It has been 14 months since my last confession blog entry, and a lot has happened. The last time I wrote, we had just returned from our Spring 2011 three month cruise in MV Sea Spirit, our 63 foot Sea Spirit trawler yacht. That trip took us from Ft. Lauderdale across the Gulfstream current to the Bahamas, and down the Exuma island chain to George Town and back, with many pleasant stops along the way. Since then, we've had two major family travel excursions, including a month aboard the 100 foot ...

End of Part One - We have had a phenomenal time on Sea Spirit We have had an absolutely wonderful first year aboard Sea Spirit. For a family's first introduction to cruising, I'm not sure we could have chosen a better boat. We are very grateful to the entire Sea Spirit Yachts crew for everything they have done to make a wonderful, seaworthy, comfortable trawler, and also for building a great, responsive company. In particular, I would like to thank the following Sea Spirit people: Dan Fritz (C...

Sea Spirit, being unloaded, before we owned her Sorry to have left some of you hanging after the last blog entry at the end of April. We greatly enjoyed the remainder of our spring cruising season in the Exumas. Sea Spirit is now back in Fort Lauderdale, while the Freedmans are at home in Honolulu until the late Fall. Those of you who have been reading from the beginning will recall that while the boat was fine, we ourselves had a bit of a bumpy start to our cruising career, suffering in the...

I thought I'd interject a quick blog entry with some fuel economy numbers for Sea Spirit. As you may recall, she's a very slippery Sparkman & Stephens hull design, so we knew she'd get good fuel economy. But we were so busy learning how to run the boat that it took us a couple of months to get around to truly measuring it. In order to do the measurements, we picked a calm day (of which we had plenty in the Exumas), and made sure that our GPS speed and our speed-thru-the-water numbers were conf...

The Freedman family has been busy over the last 3 weeks or so, learning a lot about operating our trawler, and getting to know one of the most wonderful cruising grounds in the world -- the Exuma islands of the Bahamas. Truly, I don't think I could have asked for a better training ground.   The narrow West mooring field at Warderick Wells Why is it so good here? Let me give a list: Shallow water -- Moving between destinations here means moving among waters that are in the 10 to 20 feet ran...

Winning the mental battles You may recall that in my last couple of entries, I've opened up my heart a little and spoke about some mental battles I was having with regard to boating. I'm happy to report that the last 12 days or so has been so wonderful that I'm feeling considerably more positive. Both my wife and I (and our kids) have had a chance to enjoy Sea Spirit and our surroundings, with friends aboard for a few days, and have 'decompressed' ourselves significantly. I have my own theories...