For the winter cruising season 2023\/2024 Pandora was in the Eastern Caribbean.\u00a0 As of May she is in Trinidad for some much needed maintenance.\u00a0 The big news is that in the spring of 2025 Pandora will be heading to the Azores to begin our Med cruising experience.\u00a0 This has been a dream of mine for years and both Brenda and I are excited about exploring the Azores together and to spending a few seasons in the Med after that.\u00a0 As of now, the plan is to leave the Caribbean, bound for Bermuda in mid April and then to depart Bermuda for the run to the Azores, across the “pond” in early June.<\/p>\n
The plan is to have Brenda join me for about a month of exploration of the Azores before I move Pandora to Portugal where she will be hauled until the spring of 2026 when we will move up the Spanish Coast for\u00a0 about two months before hauling her for the summer.\u00a0 More to come on that.<\/p>\n
To see Pandora’s when we are aboard and actively cruising, \u00a0click on this link\u00a0which will take you to my Garmin page<\/a>.\u00a0 This link is updated 24\/7 on an hourly basis so any position you see won’t be more than a few hours old.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We have our AIS tracker on all the time, even when we aren’t aboard and as long as we are not too far from shore, you can see where we are. \u00a0 To see us on AIS, search for Pandora<\/em>, MMSI #367600760. \u00a0This service only works when we are within VHF range so it’s primarily coastal.\u00a0 However, during the cruising season, being “inshore” is the norm.<\/p>\n A great AIS app “Marine Traffic<\/a>” it can be viewed on a laptop or as a phone app.\u00a0 With that app you can see our location in real time, updated every 15 minutes. \u00a0 There is a feature within this app that will allow you to select vessels, such as Pandora<\/em> and make them part of “your fleet” so that seeing us is that much easier. \u00a0It’s a pretty nice feature. \u00a0There is also a feature that will send you an e-mail automatically when we enter or leave a port. Pretty cool, if you ask me.<\/p>\n Our history aboard:<\/strong><\/p>\n Since I retired in 2012, Brenda and I have spent our winters south including time traveling up and down the Intra Coastal Waterway, several winters exploring the Bahamas and two months cruising the south coast of Cuba in March and April of 2016.\u00a0 In the September 2016 issue of Blue Water Sailing Magazine I had an article about our trip to Cuba that sums things up nicely. \u00a0Check it out here<\/a>.<\/p>\n For the last seven seasons, we have cruised the eastern Caribbean, first the Leeward Islands and for the 2016-2017 winter season. I did a summary of our 2017 cruise to the Leewards in this post<\/a>.\u00a0 For the last few years we have cruised the southern islands of the Caribbean, the Windwards from Antigua to the Grenadines and I wrote an article about that area for Blue Water Sailing Magazine that you can see here<\/a>.<\/p>\n For the summer of 2024 we stored Pandora in Trinidad, a change in our approach as it was the first tiume that we kept her south as opposed to making the long run back to CT.\u00a0 With our plans to visit the Med for the next few years, it’s going to be a while before Pandora is back in US waters.<\/p>\n Regarding our trip to Cuba, which now seems like a different lifetime, you can read more about the process we went through to gain US government approval to visit Cuba aboard Pandora and the “whole Cuba thing”, I wrote about the “12 reasons”\u00a0U.S. citizens can visit Cuba<\/a>. \u00a0In any event, after much back an forth, and let me tell you there was plenty of “back and forth”, we received approval and went.\u00a0 Sadly, with a quick reversal of Obama’s policy, Cuba is no longer a reasonable option for US flagged vessels, a policy that is unlikely to change any time soon.<\/p>\n