I am not good at waiting. Having to sit in the car, through a church service, or in a waiting room used to feel like physical torture when I was a kid.

While I’ve learned to tolerate (or at least mask) my discomfort at trivial waits now, repeatedly watching our friends sail off without us while we wait on parts to fix something that has broken on our boat is not my idea of fun.

The nice thing about cruising however is that you tend to catch back up with old friends in new, far flung anchorages. We left our New Zealand friends on Kaia back in St Augustine when they were headed to visit with family and we wanted to get down to West Palm Beach. The two weeks we spent in Staniel Cay waiting on a new propeller for our dinghy provided just the right time for them to catch up to us in the Exumas! We received our package (finally) they day before they arrived and sailed back up to Pipe Cay to meet with them. We spent the day snorkeling, paddle boarding, and beaching, rounded out with Moana 2 for the kids and sundowners for the adults. We were so happy to see them again! Even more fun, they’re on basically the exact same boat as us so we can swap stories (and parts) as needed.

The Kaia crew have similar long term plans as us, so we were able to buddy boat down to Georgetown with them. In Georgetown we caught up with two other boat friends we haven’t seen since Christmastime in South Carolina. Beyond the playmates for the kids, it has been SO NICE to have people to bounce weather and routing plans off of. It makes us feel much less alone in this new scary thing we’re doing. Receiving an “oh my gosh it’s so windy our school papers are blowing off the table” text message when ours are doing the exact same thing brings such a sense of community.

Next up in our cruising journey: taking the “Thorny Path” from the Bahamas to the Dominican Republic. This time of year is not ideal for the journey as the winter weather systems on the US East coast needed to disrupt the trade winds down here are becoming fewer and farther between. Bashing into the easterly trade winds will not be fun for anyone, so we need to wait for the winds to clock around and stay that way for sufficient time to allow us to make eastward progress. In the meantime though, Georgetown (with friends!) is a pretty great place to wait.

Also just as a reminder, if you’d like to follow along in real time we post the most frequent updates and pictures on Instagram at SailingZia.

Rowan adds:

“Life is better with friends cause then I get someone to play with. Here’s who I’ve been playing with. Leo and Willow, and also kind of Ronan and Jameson, and other kids.” 🙂👍🏻