See ya later, Caribbean! Hello, Mediterranean!

Anyone who has ever crossed an ocean on a sailing boat knows that getting the boat ready is always the worst part (ok, sometimes it can also turn into fixing the boat after the passage). Once you're off the dock, you settle into a rhythm of doing watches on deck, sleeping, and eating. Occasionally you read a book, or watch a movie, or even have a shower if the weather permits it. You chat with your fellow crew members, and even if after about 12 days you start fantasizing about the first meal and cocktail you will have when you arrive, you generally have a pretty good time.

But the weeks/days leading to the departure are usually a mad scramble to fix everything that need to be fixed, think of all the things that might break during the trip, stow away all the fragile/useless item, find crew, and fill every possible hole inside the boat with food or water. Given the fact that only 10 days ago we still didn't know whether we would have to sail across, you can imagine the amount of things we had to do in about a week. I won't give you a full list of what we did, but here is enough to give you an idea: take our new racing mainsail down, and put the old one in its place, fix 2 stanchions that had come off the rail, fabricate a new piece to connect our spinnaker pole to the mast, service the engine and the generator, find a phantom leak in the master cabin, install a new spinlock and replace the outhaul, fit the content of our container back into the boat (definitely Bill's favorite), provision for 6 people for at least 21 days (definitely my favorite part).

Finding crew has also proved to be a lot more complicated than we expected - that's what happens when you have only a 10-day notice for a 6-week long passage, and when all your yachtie friends have turned into responsible persons and now have steady jobs on other boats (for which they also need crew of course, you get the drift...). After a week of interviewing very strange people found on various websites or on the docks, we finally completed our crew in just 2 days on Tuesday. We are leaving with a crew of 6: Bill and me of course, Bill's cousin Grace, a French girl named Camille who worked on the Swan I used to work on 2 years ago, and 2 Bens (one of our British friends, yes we do have some of those!, and a New Zealander who was racing here in Antigua this week and who seemed a perfect fit for the job!

So here we are now, the boat is (almost) ready, so full of food that we could probably drift across the Atlantic and not go hungry, the crew is eager to set sail and we are all looking forward to the Med! The weather is not looking great right now, as the forecast says we won't have any wind for another 2 weeks, or if we do it will be head winds. We will leave tomorrow nonetheless and if we really don't catch any breeze, we will motor/motorsail to Bermuda, where we will be able to refuel and wait for a good weather window for the big jump across. It should be about 4 days to Bermuda, then about 3 weeks across to Gibraltar.

Bill's father will receive news of our position regularly and update the boat's Facebook page. To find our page, simply search for S/V Tilly Mint on Facebook.
We are very excited to embark into a new adventure, and are hoping to have fair winds and to catch lots of fish! See y'all on the other side!