Living on a sailboat is never boring… and this episode proved it. 🌊⛵

From nonstop wind, thunderstorms, lightning strikes, and near collisions in Biscayne Bay, to grocery runs in rough seas with 4 dozen eggs balanced on a dinghy ride home — life aboard has been absolute chaos lately.

In this episode:

⚓ Strong winds and rough anchorage life
⚓ Another boat crashes into us at anchor
⚓ Friends’ sailboat gets struck by lightning
⚓ Bahamas prep begins
⚓ Boat projects, solar arch progress & dinghy repairs
⚓ Kids making friends and living their best salty life
⚓ The reality of full-time family boat life Somehow through all the craziness, we’re still finding sunset moments, taco nights with fellow cruisers, fish-catching adventures, and reminders that this wild lifestyle is exactly why we chose this journey.

We’re getting closer and closer to finally crossing to the Bahamas… if the weather cooperates. 🤞 Thanks for following along with our salty crew. Your prayers, encouragement, and support mean more than you know.

⚓ Ride the t, Capt. Josh, 1st Mate Sam & the salty crew

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Letter to home v. 03.08.2026

Hi Nobad Family! 

As mentioned in our last email, the forecast for this past week was uninspiring windy. However, I don’t know who at home is owed something from the Big Man Upstairs, but whoever was praying that the thunderstorms not come – we thank you. Weather predictions changed; although we received some rain, we had no thunderstorms this week. Hallelujah. So thank you! 

Believe us; we will take wind over lightning any day. Obviously, we sailors now. But we’ve been dealing with nonstop wind. Since last Sunday, the wind came and has not ceased. Sustained winds in the high teens with gusts up to the low to mid 20s knots. Every day. All day. We are so grateful for our anchor and chain, which allow us to leave the boat, even in these conditions, but it’s been wild to have no reprieve. We get soaked on the dinghy rides but we’ve learned to just accept it. Yes, wearing our rain jackets helps. We still manage to get to land every day and go to the parks. The kids are quickly learning how to make fast friends so they have others to play with at the park. And we realized if we time going in to town right after school gets out, there are a lot more kids to play with! 

We managed to create some sweet memories this week amongst the windy mayhem. First, our neighbor boat, which we referred to as “The Swedes” in our last email, we’ve actually gotten to know better. We learned that they are from Stockholm but the mom is actually French (she speaks French, English and Swedish)! The dad came over Tuesday to talk some boat stuff with Josh, he also wants to build a solar arch, and we invited him and his family over for Taco Tuesday! They have 20mo old twin boys and a cute little whippet greyhound (never thought I’d say that about a greyhound). They agreed and joined us for tacos and it was just so cool. It was a blast to have little babes on our boat and our kids had fun playing with them. We learned they’ve been at this location for about 6 months! Like us, they bought a project boat so they’ve been working on it (mostly at anchor) since they arrived to the US. Guys, these people are so impressive. The mom single handedly takes her twin boys, their dog, plus their double stroller to land at least once a day by herself on the dinghy. And they don’t have a car (same as us) so she will take her whole crew to the laundromat or grocery store nearby on foot as well – clocking two miles one way. They’ve been putting a lot of work into their boat so it was really nice to have a dinner with folks who are in the same boat (pun intended) as us. It would be fun to go to the Bahamas with them – that’s their goal once they are done with major refit projects. Oh, also! We learned the name of their boat – SV LEXAK. Maybe we will help each other finish putting our name decals on our boats. We are supposed to have a break in the wind Monday and Tuesday, so we plan to take the boat to the fuel dock, fill it up, and then anchor closer to SV Lexak. 

Josh finally ordered the remaining parts we need for our solar arch! So that’s a big step closer to done. Hoping for calmer weather this coming week so we can get it all up. We have two different boat friends who are in Ft. Lauderdale (SV Chasing Serenity and SV Orion) who are both looking to cross in two weeks – so we have our new stretch goal. 

Yall, we’ve had some big prayers answered this week. We are so full of gratitude. One of those answers being something to celebrate so we ventured into town and went to the Salty Donut. Those donuts are something else – they were so delicious. My favorite was the pistachio cannoli. God is good. 

With all the parts ordered and most of the parts already on our boat for the arch, I’ve entered Bahamas prep mode. I’ve contacted the vet where we will take Kramer for his health check. You have to get this done within 48 hours before entering the Bahamas, which is really frustrating (although they are more lenient for cruisers). We have to restock the boat food, we intentionally ran low this week so I could accurately order what we need. I placed the first big Walmart order this week and went to land by myself to pick it up. It was a riot, lol. It was windy, the waves are quite large and choppy, and I have weighed down the dinghy with an insane amount of groceries. I also had 4 dozen eggs sitting in a container on my lap on the way back, and I was desperately trying not to break them. I’m sure I was quite a sight ripping through the bay on the dinghy with a schload of groceries and 4 dozen eggs, bracing with one arm for shock absorption. You also don’t want to go too slow or you’ll get splashed a ton (don’t want wet groceries). I made it safely back to the boat and was sweating and exhausted…and ALL the eggs survived! 

Raegan is super frustrated by the wind because the chop and strong currents have prevented us from allowing the kids to swim all week. It’s been rough as that’s a great way for them to be active on the boat. 

Today did not turn out as we intended. This morning while making waffles, an older couple on a small monohull (20 ft or so) wasn’t paying attention and ran right into our starboard sugar scoop. Instead of turning off their engine and lowering their sail after impact (heaven forbid before), they then tried to get around us and ended up banging along into the starboard side of our hull as they moved forward. Luckily, they finally cut their engine because the wind then pushed them into the front of our boat where they unfortunately entangled themselves in our bridle. Josh ended up having to jump onto their boat to untangle the bridle from their outboard and help the gentlemen lower his sail so the wind would stop pushing their standing rigging into our bow. I got their information and they seemed to head back into the marina. Both parties just seemed rattled by the whole ordeal-they seemed rather embarrassed. It seemed like they were just going out for a nice Sunday sail. Luckily no one was injured and the damage seems mostly cosmetic. Took out a good piece of gel coat down to the fiberglass and lots of cracking in the gel coat on the sugar scoop. All damage appeared to be above the water line, and we checked to ensure we were not taking on any water. At a high level, we are very grateful it wasn’t worse. At a low level, we are very annoyed. The older couple was nice and we were just like, what were yall thinking? We are a huge boat at anchor (aka not moving) and you ran right into us. There’s so much space around us. To (kinda) help their case, a regatta was happening really close to our boat and they seemed to be trying not to get in their way and misjudged how far away they were from us. But who knows. We reached out to our cruising community on what we should do, so we’ve taken those steps. I’ve contacted insurance and the US Coast Guard (USCG). Josh went to shore to meet with USCG to get a written incident report done that we can submit to insurance, if needed. So we shall see what this does to our future plans now. And this all happened BEFORE boat church today. The one day I’m glad we did boat church, imagine them hitting the boat and we were gone. 

Our home Sunday school today was a good discussion on fasting, as we started enforcing Fast Sundays for Finn and Raegan last week. We had done some home church during the week as part of homeschool and Raegan was really curious about what “birthright” meant and how it works (following the story of Jacob and Esau). We had some good, kid-level discussions about it. 

We are so lucky to call you all family and friends. I know I write this every week but it’s so true. Some of our boat buddies we were with back in Marathon called us this week to check on us and say hello and yell at us to hurry up and get over to the Bahamas. It was so cool of them, we were laughing so hard together. We continue to embrace what this crazy life throws at us. There a more thunderstorms later this coming week – so whoever you are, keep praying. ;) 

Hopefully next Sunday you will read the words – the arch is done – so pray hard that Josh can get it done with the ‘calmer’ weather. We are so ready to get the sails up and take this old vessel for a spin around the bay. 

Ride the t, 

Capt. Josh, 1st mate Sam, and our salty crew

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Letter to home v. 03.15.2025

What’s up Nobad Fam! 

We are coming at you once again from Biscayne Bay, hopefully with only one more email from here. *fingers crossed* 

This whole week we’ve been trying to move closer to our friend boats…

Well every time a spot opened up by them and we prepped the boat to move, another boat would come and take our spot. It happened three times! Friday morning there was another open spot, we prepped the boat and even turned on the engines to warm up, but alas another boat swooped in and took it. Since the engines were on tho, we did move the boat closer to our friends but stayed on the south side of the channel. So we are a lot closer to them, which is nice. 

The winds let up some the beginning of this week and we even had some calmer days. The kids swam a ton this week! Waking up in the morning and jumping right into the water. They saw so many fish and practiced diving down to touch the sandy floor. It was so cool. The life we pictured living on a boat started to take more shape this week. Josh and I even found a few moments after dinner to just enjoy each other’s company and watch the sunset. 

The latter part of this week has been very humid and muggy from distant thunderstorms, so Josh pivoted projects and got all the fans on the boat working. It has been amazing! (And cheaper than running the AC all day).  

We had another visit from Sam’s uncle and aunt!! They took us to Costco so I could do a big haul for Bahamas prep. The kids were so stoked to eat dinner at Costco. I haven’t been to Costco in over 6 months, so it was a fun excursion for me too. They also surprised the kids with fishing nets! Talk about some divine intuition. The kids had been begging us for fishing nets. They’ve fished with them every day, Skylar even caught a tiny fish! 

They are so generous. We love our family. 

We haven’t made progress on the arch due to the weather and we are still waiting on the remaining parts and praying they get here this week. Instead, Josh cleaned up the captains station in the salon and it looks so much better! He got all the breaker panels cleaned up and a lot of the items on the desk sorted and put away. We look a lot less like a hot mess now. 

Yesterday after Josh returned to the boat from walking Kramer and doing a trash run, I decided to patch up the dinghy. Since we moved closer to our friends and the expected bad weather keeping us on the boat, it seemed like a good time. Since patching requires a full 24 hour period where we can’t use it. So Josh helped me and we got ole spongebob (that’s what we call it) patched up. I’ve patched it up before and those held for a while but it was with a patch kit we found on the boat and didn’t have any idea how old it was or even what the material was (which does matter). This time we bought the legit repair stuff so we are hoping this will be a huge improvement!

It’s clearly spring break, or that’s what we are assuming, because the mega yachts in the marinas were driving in and out of the channel by us all day yesterday with different guests going for cruises in the bay. It’s cool to see the yachts in action, although their wakes sure rock our boat. 

Today has been WILD and we for sure have some guardian angels watching out for us. We had legit thunderstorms roll in this morning right over us, with thunder and lightning all day. Late this morning a rather nasty squall rolled through with gusts up to 40 knots. I was looking out the windows and watching the other boats around us (it’s what I do when I get nervous about the weather) and noticed two boats facing a different direction than all the other boats – which is a big deal/bad sign. Upon closer inspection, I realized that they were in trouble. Josh and I both went out into our cockpit with the binoculars to see if we could figure out what was going on. Just to the south of our friend boats there was a monohull (who was actually the boat that took our spot Friday morning and is the reason we aren’t anchored there) and a trimaran. The monohull’s anchor chain somehow wrapped around the rudder of the trimaran. And they were very stuck taking the wind and waves on their beam (very uncomfortable). So they were in a hot mess in the nasty weather trying to get untangled. I was texting our friend boats over there to see if they could tell what was going on. We felt so bad for them. As soon as the weather let up, a couple of dinghy’s from other boats zipped over to them to see if they could help. We could not because our patches are still curing. Then sea tow came out. Then another round of the storm passed over. After a couple hours they finally got untangled. We aren’t sure who is at fault, but our friends think the trimaran drug anchor. But who knows. I had messaged the owners of the monohull yesterday because when they were trying to anchor they accidentally grounded their boat and had to get towed. So I reached out just to check on them and we went back and forth in friendly conversation for a bit. So I reached out today after this whole episode and she said they were shaken up but doing good and just happy to be out of the weather. 

During that whole event, one of our friends, SV Vega texts me, and say they got struck by lightning. A lightning strike on a boat is game over – all electronics are shot. Engines don’t work. Amongst other things. So their plans to leave here are now out the window. They confirmed they were ok and will get it all sorted tomorrow. We are praying that their anchor holds fine tonight until insurance and the tow boat can come out to them tomorrow. Even the anchor is controlled by electronics. This is the boat with older kids, not “the Swedes” with toddlers, for those wondering. 

We were pretty frustrated we kept missing our opportunity to anchor closer to our friends, and today proved God’s timing. If we would have been able to anchor by them, then it’s very likely we would’ve been in the mess with the trimaran AND our mast is one of the tallest out here and we would have probably taken that strike instead of SV Vega. 

However, We are safe, our anchor (the great potato) has held so well. Many prayers of gratitude have been said. The opening song at church today was Savior, Pilot Me and it seemed rather fitting. 

When there was a decent break in the storms, I received a notification on my phone from one of our sailing apps. Another catamaran near us had been struck by an unmanned monohull boat that broke free of its anchor in the strong gusts – they put out a warning to the anchorage. Today has been rather bananas. 

Speaking of boat damages – we’ve been able to call the guy who ran into us last week and he’s been really good to work with. So we are making progress there.   

Thank you, as always, for your prayers. They’ve clearly protected us today. Wish us luck as we try to wrap up everything to get out of here. The weather this week looks not-awesome and it doesn’t look like the next good weather window is until the following week. So that’s lame, but we roll with it because what else can we do. 

And if you didn’t notice, the 40 knot gusts mentioned earlier were a lot less scary than our episode in Marathon, FL. Are we becoming seasoned sailors?! ;) Love you all. 

Ride the t, 

Capt. Josh, 1st mate Sam, and our salty crew