Author: Karen Crowe

A Joint Post by Andy and Karen (Karen) Hello friends! After a summer of hurricane-avoiding land-lubbing, Andy and I are preparing to return to the pirate life. Gratitude has been docked in Charleston for a few months now, and we’ve been busy fixing things. Like you do. We had our jib (foresail) taken down and…

After leaving Katy and Story in West Palm, Andy and I continued to make our way up the coast of Florida. We anchored in Ft. Pierce for one night and were again unimpressed. I think if you live in Ft. Pierce and own a fishing boat, it’s probably perfect. But if you live on a…

On April 7 we boarded a plane for Ft. Lauderdale and got upgraded at the very last minute to First Class! (Score!) We were headed back to Gratitude to begin this year’s journey out of the Hurricane Belt.  For weeks there had been much discussion of where we wanted to take Gratitude for hurricane season…

Happy New Year, my friends! When we last wrote, it was the end of 2020 and the end of our summer/fall along the East Coast of the U.S. Soon Andy and I will celebrate our second anniversary of living like pirates on Gratitude. Here’s a quick update to catch you up on our most recent…

Moving On – St. Michael’s and Southward A couple days after my friend Christine’s visit, we said a reluctant goodbye to Annapolis and turned Gratitude southeast toward St. Michael’s, MD. We left a day later than we had planned, resigning ourselves to a new route that did not include the Potomac. We’d really wanted to…

Before we arrived in the Chesapeake Bay we had done a little research to narrow down the scope of our cruising there. The Chesapeake is HUGE, with more little rivers and creeks and anchorages to explore than one boat could do in just a few weeks. One source we read said that the Chesapeake has…

Hello friends! It’s been a minute since we last posted. Part of that is because we’ve been busy sailing, seeing, and doing. Another part of it was a feeling, on our part, like we didn’t have all that much to write about. As I started reviewing photos, however, I realized just how wrong we were!…

Before we got out of chronological order with our Lightning Strike story, we left you off the coast of Georgia, near Savannah, in late June 2020. Time to pick up the story and tell you all about our summer in South and North Carolina. As you know from Andy’s last post, it was eventful! And…

Last year we waited out hurricane season at Camp Grenada, but this year we wanted to try something different. So when we renewed our insurance policy in January we declared our intention to head up the East Coast of the U.S.  This turned out to be a good decision, when the pandemic made the Caribbean a…

Day 7 (Thursday, April 30) (We left you with a bit of a cliffhanger at the end of the last post. Here’s a brief recap before we continue… Gratitude is hove-to, moving at about 1 knot of speed, between the Bahamas and Cuba. After a glorious FOUR hours of sleep, I awaken to the alarm…