It Never Rains but it Pours

Our next adventure is about to take off. Instead of sails and salty decks, this season's crossings will be done at 35,000 feet in the air.

Our Flight Plan

🇬🇹🇨🇱 Guatemala City - Santiago Chile: A few days of exploring, wine tasting, and trying not to freeze after the tropical heat.
🇨🇱🇦🇺 Santiago Chile - Melbourne Australia: We'll hop the mighty Pacific Ocean and spend a whole month enjoying family time.
🇦🇺🇿🇦 Australia - South Africa: Crossing the Indian Ocean sky high, we'll land just in time for spring in September and of course birthday celebrations.
🇿🇦🇬🇹 South Africa - Guatemala: By mid October, the Atlantic hop will bring us full circle, right back to Intle Breeze for the start of a brand new sailing season and many new adventures.

Our sky passage will consist of 3 oceans, 3 continents, 3 months and enough time zones to spin your head.

Now before any part of this adventure could even begin, we needed to get many boat tasks and cleaning complete to get Intle Breeze ready to be left by herself for 3 months. Despite all the work we had ahead of us, there was always time for friends and some fun times, a last margarita Monday, and some final dinners with a touch of chaos.

As many of you have noticed it has taken me a long time to write this story. A couple of weeks ago I wrote version 1, when Eric read it he plainly told me it was lousy, truth be told it really was. This was when I realised that my brain was totally out of boat zone. Here is what I did know, without a doubt, is that I would be able to give you a little decent reading when I start to miss my floating home, and I think that time has now arrived, so here goes version 2.

Dinner with Soggy Peeps

I had a genius idea, and that was to check into the marina hotel 2 days before we leave, the logic behind this was to be able to clean our boat, without eating, sleeping and tripping over ourselves, creating more chaos. This worked out pretty well I thought, as the work seemed to get done at a much better pace.....or so I thought.

Our friends Arzum and Jens invited us over the night before departure for a  home made pizza dinner and a farewell drink at Monkey Bay Marina, although this did mean we would have to rely on friends for a dinghy ride as ours had already been hauled out of the water and because we are stern in, we will not be able to drop her. Thank goodness for friends, arranging a ride was pretty simple, well until the heavens decided to unzip, and gave us a stern reminder of who is in charge of Mother Nature. In the pouring rain the launcher arrived to collect us, all the while the rain was still belting down harder and louder than anyone had ever seen in this area. Thankfully it is not cold as the humidity levels are still very high, of course we have no raincoats......I mean why would we have raincoats.😝 We will not melt after all. I am sure our ride was wishing he had never offered, 😂 too bad so sad I am not missing out on Pizza. In the pouring rain off we went over the water to meet up with our friends,  I think it goes without saying that drowned rats would have felt sorry for us, soaked from head to toe, it was going to be a soggy night out.

The water just kept falling out of the sky like a tap that simply would not turn off.  Together with all this water came an army of bugs, some were harmless and others were vampires, by the end of the night I looked like a buffet had been served and my body was the main course, an endless amount of welts on both my arms and legs. Although as we know for every negative there is a positive, from our harmless flying friends we got a magnificent display of colourful bugs dancing under the lights which reflected the beautiful colour of the stained glass on the bar. We also met some new sailors and enjoyed delicious home made pizza. While sitting there enjoying the chatter and a couple of well deserved beers after all the days boat chores, the realisation finally set in, we are actually leaving tomorrow, we are all done, everything is clean, bags are packed and in the hotel, we are leaving this salty, unpredictable lifestyle behind us for 3 months. Staring into the heavy rain outside I was left wondering how long it will be before we start longing to return to our crazy salty life.

After an awesome evening with delicious pizza and even better company, we took the gap in the rain to head back to our Marina Hotel and get some sleep before our 7 hour taxi drive to Guatemala City in the morning.