Category Archives: Cruising Life

Describes an experience regarding the boating lifestyle of our travel.

Getting Ready to Return to Kosmos

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Another week has gone by since we wrote the last post, 18 days into our stay in the USA. We are absolutely thrilled to report that Eric’s mom went home from the convalescent home a few days ago. Her rapid improvement has been nothing short of amazing. Yes, she is still very sick, but seeing her get so much better so fast, it is easy to forget how sick she really is. We now have a lot of hope that she will beat the cancer altogether.

Now that she is doing better, at home, and her treatment and care strategies have been more or less situated, Eric’s parents have urged us to go back to the boat and continue with Our Plans. Once we got their blessing to go, we booked a flight back to Egypt. We leave in a couple of days.

In the beginning, Eric’s family was opposed to our trip. Now his parents are our biggest trip supporters and blog fans, which makes us happier than you can imagine. Eric’s parents enjoy hearing about our daily life and travel adventures via the blog, which are much more detailed than we could ever go into verbally. More than ever we feel they are traveling with us.

Though we are sad to be leaving our families, we are ready to get back to our own house (Kosmos is our house now), and to the slow paced cruising life we love. Our last few days at home have become more hectic than ever. We are trying to Continue reading →

Welcome to Port Ghalib, Marsa Alam, Egypt

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We approached the channel entrance at 0000 (midnight). The prudent thing to do would be to do circles until dawn. Since this is a brand new development, we didn’t have charts. The main channel buoy light was out. But there were additional channel markers that were visible, with an entrance buoy and red and green flashing lights. The whole development is well lit, and the ambient light made it bright enough to see well. The wind was still and the sea completely flat, helping with visibility. We decided Continue reading →

Oman to Egypt – Day 9

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11:00 — Yesterday afternoon the seas calmed down to where it wasn’t too bad. In the night it calmed down so much that the ride wasn’t bad at all. The wind died to practically nothing for a while. When the wind died, speed really picked up. But this morning, the wind returned with a vengeance. Wind was in the low 20’s, on the nose, and waves were angry and brutal. We slowed down to 1800 to reduce bashing. We are probably going to need to slow down even more. It is definitely in the miserable category right now. It is rocking so much that Christi’s tea splashed out of her cup and all over her while she was holding the cup steadily upright.

In good news, our 24 hour average was 7 knots, thanks to good speeds yesterday. We also crossed the Tropic of Cancer line a couple hours ago, so we are officially out of the tropics. In bad news, Continue reading →

Oman to Egypt – Days 7 & 8

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Yesterday morning, we saw a pod of dolphins playing at the bow. There were only 5 or 6 and they didn’t stay long, just a couple of minutes. They were tiny little guys, the smallest dolphins we have ever seen.

The waves were mildly uncomfortable in the early hours of the morning, and as the day progressed, the waves got bigger and bigger. By the afternoon it was definitely well into the “uncomfortable” category, not quite at “miserable”, but close. Eric got sick. His body just doesn’t do well in the lurching head seas. We had to lower the RPMs by 200 because we were just hitting the waves too hard at the higher speed. We were only doing 4.8 knots, abysmally slow for 1700 RPM.

Today the ride started off just a touch better than yesterday. In the afternoon, the sea Continue reading →

Oman to Egypt – Days 5 & 6

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We have a confession to make. As you all know, when we crossed the Pacific Ocean on our 21 day passage from San Diego to Nuka Hiva, the blog postings were in real time. We didn’t want anyone to worry about us, so we seriously downplayed how miserable we were during that passage. Now that the blogs are no longer in real time, we feel no need to underreport. By the time an entry gets posted about ugly seas, we are already safely in a port, so no one needs to worry.

A secondary reason we downplayed our misery on that first passage was because we were novice blue water travelers, and we didn’t want to sound whiny. We figured that Continue reading →