Temporarily not cruising around the world with H2OBO: What A Year It Was!

Quebec friends in Florida

I will always look back on 2011 as a great year. It began in the Bahamas with old friends and ended in Spain with new ones, and it was all fun and adventure in between. It was a year of achievement, learning and discovery. We took risks, overcame challenges, and continued the adjustment to our new lives. Most importantly, the year that was 2011 brought into sharp focus the very real opportunity that we have to live anywhere in the world that we wish to experience.

Gerri and Alan catching supper in Abacos

Shaking the Bahama beach sand out of their bathing suits

People, that's what can make a place truly memorable instead of merely beautiful. The white sand beaches, palm trees and crystalline waters of the Bahamas might only have been for us a postcard memory but for the friends we made there. Warm evenings spent at anchor having a few drinks with friends and fellow cruisers; catching lobsters among the reefs and grilling them on a driftwood bonfire made on an empty beach and warming ourselves by the dying flames as we watched billions of stars come out in the evening - that's how I remember the Bahamas.

Kathy & Elsie on cruise in the Sea of Abacos

Surprise visitors from Toronto....

....in Bermuda.

Beautiful Flores

The harbour in Horta

Bermuda, an improbably tiny speck of land in the middle of the nowhere in the Atlantic Ocean where you meet people excited by having completed their first ocean passage or by preparing for an even bigger one that will take them to a new continent. The Azores, the crossroads where you meet and exchange stories with other ecstatic voyagers that have made the 3000 mile journey to get there, and where you meet the people that live on these mountainous, flower-covered islands that are genuinely happy to meet someone from Canada, a place to which so many of them have some connection.

Anne enjoying a quite day on the ocean

The Crossing, I will remember it as weeks of living on the heaving ocean, beautiful in the way that the few elements that comprise the seascape - wind, clouds, waves, sun, moon, and stars - can conspire to present something new to behold each day; sharing the thrill with Maggie and Anne of seeing a whale, dolphins, another boat, or even some large floating debris that might punctuate the vastness through which we were sailing; and of course the humbling experience of being on a tiny boat when the big ocean gets a little angry at the audacity of us being there. In as much as it was a journey measured in miles, it was also a spiritual one, because if you lie on your deck a thousand miles from the nearest city lights on a calm, moonless night and look up at the clear sky with binoculars, you see among the billions of stars visible to the naked eye, billions more and know that you are still not seeing billions of others, you can't help but ask the oldest and shortest question in the history of humanity - why?

Europa Point

The European continent, the Old World where ancient history has shaped the land and its people, is where we have seen and touched things that people made well before the New World was ever discovered. A huge milestone was dropping anchor in Portimao, Portugal, because it signified that we made it - we crossed the ocean in a boat that we practically built. Also a big milestone was passing Europa Point on Gibraltar and entering the Mediterranean Sea because it will be our home and playground for the next few years and the achievement of a goal.

Terri and Drew in Mojacar

The girls having fun with paddles on the beach???

We closed out the old year celebrating with new friends that live here in Spain and have graciously invited us into their homes. We hope to add them to our collection of "old friends" that will we see in the future when we move on to new destinations and they come to visit us. We rang in the new year with cruising friends, both new and newer, which is all somehow appropriate. When we were all together on New Year's Eve, a toast was made calling for 2012 to be a better year, but I felt that, for us, that was asking too much. We could only hope that 2012 will be as good a year to us, our collection of friends, and to everyone reading this as was 2011.