Wild Rumpus is Grenada undergoing some repairs under the supervision of its skilled and dedicated crew. I am in California and about to start teaching sailing. So what is next? That’s what family, friends, and I keep asking myself, and now I think I have some answers. Oh, and some more videos and pictures of sailing across the Atlantic from Africa.

What’s Next for the Blog

The original purpose of this blog was to keep our family informed about the move to San Francisco, the road trip, and the sailboat idea. As life kept chugging along and things evolved, the blog followed suit. Eventually, we got to the concept of shopping for boats, buying a boat, and then the blog was about the passage from Cape Town to Grenada.

Now that the blog is complete, I contemplated the possibility of wrapping it up. But, I must confess that I enjoy the writing process, and my ego needs the slight boost it gets with every like or comment. So, since I am going to keep the blog going, I will re-purpose it a bit.

After speaking to some sailing friends and some kind souls who actually read this exercise in narcissism, I’ve decided to continue the blog by simply allowing it to evolve as it has before. The blog will now focus on two things:

• dissecting our passage– figuring out what we did right and what we did wrong, sharing the various watch schedules, how we handled galley assignments, our daily maintenance routines, and life onboard generally, and
•  pouring over our Phoenix Marine built Xquisite X5+ catamaran in detail – from delivery and initial training to each leg of the sail, what we broke, what broke on its own (it is, after all, a sailboat), what gadgets we used, and the challenges of starting in a foreign country all the way up to the post voyage service (the fact that we even have post voyage service makes the purchase of an X5 wildly different than a typical production catamaran).

There are many better-looking people than me doing YouTube videos of passages (I’m a troll, but my crew were models of aesthetic pleasure from which the Romans could carve statutes.), but relatively few resources for people thinking about doing a passage that detail the actual preparation and then go back to critic their own prep. The same is true for boat reviews- very few people go back and review their own boat after they purchased it. And, while there are a lot of magazine reviews of various catamarans, none that I am aware of were done after 35 days of sailing in the open ocean.

Wild Rumpus performed really well, we felt safe, and the accommodations were comfortable. But boats break, and nothing is perfect- so we’ll detail what needs to be fixed, what could have been better (not much), and why I think the post-voyage customer service from Xquisite has been excellent and worth the extra money as compared to production yachts.

Some Video and Pics of the Crossing

What’s Next for Wild Rumpus

Wild Rumpus is undergoing maintenance and repairs in Grenada. Once the work is done, Wild Rumpus will cruise around Grenada until the end of hurricane season. On November 1, the crew and I will sail up to the USVI, where Wild Rumpus will stay for the season. In 2023 she’ll be available for a limited number of captained charters. Wow, that is a long way from this blog’s first post in 2017!