Category Archives: Information

Information we discovered during our travels.

Keith’s First Ocean Adventure: Leg 1 San Diego to Oceanside

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We mentioned in our May 2012 update that we had taken Keith on three cruises around San Diego Bay by the time he was 8 weeks old. Shortly after his 2 month birthday (in May), we took him on a fourth bay cruise, and this time we stepped it up a notch by anchoring out overnight. Keith did just fine – in fact, that night he slept for 7 hours straight! (6 hours was/still is his norm, and believe us, that extra hour was a blessing.)

We decided Keith was ready for more adventurous cruising, so we planned a mini-vacation to Santa Catalina Island, about 80 miles northwest of San Diego. The last time we went to Catalina was in October 2006, when Kosmos was brand new.

We decided that instead of going to the main town of Avalon, we’d go to an anchorage called Catalina Harbor on the northwest side of the island. Despite the fact that it was probably the most sheltered cove on the island, it wasn’t all that popular of a boating destination. The nearby town of Two Harbors was tiny with few amenities. Niether of us had been to Cat Harbor before, but from the description, it sounded like it was the perfect “getaway” destination for us: quiet and peaceful.

Getting to Cat Harbor would take us 15 hours in head seas. We decided it would be best to break it up into two legs, with an overnight stop in Oceanside (about 40 miles north of San Diego Bay). The detour to Oceanside would add an extra couple hours of sea time to the trip, but we didn’t know how Keith would do in the open ocean and thought it was best to play it safe.

On Wednesday, June 6 at 0900, we untied the lines and headed to out. Sea conditions weren’t bad, but they weren’t good, either. Swells were coming from both the northwest and the southwest, hitting us on the port beam. Waves were 2 – 6 feet, gently shaped, and well spaced at about 10 seconds. There was a time when we had such a tolerance to the seas that we would have thought the conditions were fairly nice, but we’ve lost that tolerance and were both green the entire trip, though neither of us got sick. (Eric took seasickness medicine before we left; Christi did not as she is breastfeeding.) Keith slept for the majority of the 6 hour run.

The only exciting thing to report on the passage up was that near Oceanside we saw two military Hover Crafts doing exercises. We discovered that neither one of us wanted to change Keith’s diapers. The diaper changing station was located in the forward stateroom, a place neither of us wanted to be while fighting off seasickness. (Not being able to see the horizon often takes a person over the edge from nauseous to sick.) We also didn’t love walking up and down the stairs holding him while the boat was in motion. Keith pooped an hour out of Oceanside and we both agreed that he could wait for a fresh diaper until after we arrived. Fortunately, Keith didn’t complain.

We arrived in Oceanside around 1500 and were assigned a slip near the mouth of the harbor.

We’re kind of ashamed to admit this, but Continue reading →

May 2012 Update

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We have just lowered the price of the epub books from $7.95 to $6.95! Woo hoo!

Part 1 of The Unexpected Circumnavigation is available in e-pub at Lulu, iTunes, and Barnes and Noble.com. It is also available in paper format from Lulu and Amazon. Currently, Part 2 is available in both paper and e-book formats at Lulu. Part 2 should be available at the other retailers within 10 weeks. We’ll let you know when the other sites have the books listed.

If you’ve read either book and liked it, please write a review on any of the retail sites above, or on GoodReads.com. We’d appreciate it!

Our upcoming workbook, Recipe for Success: What Cruising Aboard My Own Boat Will Cost Me was about 95% done when Keith was born. We haven’t worked on it since, but we plan to finish it as soon as Keith is a little less needy.

Christi will start working on The Unexpected Circumnavigation Part 3: Oman to Gibraltar as soon as Recipe for Success is done. We estimate it will take her about 10 months to write it once she gets started.

In personal news,  Continue reading →

Keith Week 2 and 3

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We made another photo montage of Keith from Mar 24 to Apr 05. Like the last montage, it is mostly faces. He is an expressive little guy.

All the baby gear we got for Kosmos has been working out great. We use the glider chair for breast feeding, the diaper changing station in the forward stateroom, and during the night he sleeps in the little folding bassinet next to our bed in the mid-stateroom.

We took Keith out for his first cruise yesterday. It was just a quick bay trip to keep Kosmos exercised. We put Keith in the car seat in the pilot house for the duration of the trip. He seemed to really like the engine noise. While underway, he mostly slept. However, during docking he figured out he was not the center of attention and got upset.

Keith has been a good baby overall, doing all the usual things. Christi is recovering nicely. We think we have adjusted pretty well to taking care of Keith. Christi has commented that waking up a couple times for 30-45 minutes to breast feed and diaper change in the middle of the night is easier than having to wake up for a 4 hour watch during a passage!

Outfitting Kosmos For a Baby — Feeding, Diapering and Bathing

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Our new little crew member is due in only 5 days! Given the limitations onboard, we can’t go crazy with lots of baby products. We’ve carefully chosen a few key items that we think will meet the baby’s needs, yet work well with Kosmos’s space limitations. We’ve already covered the sleeping arrangements in another post. The other basic needs are feeding, diapering and bathing. Here is what we have done:

All the baby books claim that a glider chair and/or rocker are must haves for every nursery, both for feeding and for soothing a fussy child. So when one of our friends offered to give us her used glider and ottoman, we jumped at the opportunity. Most Nordhavn 43s don’t have room for such a large piece of furniture, but when we ordered Kosmos we decided to remove the port side settee and replace it with cabinets. Yes, we lost some seating, but it made some of the juiciest storage space on the boat even more accessible and gave us more floor space. We’ve always been glad we made the choice to eliminate the settee. But when the glider came into the picture, we were more happy than ever about it!

Much to our amazement, Continue reading →

Yellowstone to Jackson

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This post covers the late afternoon of Friday, May 14, 2010 — Day 21: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming to Jackson, Wyoming. You can read about the activities we did in the morning here and the activities we did in the early afternoon here. 

We left West Thumb Geyser Basin and headed south towards Yellowstone’s southern exit. Bordering Yellowstone is yet another national park, The Grand Teton National Park, which features one of the world’s most spectacular mountain chains, the Teton Range. These precipitous mountains rise directly out of the beautiful Jackson Hole valley. Being geologically young, little erosion has taken place, leaving extremely jagged and photogenic peaks. The largest of the mountains in the Teton range is Grand Teton, which peaks at 13,770 feet. A series of beautiful lakes sit at the base of the mountains.

While the Grand Teton park is quite large at 310,000 acres (including 40 miles of mountain range), it is tiny compared to Yellowstone. The park was first established in 1929, but it was much smaller then. Between 1930s to 1950s, and then again in the 70s, surrounding land, particularly in Jackson Hole Valley, was purchased and added to the park.

Grand Teton is outside the volcanic caldera, so it does not have thermal attractions like Yellowstone does. But there are many things about the Grand Teton park that make it special beyond the scenic mountains. It is one of the few places where that still feature the same species of flora and fauna that have existed since prehistoric time. There is a rich ecosystem with more than 1,000 species of plants, dozens of species of mammals, 300 species of birds, more than a dozen fish species, and even reptiles and amphibians. There are about a dozen small glaciers in the highest regions. Some of the rocks in the park are 2.7 billion years old, the oldest of any US national park.

As much as we would have loved to do more sightseeing in both Yellowstone and Grand Teton, we were running out of time. We drove through the southern portion of Yellowstone and all of the Grand Teton park without stopping until we got to our destination of Jackson, Wyoming. As you can see, the drive was gorgeous! And we didn’t even capture it all. We’re not sure exactly where one park ends and the next begins, but we know the first photo was near West Thumb Geyser Basin and the last photo in this series is at Moran Junction, which is just south of Grand Teton Park.

Continue reading →