At this point I began to resemble the horse who smelled its barn and so my dedication to recording and updating this website finally ebbed. Suffice it to say that we arrived safely back at our home port in Rock Hall, MD, and were picked up by Sandy’s sister and her husband who ferried us home.
Cruising aboard our boat to and through the Bahamas was a dream trip for us. It was an adventure Sandy and I will treasure for the rest of our lives.
I’m writing this in April of 2022, nearly twenty years after we completed the trip. I’m revisiting the site because I’m in the process of moving the content from my old, hand-coded-HTML website to WordPress. Moving 204 pages of text, formatting them and inserting 1,250 images is significant effort. I want to complete it before our camping trip to Newfoundland this summer.
We sold Whistwind in July of 2015, having owned her, made her our own and treasuring our experiences aboard her for thirty years. We decided it was time to let new owners enjoy her while we move on to other kinds of experiences.
One of the most remarkable parts of the experience we really only realized years after the trip. That is the spirit of community that exists among cruisers who take the same journey we did. Because cruisers are mostly far from home, often in remote places, they need to be fairly self-sufficient. And, sharing a general route down the ICW and through The Bahamas, they repeatedly encounter each other. Therefore, they tend to become each other’s social life and depend on each other for help and advice. That kind of community doesn’t happen in many of the other activities we participate in.
I hope you enjoyed this travelogue!