​We are back in Canada! Although we arrived in beautiful temperatures of around 17 degrees Celcius (62 degrees Fahrenheit), the weather quickly switched to being slightly below seasonal (-2 C / 28 F) and we have snow. Compared with Florida, it is cold! But we are happy and fully enjoying our time home.

Want to see what I mean? Click the buttons below!

Wild Horses was hauled out of the water about two weeks ago and we prepped her for a hot summer in Florida. She is now safely sitting on land at Green Cove Springs Marina in Northern Florida and, yes, she is hurricane-strapped to deal with the worst Florida wind events. Everything on the boat was removed and either put in our climate-controlled storage unit near Green Cove Springs Marina, or it was loaded into our car to be brought back to Canada. But the prep work didn’t stop there! All the walls, cabinets, floors and ceilings inside the boat were cleaned and sprayed with a mold control solution. We placed several moisture wicking containers throughout the boat to deal with condensation and lots of cockroach houses to kill any roaches that decide that Wild Horses might make a lovely place to stay for the summer. In order to further dissuade roaches and any other bugs, we closed our seacocks (water pipe outlets) and also stuffed them with steel wool. To also help with mold control, we have to make sure there is some ventilation within the boat. Since every hatch (our usual go-to for ventilation) has to be firmly closed to protect the interior from weather, we opted instead to just offset our cowl vents (also called dorades), with one facing forward and the other facing backward. Cowl vents are those odd-looking vents that sit on the boat deck. They are shaped to mitigate rain or seawater intrusion while still allowing fresh air to flow into the boat. And although they are effectively open tubes, one layer of screening at its base prevents any bugs or critters from entering the boat. These fabulous cowl vents have been our solution to allowing sufficient airflow to circulate within the boat while it is closed up tight during hot Florida summers. Awesome.
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All this prep work was what we did last year for our first Florida summer on land and it worked very well. There was no mold and almost zero bugs. We did have three roaches that tried to take up residence but they were quickly evicted. Then we immediately upped our roach prevention in both the boat and in the storage locker. Staring eyeball to eyeball with a cockroach while you are lying in bed is no fun!!

So, here we are, back in Canada with our boat back in Florida. Our plans are to return to the boat in October and then journey back to Grenada for the summer of 2026. But…
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There are lots of ifs, ands and buts with our plan!

​Unlike our first trip to Grenada, we now have a car that we have to store or sell. We will also need to figure out a good solution for health insurance. Last time, we were eligible for a two-year extension for our provincial healthcare. Coupled with travel insurance, we had low-cost health coverage for emergencies where ever we travelled, including the United States. But that option is only available every five years, leaving us ineligible for this next journey south. Likely, we will need some sort of “Expatriate health insurance” to cover us once we have exhausted our seven-month out-of-province health insurance.

And then there are new regulations, and a new political climate, around travel to the United States. We are unsure how this will play out but are watching carefully. Right now, our concern is low. Although we feel confident that we can navigate the environment today, we are working on back up plans, just in case travel to the United States becomes far less than welcoming. Still, our feeling is that all will work out just fine and we will be reunited with Wild Horses next fall.

For now, we still think of ourselves as liveaboards but with a temporary status of having land full time under our feet. It has been a fun two weeks of getting back to the conservation areas and trails we have missed, the climate-controlled living that make our days super comfy, and hugging our family and friends that we love dearly. Yay!

Oh my. What a season. Or, non-season, to be more accurate. Yeesh.

We happily launched Wild Horses a few weeks ago and quickly moved her to a dock at Reynolds Yacht Centre, a mere 1.3 nautical miles north. Yes, you read that correctly. After four months living on the boat on land, waiting for our engine to be rebuilt, and dreaming about heading south…our first trip on the water was to head north.
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But this wasn’t a move borne in craziness. No, Green Cove Springs is on the St. John’s River and the only way to get to “getting south” is to first go north to Jacksonville, where the St. John’s River meets the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) and also provides an inlet that opens itself directly to the Atlantic Ocean. Sailors take either of these two routes as they head south.

At Reynolds, our plan was to spend about a week provisioning and emptying our storage locker before making our own journey south, with a new plan to go to the Florida Keys rather than the Bahamas. We had about two months left in our season, which sounds like a lot until you start factoring in distances and weather. The Bahamas is hundreds of nautical miles from Green Cove Springs. And the weather was forecasted to be terrible for crossing to the Bahamas over the next week. We knew it would improve but our fear was being in the Bahamas and trying to rush back to the States to haul out before we needed to be back across the border. We do our best not to move Wild Horses on a schedule and all we could see was a big old schedule if we tried to get to the Bahamas. We would be rushing provisioning, rushing the crossing of the Gulf Stream, rushing to get to a Bahamian sandy beach. Maybe we would have one moment to breathe deep and dip a toe in the beautiful blue Bahamian water and then…we would be rushing back to stage our crossing of the Gulf Stream again, and then rushing to haulout and to prep the boat for another summer in Florida. Yikes, it only sounded stressful to us. No, we wanted some calm joy on the water. So, instead, we set our sights on the Florida Keys, or as far south in Florida as we could get.

We started to get the boat cruising ready. We attached our sails, installed our full enclosure, set up our boat cushions, and made a loose plan of our journey.

​Sigh. Two weeks later and we are still at Reynolds Yacht Centre.

What happened?

First, another boat issue reared its ugly head. On our short cruise from Green Cove Springs Marina to Reynolds, we saw that the navigational instruments tied to our autopilot weren’t working. That means no depth, wind or speed readings and no autopilot. All of this is not critical…except depth. Without a depth reading, running aground becomes a real possibility, especially in the ICW.

We did some troubleshooting of the issue ourselves and with some of our sailor friends, but we couldn’t find the source of the failure.

At our wits end, we called Al’s Mobile Marine Service (our fabulous mechanic!) and he had one of his electronics technicians come to our boat to diagnose and fix the problem. This added a one-week delay to our plans.
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During all of this, we were chatting with family and friends. We are very lucky to have lots of support and cheering from the sidelines, biggest among those are our moms and dads. They share our joy and our pain, and make both even better, no matter where or what we are doing. It was after one of our calls back home that we realized that a quick trip to the Florida Keys is not where our hearts and our heads are fixed.

We are ready to be home, back in Canada, where we can give real hugs to our moms and dads and to give back some of that support that they so freely give to us while we are living out our dreams on the water.

Lucky us 😊.

Our sails are now off again and Wild Horses is getting ready for its second summer in Florida. We will move the boat back to Green Cove Springs Marina in about a week and then head back to Canada. The boating season wasn’t much for us this year but it hasn’t spoiled our sense of adventure. We will return to Florida next fall with plans of sailing south once again. Where? Not sure but the dreaming is in full swing and we are ready for whatever is next for our cruising life 😊.