adios puerto rico

Our stay in Puerto Rico ended up being a little longer than we had planned, but we got a ton of projects done. The most important one: we took out our old generator and put in a new one. Not an easy task with just the two of us, but we got it done with a lot of creativity.

Also pretty important and much easier: we replaced a light on the mast which requires sending someone up the mast. Emma loves any chance to be hoisted up the mast.

If she can't finish the job then I have to go up.

Olivia wanted to go up just for fun...

Last year we spent Christmas in Martinique. This year we would spend it in Puerto Rico. On Christmas Eve we baked cookies for Santa.

We had a quiet Christmas morning opening presents and spending the rest of the day at the pool.

This was the only photo with Santa we got this year.

One last thing we had to do before leaving was a trip to Costco. There are thousands of islands in the Bahamas. Some don't have grocery stores and the ones that do are very expensive. We planned to stock up with as much food and drinks as we could to last us as long as possible. This was probably our largest grocery receipt every... and the girls were pretty impressed.

It took us days to label things, enter everything into my inventory app so I know where to find them later and find a place to put things.

Finally the weather looked decent to start heading towards the Bahamas. We decided we would leave on the afternoon of New Year's Eve and try to be passing by San Juan at midnight for fireworks. I heard San Juan puts on a pretty large show, but I did not expect what we saw. The whole island was lit up with fireworks. We have never seen anything like it.

On New Year's Day a huge pod of dolphins came to tell us adios just as we were officially leaving Puerto Rico.

The trip to the Bahamas would take us at least 4 full days. This would be our longest trip on the boat. The Dominican Republic and Turks & Caicos are in between Puerto Rico and the Bahamas, so we figured if we needed a break we would stop at one of those countries for a little while.

Someone has to be on watch 24 hours a day. Since I am the one that stays up late at night I stay on watch until I get tired (usually some time between 1 AM and 2 AM), then Braden gets up and will go as long as he can while I sleep, then I'll get up so he can go back to bed. That usually means I get to see both the sunset and the sunrise.

Cruise season is definitely here. All the blue triangles are cruise ships.

Our boat is tiny compared to them, so we have to keep an eye on them and make sure they see us. Luckily they are so bright that we can see them from miles away.

After 2 nights and 3 days out on the ocean we decided to stop for a break. New year. New country. Hello Dominican Republic.