Today’s Friday. Last night, a front came through—no surprise to anyone paying attention. The forecasts were clear: sustained winds in the upper 20s with gusts pushing toward 30 knots inside the harbor.

Ahead of it, a lot of boats shifted across Elizabeth Harbour to the west side, tucking in closer to Exuma Island to get out of the long fetch that a strong westerly can build on. That made sense. I wasn’t overly concerned about a bit of rolling. It’s uncomfortable, sure, but temporary.

What I was concerned about was where I was anchored.

I’d been sitting about 200 meters off some rocks between two bays on Stocking Island. In the east winds and settled weather that we been having, it was fine. But with a blow coming from the west, it put me uncomfortably close to a lee shore. If something failed—anchor, chain, windlass, anything—I’d have very little time between an anchor alarm going off and real consequences.

So I moved.

I went back to one of my original anchor spots here in Elizabeth Harbour, on the south side of the channel between Stocking Island and Georgetown, just west of the mooring field. I relocated yesterday, well before things built, and got set with plenty of room.

Right on schedule, the wind came up around 2 p.m. It blew steadily through the night. I got up once to check on things and saw 26 knots sustained, with gusts pushing into the high 20s, maybe brushing 30. The boat felt solid. A bit rolly, but predictable. Nothing alarming.

I didn’t sleep particularly well, but I did sleep. That’s part of it.

The forecast shows things easing off today, which is good—I need to get into town. It should stay manageable through Friday, then build again on Saturday. And looking ahead, there’s another front lining up for Tuesday.

Nothing dramatic. Just winter weather doing what winter weather does.

The lesson: it’s not just about how strong the wind will be—it’s about where you choose to be and how prepared you are when it arrives.

I’m back in Elizabeth Harbour, anchored off Georgetown again. This place has a way of pulling you into its orbit. There’s always something going on—dinghy raft-ups, beach gatherings, music nights, cruiser meetups. It can be great, but it can also be a lot. This time around, I’ve been intentionally limiting how much I plug into the social side of things. It’s easy to get overwhelmed here if you say yes to everything.

One thing I have been re-engaging with is the logistics side of living aboard—specifically, how you actually get parts into the Bahamas when something breaks.

After flushing the outboard (as described below in the Log Book entry), the fuel line between the portable fuel tank and the outboard somehow decided to disappear. Just… gone. It’s a small part, but it’s critical. Without it, fuel doesn’t get to the engine, and the engine becomes decorative.

A few months ago, I upgraded the dinghy and it came with a 20-horsepower Honda four-stroke on it. Great engine. Quiet. Efficient. I also kept my older 15-horsepower Mercury two-stroke from the original dinghy, which had been living in the aft lazarette. That redundancy paid off. I broke it out, mounted it on the transom of the dink, at least had a way to get back and forth to town.

Which was important—because I needed to find a freight forwarder.

There are ways to get Amazon deliveries into the Bahamas, but they’re not obvious the first time you do it. The short version is that you ship your order to a forwarding agent, and they handle delivery into the country. Once it arrives, you pay duty and customs fees, then collect it locally.

The agent I ended up working with was Forbes here in Georgetown. They made the process straightforward, which was great when you’re already solving one problem and don’t need to create another.

It works—but it’s not cheap.

In my case, a roughly $40 fuel line is going to cost me close to $100 by the time everything is said and done. That stings a little. But when I think about how much extra fuel I’d burn running the old two-stroke over the next couple of months versus the much more efficient four-stroke, it’s a trade I’m willing to make. I’ll call it an efficiency tax.

It’s also probably my own fault. I must’ve left the fuel line somewhere stupid. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how it actually went overboard, but it’s nowhere on the boat. Murphy’s Law says that the moment I pay the duty, place the order, and wait for delivery, I’ll find it tucked behind something or exactly where I meant to put it.

My best guess is that it went over the side—maybe kicked, maybe dragged by something shifting, maybe caught by wind overnight. We had a couple of breezy nights earlier in the week. Hard to know. Easy to lose small things at sea.

I did make the rounds locally before ordering. None of the businesses I called carried the fuel line with the specific adapter I needed. I understand that customs duties exist to protect local businesses—but when the part simply isn’t available locally, you do what you have to do.

One captain I talked to suggested rigging a temporary line directly from the tank to the carburetor. That may work in theory. I’m not ready to go that route yet. But it did give me an idea - see The Log Book for how that worked out.

Living aboard teaches you this lesson over and over: there’s almost always a way to solve the problem. It might take longer. It might cost more. You might have to get creative. But if you’ve got a little redundancy, a little patience, and a way to get to town—even on a smoky old two-stroke—you can usually keep moving.

Last weekend, I mentioned to another cruiser on the beach that it might be fun to get a music session going again. He told me the trick was simple: just announce it on the morning cruiser’s Net. If people want to play, they’ll show up.

So on Monday morning, I did exactly that.

After the net wrapped up, a follow-up radio conversations turned into a loose plan. We settled on Wednesday at noon, down at Chat and Chill Beach—easy to reach, casual, and it had a tiki bar if things didn’t quite come together.

They did.

I brought my mandolin, which is usually a safe bet since guitars tend to appear. Sure enough, we had plenty—four guitars by my count. But what really made the session was the unexpected instrumentation. One guy showed up with a recorder and a trumpet. Not exactly standard beach-jam fare, but very welcome. Another brought a banjo, which immediately made me smile.

For about an hour and a half, right through lunchtime, we played there sitting in a ring on the sand. Nothing formal. No setlist. Just people listening to each other and jumping in when it felt right.

The trumpet was incredible—maybe a little loud for a beach jam, but in the best possible way. It carried. It pulled people in. When we launched into Ring of Fire, he joined without hesitation and absolutely nailed it. That one turned heads.

Of course, that was the moment my camera wasn’t recording.

Still, between a few bystanders and other cruisers, we managed to piece together some video from different angles. Not perfect, but honest—which feels appropriate.

It was one of those afternoons that reminds me why music works so well in places like this. You don’t need planning committees or rehearsal schedules. You just need someone willing to say, “Let’s try,” and a few people who show up with instruments and open ears.

I’m already looking forward to doing it again.

Back in July of 2024, I made my first trip north on Celtic Cross. One of the jumps was from Norfolk to New York City—about two days offshore. We left on a Saturday morning. The crew was my son Antony, my friends Isaiah, and Graham.

It was the first time I’d ever sailed with my son. He was serving in the Coast Guard then, and still is. Graham is a Marine veteran and Isaiah, Army. It was a good crew—people who understood watch standing, not as a formality, but as a responsibility. People who knew how to stay alert when it mattered. That alone let me sleep easier, knowing the boat was being watched by people whose senses had been trained to notice small things.

We got underway just after the Fourth of July—Saturday, July 6th. As we moved north along the New Jersey coast, we could still hear fireworks each evening from towns ashore, faint and distant, drifting out over the water. It felt like the last echoes of land-based celebration following us offshore.

The night before we reached New York Harbor, fog rolled in. Real fog—the kind that erases distance and compresses the world down to what’s immediately around you. It was my first experience sailing in it. Radar was on and working well, but still, I chose not to leave the cockpit that night taking cat naps every 45 minutes or so. I rotated one person below at a time and kept two up with me, extra eyes and ears, just in case.

As dusk settled in the fog bank, visibility dropped to maybe fifty yards. The boat felt suspended in nothing. No horizon. No reference points. Just motion and sound.

And then Isaiah started singing.

It was an old Norse tune—Þat mælti mín móðir or My Mother Told Me. His voice carried across the cockpit, steady and unforced, echoing into the fog. Standing there, listening to him sing that song, in Old Norse, on a sailboat in reduced visibility, it felt almost unreal. Otherworldly. Like the present moment had slipped sideways into something older and deeper. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that sound, or how it moved me in that space. Here are some of the lyrics and the English translation.

Þat mælti mín móðir, at mér skyldi kaupa.
Fley ok fagrar árar, fara á brott með víkingum,
Standa upp í stafni, stýra dýrum knerri,
Halda svá til hafnar,
Hǫggva mann ok annan. 

My mother told me
That I should buy galleys with good oars,
Sail to distant shores,
Stand up on the prow,
Steer the noble barque,
Steady course to the haven,
Hew many foe-men. 

By morning, the fog lifted, and we sailed into New York Harbor at sunrise. Light poured through the buildings of Lower Manhattan, the city slowly revealing itself after the long night. We passed the Statue of Liberty with my son and two close friends on board, the boat quiet in that way it gets when everyone knows they’re inside a special moment.

It was a bucket-list passage for me. One I’ll always carry.

Take a listen to this live version of the song, and imagine it echoing through a fog bank at sea.

After returning from Cat Island, I decided to flush the outboard with fresh water before reinstalling it on the tender’s transom. It’s a small maintenance task, but an important one. Salt left in the cooling passages can dry, crystallize, and slowly restrict water flow. Add a bit of sand to the mix, and you’ve got the beginnings of a problem that won’t show itself until you’re relying on the engine.

Under normal circumstances, you’d flush an outboard using a set of muffs over water intake holes and a garden hose. I don’t have a garden hose—and more importantly, I don’t have fresh water to burn. Fresh water on board is a managed resource. These days, I’m running the watermaker about once a month just to stay topped off. Letting an unknown amount of water run through the engine didn’t make sense, and I don’t have a good way to connect flushing muffs to anything onboard anyway.

So I stopped and thought about what I actually needed.

What mattered wasn’t volume—it was circulation.

After experimenting with a few setups, I landed on a simple solution: a five-gallon bucket suspended over the side near where the outboard was mounted on the rail. The engine draws water in as usual, circulates it through the cooling system, and then discharges it through the telltale—the small outlet where cooling water normally exits back into the sea.

I rigged a catcher and return line so the telltale discharge fed straight back into the bucket, creating a closed loop. I added a small amount of vinegar and a few drops of Dawn dish soap to help loosen salt residue and grime, then ran the engine for a few minutes.

In total, I used about five gallons of fresh water. That’s not insignificant—but it’s far less than I would’ve used with an open flow, and in this case, that option didn’t exist anyway.

Once the flush was complete, I didn’t dump the water. I repurposed it. Rails, lifelines, chrome fittings, winches, and windows all got cleaned before the bucket was finally emptied overboard.

The setup worked better than expected. Simple. Effective. No wasted water. Check it out below.

Sometime after flushing the engine, the fuel line disappeared. This was the line that runs from the portable fuel tank to the outboard—small, unassuming, and absolutely essential. I didn’t notice it right away, but when it came time to reconnect everything, it simply wasn’t there.

Fortunately, I wasn’t completely stuck. I still had a spare outboard from my original dinghy—an older two-stroke Mercury that had been living in the aft lazarette. I hauled it out, mounted it on the transom, and got it running. Not elegant, not quiet, but it gave me mobility and a way to get back and forth to town.

Not long after that, the week took a turn.

Wednesday evening, while trying to start the Mercury outboard-my backup motor, I broke the starting cord. That left me stranded about 2 miles from Celtic Cross. I had to get a local water taxi to tow me back. On Thursday morning, while attempting to repair it, I damaged the part of the motor that holds the throttle linkage. At that point, the engine crossed the line from temperamental to unusable.

That left me sitting aboard this Friday, waiting on a replacement fuel line to arrive from Fort Lauderdale. According to the forwarding broker, it’s already stateside and working its way through the system. All I could do was wait for delivery the following week.

And then it clicked.

The Captain I talked to earlier in the week mention running a line straight to the carb. It occurred to me that I had a fuel line. It was just on the wrong motor.

The real issue was the fitting at the engine end. I looked that fittings on the Mercury and the Honda. The hose diameters and routing were nearly identical. The only meaningful difference was the fitting where the fuel line connects.

So I removed the fitting from the Mercury and transferred it to the Honda, routing it directly into the fuel filter. What started as a stalled afternoon turned into a careful disassembly, swap, and reassembly. When it went back together, it worked.

I was able to remount the Honda on the transom of the dink and keep moving while I wait for the proper fuel line to arrive.

I’m more than a little proud of this bit of improvisation. This is exactly the kind of thinking that living aboard demands—where resources are finite, stores aren’t always available, and problems don’t care about your timing.

To paraphrase the famous Martian astronaut Mark Watney:
I MacGyver’d the shit out of that.

On Monday, I let my professional circle know that I’ve stepped away from the company I’ve been with since selling my business nearly six years ago. It’s not retirement—I’m not wired for that—but it is a deliberate slowing down. A shift. A decision to focus my time and energy on sailing, on this journey, and on music in a way I never really could before.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate. Right place, right time, a few good decisions, and a lot of help along the way. That combination has given me the opportunity to do something I’ve carried quietly for a long time. Even more meaningful has been the support around me—loved ones, friends and family who understand what this chapter represents and why it matters.

Leaving wasn’t trivial. With the exception of a couple of short detours, I’ve worked in the same industry, and largely alongside the same people, since I left the military. That kind of continuity builds deep friendships and a strong sense of identity. Walking away from it is uncomfortable. A little unsettling. There’s a low-level hum of uncertainty that comes with it.

But there’s also clarity.

I remind myself—often—that we don’t know how many days we get. It sounds cliché, and I usually roll my eyes when I hear it said out loud. But it’s still true. And knowing that doesn’t mean rushing—it means choosing deliberately.

This is the first week where the news is fully out there. Over the coming weeks, I’ll start laying out what that actually looks like—the routes, the timing, and how this journey begins to take shape.

For now, the direction is clear. I’m setting my sights on a circumnavigation, even if the details are still emerging.

For everyone following along, thank you. I appreciate the encouragement more than I can say. I’m looking forward to seeing where this leads—and to sharing the story as it unfolds.