of which that’s all I have for you today, have a great weekend!

Ps. Still doing art commissions. For ten dollars! I would love to hook you up with some art if you’re interested.

~Posy

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Below is a picture of the route that we sailed last week.

Chris – “St Augustine to Ft Pierce”

It feels important to get the whole story written down in one place, but it feels like it is going to be a long one. I am doing a mid-week post, because I want this to be fresh. Already, just a few days after our passage to Ft Pierce, Florida, the details have begun to blur, and there are things that I’m sure I am forgetting, so here we go, this is the most adventurous adventure we have encountered on this journey so far:

A week and a half ago, we were anchored in St Augustine, FL. St Augustine is a beautiful town, with rich history, and a lot of activity. On our first day at anchor, we encountered a town full of light, and music, and history. The nearby Castillo de San Marcos, a historic fort, (shaped like a ninja star when viewed from above) that sat directly West of us, fired blank cannon shots over the bay where we were anchored every few hours. To the South, the Bridge of Lions sat; it is a beautiful stone-clad drawbridge that opens frequently to allow boat traffic through as boats travelled North and South along the Intercoastal Waterway. Loud sunset cruise/ bar boats traveled up and down the waterway, blasting music, and packed with “happy” tourists and drink enthusiasts. Super cool, but not really our scene. We were still looking for warm, clear water, snorkeling, swimming, and sunshine. The weather in St Augustine was still hitting high 30’s in the mornings, the water temperature was 59 degrees, and the water clarity was… not clear. So, we started looking further South. There is a hump in Florida’s East coast, where Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center are located. South of that hump, water starts to become clearer, and water temperatures start climbing up into the 70’s. That sounded like what we wanted to head for, so we made plans to leave as soon as we could get provisions, and find a good weather window.

Based off our boat’s height, and depth, we chose Fort Pierce, Florida as our next targeted anchorage because it was the next inlet, to the South of Canaveral, from the Atlantic, that could handle our dimensions. The chart-plotter (like google maps for a boat) said that this was a 166 nautical mile distance to travel. We use 5 knots (5 nautical miles per hour) as our average speed because we can easily make that speed under motor even if the weather doesn’t cooperate for sailing, so 166nm translates to 33 hours and 15 minutes of travel time. This was a BIG jump from the day-sailing that we have done so far, in our sailing careers. It would mean at least one overnight passage, and would at least triple the distance we had traveled in this boat, to-date. But we were excited to put ourselves to the test… nervous, but excited.

The weather window we chose would take us out of the St Augustine inlet in the dark, on Tuesday morning, Feb 24^th. It was 36 degrees out, and the sea-state (waves) was rough, but was supposed to settle down as the day progressed. We kind of wanted to know what rough seas were like, and we purposely decided to experience some hard things to gain experience. The weather was supposed to clear up, and be pretty mild until Friday afternoon. We figured, if we stuck to our pace, we would arrive by Wednesday evening. We nearly hit 2 buoys on our way out… turns out, it is hard to see in the dark, and not all the buoys have lights on them. The seabirds that sleep on these floating navigation markers were not impressed with us coming so close, at such an un-godly hour, but we made it out without a scratch, so we called that one a win. Next came the waves. The height of the waves is not always as important to pay attention to, as is the “period” of the waves, meaning how many waves are coming during a period of time. We read that, as a rule of thumb, if the wave period is twice as long as the wave height, it will be a relatively smooth ride (example: 5’ high waves with a 10 second, or longer, interval is fine, but 3’ waves at a 3 second interval is terrible.) We were in 5-7’ high waves that were coming at 4 second intervals… NOT smooth. We found, very quickly, that we had not stowed/ secured the interior of our boat well enough for these conditions. There were things flying everywhere in the boat. As we got out far enough from shore to turn South, the waves, which had been hitting us from the side, moved to the back of the boat, and the ride improved. Other than the boat being a mess, this also felt like we had handled it, and kept going. Rough sea test… check. The sunrise was gorgeous. We put up the sails, turned off the engine, and started making gains on the miles we had to travel, South. We decided to sail as much as possible, and let the journey take however long it needed to take. We were sailing. This is what we have been preparing to do, and it felt good to be doing it. Actually, people were not feeling great… not full-on seasick, but definitely not feeling 100% either. What was sleeping going to be like? Being on-deck, looking at the horizon, is the best place to be. But, inside the boat, there is ALL of the boat movement, with no visual reference, so your equilibrium rebels, and your insides start swimming. All told though, people ended sleeping okay inside. Laying down seems to help with the nausea. We didn’t sleep as good as we do at anchor, but we did sleep. We slept wherever was most comfortable; sometimes in our own beds, sometimes somewhere else. Jasper refused to even attempt sleeping inside the first night, and slept on the deck, bundled up in layers and sleeping bags. It was only 39 degrees that first night. I slept 2 or 3 hours, broken up because I was just too wound up to turn off. We had split up our watches in pairs. For two hours, two crew would steer the boat and watch for other boats, or objects, in the water around us, then we would change out, and two fresh people would watch while that last two would try to get some rest. The wind and waves had calmed overnight, and we sailed slowly, at 2 knots, through the night and into the next morning. We let Wednesday just play out, without firing up the engine. There were dolphins that would come and travel alongside us, for a time, and even a sea turtle too. The sky and the sea were beautiful, and full of the Glory of God, and constant motion. We had fishing poles out… but we caught no fish. We ate food, we listened to music, and we congratulated each other for being real sailors.

We were not really sure if we wanted to sail another night, but by the afternoon, we had decided that we had moved so slowly, for so long, that we would have to spend another night out. We opted to start the motor and begin moving at a reasonable speed. I flipped the ignition switch… and the engine wouldn’t start. I panicked for 2 whole seconds, then I got down in the engine room to try to figure it out. I have had a couple pesky problems with air getting into the fuel lines. I thought I had fixed them, but I decided to try bleeding the air out of the fuel lines first, just in case this was the issue. After about 20 minutes, I had the engine running, and all seemed to be well. We decided to motor towards the coast so that we could check weather, and let people know that we were staying out another night. We had been traveling 12 miles off-shore. That far out, we had no cell service, and only very limited Starlink coverage. 7 miles off shore, seems to be the tipping point where we can start to really be connected again. While we were approaching “the hump,” where Cape Canaveral is, we watched as Space X launched a rocket, and later saw the boosters coming back in for a landing. That was a pretty cool experience! At about 8:30pm, we decided to slow the engine, and turn South. The wind had picked up quite a bit, and we wanted to sail through the night, not motor. Traveling under sail is much quieter than motoring. But, as I pulled the throttle back, the engine died. I attempted to restart it, but it would not go. It was dark now, and we had been planning on sailing anyway, but it is a very vulnerable feeling to be traveling under wind-power alone, with no back-up propulsion. The seas were getting rougher again, with the rising wind, and being below in the engine room was nasty, so we opted to sail, and to work on the engine in the morning. We hit our fastest speeds that we have ever made on this boat, through that night. It was a bit of an intense ride, so I steered, and Crystal sat on watch with me… for 5 hours.

The winds and the seas calmed again, and we woke two of the older boys to take over, and I got another 3 hours of off-and-on sleep. We traveled under sail for the first half of the day, on Thursday. I tried bleeding the air out of the fuel system again, but the engine didn’t start. I had done my best to clean our fuel tanks back in the boat yard, but the rough seas had stirred up junk in our tanks that I had been unable to reach in the cleaning process. I could see dirt and debris in our fuel filters, so I figured they had become clogged. I rigged our boat to run out of a clean 5-gallon jug of diesel, figuring that, if I could get the engine restarted, at least we could motor in, and anchor at the next available inlet, but even bypassing the dirty filters, I was unable to start the engine. I tried everything I could think of. To make matters even more interesting, Thursday morning, we discovered that all our water had fouled. Green blobs were spotted floating in all the drinking water jugs, and, also in all the general-purpose water containers. The rest of the trip, we were thirsty. Filtering and boiling water to use, in small quantities, praying that no one would get sick from the water, and mostly, just not drinking enough. Thursday night, we tacked back and forth through a southerly wind, making painful progress South, traveling nearly 30 miles, but only making 5 miles progress towards our goal. Somewhere during the night, we tore one of our sails when it got caught on some of our rigging. I got more sleep that night… mostly because my family was insistent. They could see that 6 hours of sleep in 3 days was not going to cut it for me. Morning came, and a dense fog closed in around us. That was a fun new experience. Visibility was only a hundred yards in any direction. The fog lasted for most of the morning, but thankfully we didn’t cross paths with anyone else out there… at least we didn’t see them. We ran out of wind in the middle of the day, on Friday, and sat bobbing in the Atlantic. The sea was beautiful, but I mostly missed it because I was in the engine room. The water had become clearer, and warmer. Ellis dived under the boat to inspect the bottom for the first time since we launched her, last December. We caught our first fish. And still the engine wouldn’t start. In the afternoon, the wind started to come back, and I instructed the crew to head West, straight towards the nearest shore. We were parallel with the San Sebastian inlet, which was still 30 miles north of Fort Pierce, but I wanted to be in cell range, in case we needed to call for a tow. I wanted to call tow companies on the phone, rather than initiating an “emergency” call on the radio, but I was still working in the engine room too. I was hopeful that we could pull off a last minute miracle, and motor into our intended port under our own power. As we rocked brutally, side to side, trying to make our way West, we found that the drain in our propane locker was taking in water every time we rocked to starboard, and then leaking water back into the boat. The water was accumulating under our engine, which is the one place that we don’t have a bilge pump. You are not supposed to have a bilge pump directly under your engine because any oil/ diesel that was leaked under the engine would be pumped out into the water, which is illegal. Just another thing to add to the “I guess I’ll fix that later” list. It was not a dangerous amount of water, but still… a boat is supposed to keep the water out.

It was Friday, and there was rain and lightning in the forecast for the evening. Finally, I came to the last trick I had up my sleeve for the engine, and when that failed, we decided to call it. I began calling tow companies, and making arrangements. We could be towed North, back to Canaveral, which was the shorter distance, or we could be towed South, to our intended port of Fort Pierce. There is a “lock” (a chamber with gates at both ends, built into canals or rivers to act as an “elevator” for boats) at Cape Canaveral, and the lock closes at 9:00pm. We weren’t sure we could make it there in time, so we made the decision to be towed South. Our towboat showed up at 5:00pm. There were some scary looking clouds building over the land, to the West, as we hooked up our 58,000lb boat to this boat that looked undersized for the task. But the towboat captain knew what he was doing, and the little towboat was powerful. Before long, we were underway. I could tell that the towboat captain was looking warily at the sky, and was anxious to get moving. Within 10 minutes, we saw the wall of rain headed our way. The lightning was crashing around us, the rain fell in BUCKETS, and the wind whipped up into a frenzy. It was a high stress ride. I could only see the towboat’s flashing lights ahead of us, and steered our boat to try to keep our nose pointed at those lights. Darkness fell, and the rain kept pouring down. It took 5 ½ hours of pounding through rough surf, and high winds to arrive at the inlet to Fort Pierce. My crew was so tired, that all the kids just went to sleep. The boat pitched and slammed into waves, but they were OUT! As we pulled into the inlet, the wind died, we transitioned to the flat water of the Indian River, and the rain slowed to a soft mist. Our towboat captain recommended an anchorage that seemed like it would be best for our depth, and positioned us to drop our anchor in the middle of a fairly crowded anchorage, full of sleeping boats with anchor lights shining around us like low stars. We were so tired, and so grateful to be motionless.

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Relief was paired with feelings of embarrassment for needing a tow. I was deeply disappointed with the engine quitting. If you have been reading our blog for any amount of time, you know how hard I have worked on that engine, and it feels very defeating for it to be out of commission again. On top of that, there was the towboat bill… let’s just say that being towed 30 miles on the ocean, during a storm, costs substantially more than towing a vehicle 30 miles on a road. We were devastated to have to shell out those funds on an already tight budget, but simultaneously SO grateful to be safe, and that no one got hurt along the way. We slept in, on Saturday morning, and decided to spend the day resting, as much as possible. We got clean drinking water, we ate, and we talked about our adventure. It felt like we had gained a whole cruising season’s worth of stories, in this one passage. All told, we had actually traveled 232 nautical miles, and had spent 90 hours at sea. During those 90 hours, we only spent 11 of those hours under motor power… well, 17 hours, including the towboat. We feel accomplished, and discouraged. We feel tired, but we are hopeful. Little did we know, but this was not the end of the craziness, but I will save the rest of the story for Friday.

If you made it all the way through this story, thank you for reading. Even this long form does not really cover all the details. There were many beautiful, good moments. Sailing at night is beautiful! When a sailboat is working like it should, and the engines are off, there is nothing really like it; it is amazing. The dolphins really do come swim along with your boat, just like the sailing YouTubers show. Time spent together, seeing the bigness of the ocean, is priceless. There were many challenges that we handled well, and gained confidence through. The crew became more competent, we each learned new skills, and we learned how to work together well. And, there were scary moments, that made us grateful that God promises to never leave us or forsake us. We don’t know how long it will take for us to make our repairs, and be ready to move again, but we are still here to do it. Praise God!

This Friday, we will return with the whole family’s perspectives. Take care! Thanks for reading

~Chris

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We are OK.

God is good.

We did our first overnight passage and we got more than we bargained for.

Stay tuned for updates. We all have stories but aren't in a position to compile them at the moment.

Much love from the Mullen crew.

Prayers appreciated.

Normally, we would type, and assemble the blog on Friday, but we were busy sailing all day, so we made you this video update. We hope you enjoy!

If, for some reason, the video player above does not work for you, you can try this link instead.

Have a great week!

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Chris – “A New View”

Well, we finally did it. We pulled up our anchor, and headed South. If we had been traveling by car, we would have moved only about 45 minutes South… but by boat, it’s a bit more impressive feeling. We logged our first 40 nautical miles of Atlantic Ocean sailing… well, boating anyway. The wind was much lighter than we predicted that it would be, and we motored the whole way down, which was a bit of a let-down. But our diesel engine worked like a champ, and pulled an 8-hour shift of ocean-travel, with zero complaints, and that was a huge blessing. All told, I am pretty pleased with the passage.

We had planned to leave last Tuesday, from St. Mary’s, and head to Fernandina, Florida, to anchor for the night, before continuing South on Wednesday morning. Fernandina is about 45 minutes from St. Marys, and is located right next to the inlet that we would take to go out into the Atlantic. Tuesday, we did all our prep work for leaving. We parked our car at the church we have been attending (they agreed to let us store it there, which was a huge blessing), hauled fresh gasoline (for our generator/ outboard motors), and water to the boat. I added diesel to our boat’s tanks, and we fired up the engine to prep for hauling the anchor. After a few minutes, the engine suddenly died! We had not started hauling the anchor yet, thankfully, so we just stopped operations, and I started running through the possible issues, in my head… I pretty quickly remembered closing the fuel valve, while I was putting fuel in the tank, and I realized I had not opened the valve back up… we ran out of fuel. In a marine diesel engine, this means that you need to go through the engine to bleed the air out of the fuel lines, through various bleed screws, or the engine will not run. This took us an hour. I would like to speed that process up, in the future, because the idea of taking an hour to get my engine up and running while I am drifting is terrifying, but we got it done, and the engine was happy again. That hour, was the hour that we had planned to use to travel to Fernandina, though, and since we had already been running a bit behind schedule, we decided to cancel our trip to Fernandina, and just leave early the next morning, from St Marys.

We were pulling our anchor by 7:40 the next morning. The engine was happy, the sunrise was beautiful, and we were all feeling a bit jittery. Our anchor pulled up an 8’ long rotten log with it when we hauled it! That was a bit crazy, especially since we are still pulling up our anchor manually. But fortunately, it was rotten, so it was easy to break, and free our chain from. The rest of the anchor pulling went smoothly, and we rode the wind, and the current, out the inlet, turned South, and began our trek to Jacksonville. As I mentioned earlier, the wind did not really cooperate for us to turn off our engine, and sail, but the sea was relatively flat, and the ride was very smooth. There was a light rain for most of the day, and the wind that was there only served to make our wet bodies feel a little colder, so we all bundled up in waterproof layers, and stood around stamping our feet and looking cold. Even though the waves were small, a couple of the family members complained that riding inside made them feel sick, so we all hung out around the rear helm station, playing music loudly, and eating finger foods. I don’t know what I expected to see on the ocean, but there were NO other boats out there with us. We use a variety of navigation apps while we are sailing, and sometimes it looks like there are boats everywhere, but the sea was empty… granted visibility was slightly lessened by the rain, but still, we felt like we had the run of the place. It was equal parts unnerving, and totally exhilarating for me. I felt myself caught somewhere between, “I could go anywhere right now, and no one would stop me,” and, “I can’t believe no one has tried to stop me, or ask me if I am qualified to do this.” It really is the wild-west out there. Once we gave up on traveling under sail-power, we traveled a fairly straight line down the coast, to the inlet of the St John’s River. There is a lot of Military activity in that river, and along the banks, but we met very few boats, or ships in the river, on the way in. We were aiming for an anchorage along Sister’s Creek, which would have necessitated us going under a bridge. Our mast stands 64 ½” feet above the water, and as we approached the bridge, at high-tide, the marker at the opening read 65’… I fully chickened out and did NOT attempt to go under that bridge. We anchored, instead along a beach, on the other bank of the St Johns River, called Great Marsh Island. It was a beautiful night, and we were the only ones anchored in this area. Large ships, some of the largest ships I have ever seen, at least while on a sailboat, cruised up and down the river all night, rocking us with their wakes, and thrumming their huge engine noises. I set up alarms to check our anchor/position through the night, but all was quiet, and I slept well all things considered. We decided to move the following day to an anchorage out of the main river, and we are planning on spending a few days here, stocking up on some Sam’s Club, and waiting for a weather window to continue South. The huge ships in the main river are really cool, but I also felt like a little bug, camped out along an elephant trail, so we decided to move.

It is crazy how refreshing a new view is. Wednesday night, we anchored with a massive refit facility to the North of us, and a small patch of palm trees and sand, bordered by marsh to the South. The refit facility works on MASSIVE boats, and was lit all night long. We could see a huge Navy Destroyer being worked on, and a massive pleasure yacht. The palm trees to the South added just enough Florida to distract from the all-too-familiar marsh behind it. The strange ships, and boats that passed were new, and different from the type of boats we were see in Georgia, and it all worked together to give us, “we are really doing it,” vibes! Though, every time I realize that we don’t have a car anymore, I panic a little bit, but we are figuring it out. This is the new life, I guess it is time to get used to it.

We have a lot to celebrate, and a lot to look forward to. We are thankful that God has brought us through this far, and we are eagerly looking forward to what He is doing in our future. I think the anchorage we are staying at now has the potential to be really cool, but I will save the report on that for next week. Until then, take care. Thank you so much for following along with us, and for sticking with us while we have been trying to kickstart the travel portion of this sailing adventure. We are so blessed to know amazing people, and to keep meeting them along the way.

~Chris

Crystal - “Agnes Toddles”

2/12/2026 marks one year since we moved onto Agnes. When we left Montrose, we committed to the year away. It took us a long time to find a boat, and a longer time to make her seaworthy. But today, I woke up in a coastal anchorage after spending a day at sea. It finally feels like we are not pretending! Our weeks on the water in St. Marys felt a little like we were just joining a community of long-term tenants on the river; most of our neighbors had not moved for years.

One year to the day. One year ago felt like a serious blow. A year ago yesterday, we said goodbye to our 16 year old puppy. That wound was real fresh, and then we moved into a smelly, dirty, defunct boat that we had only just begun to bring life back to. So much slow steady work, so many setbacks and realignments, so many incredible unforeseen blessings in the midst. We have found people who are invested in us in the most random ways. We have been taken care of by strangers. Cheered on by people we may never even meet. We have found the type of friends that most people are just dreaming of these days.

What a year! I’m amazed with my crew. I’m amazed at how much more I have to learn. I am continually seeing God expand my understanding and expectations of Him. He is so much kinder, so much bigger and more invested in my abundant life than I ever could have dreamed up.

A year in, and it feels like we are just getting started. We have so much to figure out now. No car. No address. People did this way before all the things we consider necessities were even available, and now I realize we come from absolute savages! Anyway, we are celebrating, and we are still all in!

Do something hard. Do something that makes you nervous. Believe that God’s calling you to something good whether it feels good today or not.

~Crystal

Ellis - “We’re Boatin’ with the Big Boys Now”

This week we moved anchorages down from St. Marys GA to Jacksonville FL. Jacksonville is a much larger city than St. Marys was, and as a result, it’s much busier. Coming into the St. John’s river channel, where we’re anchored, the first thing I noticed were the gigantic boats and their accompanying rigs/docks. Right inside the channel mouth the river splits, and on one side the river goes on, and on the other side is a large man-made cove where the Naval Station Mayport is based—which is to say it was full of 500+ ft Destroyers. We’ve sailed around big ships a bunch of times before but it’s still crazy to me that people can, and have, built such humungous structures that not only float but are also fully capable of crossing an ocean. Farther up the river, right across the river from where we anchored actually, is a facility that services the destroyers by literally lifting them out of the water. By using a series of very powerful winches, they first pull the nearly 10,000 ton destroyers out of the water on a submersible platform and then they use a special system of rails to move the platform onto land. . . which is crazy. Currently the USS The Sullivans is the particular destroyer being serviced at this facility, and even from all the way across the river, it makes me feel a little bit better to see how rusty it looks! It’s not just us that have problems with the stuff.

The destroyers aren’t the biggest boats around here though. We are anchored in part of the ICW (Inter Coastal Waterway) which is a partially artificial, 3,000 mi inland channel stretching up and down the east coast which allows vessels to easily traverse the coast without having to brave the open ocean. I guess I hadn’t really thought about it much but last night (Wed evening), we all noticed a noise outside and when we looked out our windows there was this huge car ferry blocking out the entire north horizon! It was a little nerve wracking to see such a huge boat tearing by in the dark! There were another half dozen or so ships that came through in the night, and every time I’d briefly wake up to the boat rocking in their wake. This morning a particularly big container ship passed by and I was able to catch the name and do a little bit of research. The El Coquí is a 750 by 105 ft container/roll on-roll off ship with a 31 ft draft. Capable of carrying 26,500 tons, it is used for trade between Jacksonville and Puerto Rico. Fun fact: a coquí is an adorable, little-tiny yellow frog found in Puerto Rico. An ironic name for that gigantic, black brick-of-a-boat!

~Ellis

Conrad - “New Waters”

We are now in Jacksonville. I decided to write about our new anchorage a little. We ended up looking at a couple of spots, because our first spot that we had been aiming for was past a bridge, and we weren’t positive that we would quite make it under. Due to conditions (wind direction, tide, and forecasted weather) we decided to anchor in the main river beside a little beach for the night. After anchoring and unwinding for a bit from the passage, we went to the beach to explore. The beach was on a little undeveloped island that barely anyone ever came to. The shore was an interesting mix of sand, shells, and mud. For the most part the mud was not overwhelming, but mostly just made the ground kinda soft in spots. There were a lot more shells than I had expected for this far up the river, ranging from small snail shells and various little shellfish, to medium sized conchs and big clam shells, I even found a couple of shark teeth. Beyond the shore there was a big swamp area and between the two, partly on the beach, there were a few old trees. Many of these trees were dead and had fallen over, exposing their roots and basically turning into big crazy chunks of drift wood. I thought it was a pretty cool place, though there were a lot of biting gnats so it was better when we were moving. It didn’t really smell too good either, there were a bunch of dead jellyfish stranded all over on the beach.

Reading through this, it doesn’t sound like a very nice place, but I thought that it was cool to go at least once. Also while we were there we saw dolphins and a pretty good sunset.

Thanks for reading!

~Conrad

Oliver - “Bow-Riding with Dolphins”

As You know, we moved from St. Mary’s to St. John’s on Wednesday. While we were underway there was only about a one foot swell. But even that much makes a big difference. We all stayed out on deck as much as possible because we would start to feel sea sick if we went in the cabin. But, if you walk to the very front of the boat, you can stand on the wooden deck of the bowsprit. There, it gets the most wave action, but since you are in the fresh air and can see the horizon, you don’t feel seasick at all. That is my favorite spot so far for while we are underway. For the first few miles, we had a pelican following us. It must have thought that we had fish or something, but it actually ended up landing on the bow rail right in front of Ellis. Soon after it realized that we weren’t going to give it any fish, and it drifted away. Later as we were entering the St. John’s inlet, we noticed some dolphins swimming towards us. A few of us ran up to watch them, and while we were watching, they came to the bow, and hovered there for a moment, and then left. There were so many dolphins on that trip, but that was the closest they got to us. Thanks for reading! Have a great weekend!

~Oliver

Jasper - “The Bronze Colored Blankets”

Guess What!?!!?!?? We left St Marys yesterday! We woke up at the break of dawn and hoisted anchor in the misty morning rain (we were supposed to get 0.5’’ of rain). And by 7:00am we were motoring away toward the sunrise. The rain switched on and off for a while but it really got going at around lunchtime. But luckily for me and Posy we had an amazing mom who gave us two bronze colored blankets that mostly kept the rain from coming in and soaking us. But for the last hour and a half there was no rain so the wind and sunlight warmed and dried us and our blankets. It was actually really fun at some points. Now we are in the St. John’s river in Jacksonville, Florida. I think that we are staying till next Thursday, so stay tuned. See you next time!

~Jasper

Posy - “Cannonballs are floating!”

On the way to Jacksonville, we saw at least 70 cannonball jellyfish. It was pretty darn cool, and Jasper kept saying “there’s one, and another,” and so on, and so forth. Later that evening we went on an expedition to a beach that we were anchored by. There were so many cannonball jellyfish that had washed up and died but there were some that had recently washed up, and I got to save one. Anyway, this all led me to research them and so here’s what I got; their diet is mostly fish eggs, oyster larvae, and zooplankton. They basically take big gulps of water and filter out those things to eat. This is the part that makes them have an ecological role, when they eat the zooplankton it helps the nutrient cycle. They are also a big food source for endangered species. Also they can range from a tennis ball size to a volleyball size. They have many predators such as the endangered leatherback sea turtle, many types of crabs, a few different types of fish including the spade fish and butter fish, and most sea birds. Anyway, that is what I wanted to share for this week. If you would like some art I would be delighted to do some for you. Have a great weekend. See you next time!

~Posy

Have a great week! Leave us a comment! We love to hear from you guys… not because we are trying to beat the algos, we just love you guys!

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