It’s easier to understand St. Bart’s if you start by quarantining some of your thoughts. So for now, forget about the fiscal cliff, forget about the unemployment situation and record food stamp participation in the US. Forget about austerity in Europe, riots in Greece and Spain, and insolvency across the West. Forget also about poverty in Africa, hunger and food price inflation and the like. None of these thoughts will help you understand St. Bart’s, so suspend them for just a moment.

Now imagine a place where money and resources are infinite… a place where everybody who wants a mega yacht can have one. A place where a $10 million New Years party for your closest 400 friends is an annual routine. A place where the corner market stocks its shelves with $300 bottles of vodka like they’re cans of baked beans. Now imagine that place really does exist on the western side of a tiny Caribbean island called St. Barthelemy. You’re now close to understanding the surreal place we’re anchored just outside Gustavia marina amidst a sea of boats that makes St. Tropez look like a place for novice millionaires.

So here we are celebrating New Years alongside the world’s richest and most famous in an environment that really should only exist in an imaginary world. And although we’re more disgusted than impressed by wasteful displays of excess like Roman Abramovich’s billion dollar mega yacht, “Eclipse”, anchored just a few hundred yards off our stern, we had no problem quarantining those thoughts last night as we headed off in the dinghy to get our night started, already very cheerful on our $9 bottle of vodka. But as we sat on the marina wall a few hours later when the clock struck midnight, and as the New Year fireworks lit up the bay overflowing with mega yachts, and as the captains all blasted their horns to ring in 2013, and as the world’s elite popped open new bottles of Dom from their top decks just yards away, we realized something – in a place like St. Bart’s we’re perfectly happy to be spectators watching from the sidelines.

We’re now pulling the anchor to head north 20 miles towards another French Island, St. Martin. We’re expecting a return of something resembling reality there, but with the stream of megayachts now leaving St Barts and pointing in that same direction, we’re not quite sure.

From our imaginary world in St. Barts,, we wish a very happy and healthy New Year to our friends around the world! Cheers, Salute, Noroc, Nastarovia, Cin Cin, and Prost!!

In our high school days we always thought history class was the most boring of all the subjects. Why we should care about what happened hundreds of years ago was never clear to us. Since then, our opinion about the interest of world history has taken a full U-turn. Today we believe few things are more interesting than history, and it’s impossible to understand the significance of current events without first understanding what’s happened in the world over the years. This is particularly true as you travel – many of the things you see and hear would make no sense without the context that history provides.

We’re now sitting on the anchor in Guadeloupe after two days of exploring the two big “wings” of this butterfly-shaped island. Guadeloupe is an overseas territory of France. – the locals here are all French citizens and, unlike many of the Caribbean islands, Guadeloupe has never been an independent country since it was colonized in 1635. It seems like every island out here has an interesting history like this involving some aggressive European colonizers coming in around 1500 – 1700, followed by a period of various conflicts and treaties whereby the island changes hands, normally between England and France, until finally late last century many were “given” independence. Others, like the Virgin Islands, Anguilla, Guadeloupe, and Martinique remain territories of a western imperial power.

These complicated histories are not just interesting factoids for history nerds – the cultures here today are very much a fusion of the local Carib culture that existed before the Europeans arrived plus the imperial culture that has been introduced, and it’s fascinating to see what has resulted today. In Dominica, where we were a few days ago, the British elements of the culture are almost unnoticeable, except for the fact that all the locals speak perfect English. When we learned that Dominica successfully defended itself from French and British colonizers until 1805, then achieved independence less than 200 years later, it made sense why that island today is the one that offers the most “real” Caribbean experience.

As we chomp away on some French baguettes reminiscing about high school history class, our primary focus is now turning to an arithmetic problem. Tomorrow we head to Antigua and we’re debating whether or not we should attempt the shallow 3 mile channel that splits the two halves (butterfly wings) of Guadeloupe. If we make it, we will save five hours of sailing tomorrow into the wind, but there’s a catch. The channel is 1.80 meters deep and our depth is 1.97 meters. We figure they probably measure the channel’s depth at low tide to be safe, but if we leave at high tide tomorrow morning we’ll gain an extra 0.20 meters beneath our keel (the tidal swing being 0.2 meters). Wiser more experienced yachties probably look for a much bigger margin of safety than our 0.03 meters if we attempt this. But we prefer learning lessons the hard way (it keeps our blog more interesting than the others) so we’ll be up at 5am to give this a shot.

Once landing in the Caribbean after 19 days at sea, we wanted nothing more than to spend a few relaxing days bumming around Martinique with the family and drinking coconut milk. We should have known better. Our “to do” list for the boat was big by the time we pulled into port, which is always a killer of coconut-milk drinking dreams., and then Richard and Wendy were forced to make an early exit from the islands back to California thanks to an annoying, but now solved, medical problem. So after a bit of delay and a loss of a few team members, we’re now getting down to business and seeing what the southern end of the Caribbean has to offer.

We’ve explored three islands in the past week: Martinique, Saint Lucia, and Dominica. Martinique is known for its stunning white sand beaches and we think it deserves the reputation despite its minor tourist infestation problem. We didn’t see much of Saint Lucia – the purpose of our hop there was to drop off where he’s hopping aboard another boat for a while (we’ll almost certainly catch up with him further up in the Caribbean). And our favorite Caribbean island so far, Dominica, is where we’re now sitting on the anchor waking up to a gorgeous day.

We like Dominica because it has no real airport, no big hotels, and no American brands (except KFC)… all of which helps to keep the tourist problem to a minimum. You really get the feeling you’ve landed in a raw and unspoiled Caribbean island where the locals are super friendly and the island is open for unrestricted exploration. Our trip to the Trafalgar waterfalls area was a perfect example of this. If these waterfalls were anywhere else in the world, they’d need to put up barricades to keep the tourists from destroying everything (including themselves), but here there are no rules, no signs and no barriers, so you’re free to climb the falls and swim in the hot pools as you please. It’s an ideal place for adventurous travelers, and that’s what we’re here for.

Today we leave Dominica and head north to Guadeloupe, another French island which, like Dominica, is known for its lush mountainous interior. The wind is howling out there today so we’re preparing the heavy wind sails for this 25 mile hop.

There are a lot of things we love about a traveling lifestyle – the list is far too long to type here. If we did type it, though, one thing that would appear at the very top would be experiencing a touch of local life in the foreign places we go. It’s easy to be a “tourist” and see the sites and taste the food, etc., but to really get to know a place you have to go further than the tourists go, you have to go off the beaten path, you have to take more than a superficial interest in the culture, and most importantly you have to spend time getting to know local people. When we’re able to take those extra steps, the rewards for us over the years have been remarkable, and we’ve formed some of our most lasting and valued relationships this way. These people have shown us the world through a different lens, they’ve given us perspectives about life that fundamentally change the way we see things, and in doing so, they’ve expanded our minds, they’ve humbled us, and they’ve made us care about people and cultures everywhere, not just those close to home.

The reason I babble on about this here is because we’ve had just such an experience over the past few days Rapallo, thanks to the Pelloso family (to which our friends Lisa and Mara belong). By train, they took us to the Cinque Terre fishing villages, which are a must-see for anybody coming to this part of Italy. But the real fun began when they invited us to a family dinner at their hilltop home just outside Rapallo. This is where the Pelloso family ran a family business making olive oil, and today the house still has all the original production equipment in perfect working order – they could make oil tomorrow if they were so inclined. We learned about the olive oil machinery, the family’s local shoe companies, and the cliff-diving uncle known as “Tarzan”. We finished off the night at a local tavern telling sailing stories and getting so drunk that we forgot to wake up yesterday morning to leave for Monaco! Grazi (thanks) to the Pelloso family for such an amazing time – it was difficult saying arrivaderce (goodbye).

We’re now back on track after sailing most of the night towards Monaco and arriving there a few hours before sunrise. We threw the anchor just outside the harbor, snagged a few hours good sleep, got the sunrise pic inside the Monaco harbor, and are now on the motor in windless conditions heading for St. Tropez. We’re looking forward to a relaxing evening there tonight because we’ve got a big two-day passage to the Balearic Islands in Spain that begins tomorrow morning. Unfortunately this means we won’t have time to infiltrate a French family on this trip, but we’re feeling far too Italian for that right now anyway.

If you ever decide to abandon land life and take to the sea, or any other form of homelessness, one thing you’ll quickly notice is how connected you become to the world around you. When your life is spent outdoors, everything matters. With each passing week we notice the power coming out of the sun as it moves lower and lower on the horizon – at noon we now cast a long shadow, and we have no concern about sunburns any more. We notice the air and water temperature dropping as we move further north – we think twice before jumping in now. We notice the sunrise and sunsets taking longer, and the days becoming shorter – if we didn’t know the world was round and circling around the sun, this would all be hopelessly confusing.

Most importantly for us, however, is the wind. The weather forecasts are accurate on occasion, but more often they are worthless. We found ourselves in a 25 knot blow yesterday on our way from northern Sardinia (Italy) to southern Corsica (France) when the forecast was for no wind at all. When we left Corsica a few hours ago to head for Isla d’ Elba (in Italy), the forecast was for 8 knots from the west, but here we are sitting in 15 knots from the north. It would be nice to have a job like a weather forecaster where it doesn’t seem to matter how right or wrong you are about your predictions.

When the wind is on the nose like it is now, we face a choice – either we could keep motoring straight into the wind to Isla d’Elba (where Napoleon was exiled), or alter course to somewhere else (the third option of tacking / zig-zagging under sail into the wind would take too long to be appealing for us non-purist sailors). Fortunately this part of the Tuscany coast serves up an interesting alternate destination – if we bear away from the wind about 20 degrees we can sail straight to Isla Giglio, which is the site of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster last January (where the Captain pulled in a bit too close to shore so he could salute a friend, sinking the ship in the process, and sadly killing 32 people). The ship is still there on its side partially submerged as they prepare the $350 million salvage operation next Spring. So we’ve turned off the motor and adjusted course 20 degrees to the east, meaning we’ll rub shoulders with the “disaster tourists” tomorrow, then resume our passage up to Isla d’Elba tomorrow afternoon… if the weather cooperates of course.