Shall We Go North or South?

When we came back from England after we finished our Shakedown Cruise, one of the 'new rules' we put in place after considering all the learnings from that cruise was, if at all possible, avoid motoring into wind or 'beating into wind' (which is what it feels like). That new rule means that we make our decisions about where to go based upon where we can sail to, and avoiding a 'beating'. So far this trip, we are at about 50 / 50 beatings to sailings, which is significantly better than our old 85 / 15 rate.

This means that we are avidly watching the weather this week to figure out where the heck we're going! There's a cold front blowing through right now with lots of 20ish knot winds from the northeast. This means when things settle down a bit we could sail north to the Abacos or south to Nassau and the Exumas. Both are great options - the Abacos are supposed to be quieter and quite beautiful, Nassau would offer the option for a really good restock and we've read so much about the Exumas from all the sailblogs that we'd quite like to see them in person.

Hmmm, so many choices, but nothing definite in any of them. This is a really interesting approach for a couple of serious planners like Steve and I. We plan everything, in detail, sometimes years in advance. You can imagine what it feels like to not know where we're going tomorrow! But, but, but - that means I don't know where I'm going the day after and the day after that and... oh, noooooo! Actually, it's a mind shift, quite weird and we have to regularly pull ourselves up about it, but we're slowly starting to get used to it.

So we don't have a clue where we're going!

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