Between November 2006 and April 2007, Anahita and her crew had been cruising in the Caribbean. From Tobago (beautiful scenery) we sailed to Grenada (air of spices), Carriacou (best dive sites), Bequia (turtle sanctuary), Martinique (croissants and vine), Guadeloupe (créole seasoning), Les Saintes (Brittany of the Antilles), Antigua (Kafkaesque bureaucracy), Barbuda (pink beaches), St. Barths (for the rich and famous), St. Martin (the chandlery), Anguilla (our personal disappointment), and finally the British Virgin Islands (like sailing on a lake). You guess right, we had a good time. The Antilles are a great place: Beaches are gorgeous, the weather is generally fine, and the infrastructure is perfect. With our children, the cruising life became very relaxed - imagine your kids complaining because they have to go play on the beach again [sic]. Anahita also gave us no major trouble - apart from the regular haul-out to re-paint the underwater body and some important jobs on the engine. Our personal favourites: Les Saintes (for its charm) and Barbuda (for its miles and miles of pink beaches without a soul).

Still, after six months we were happy to leave. One reason is that we got tired of the mass tourism on the water. After having sailed for months in a small community of boats, it was quite a shock to see anchorages with, literally, hundreds of yachts (how nice at night, though, when everybody turns on their anchor lights). The Caribbean often felt like a big sailing Disneyland where yachties like us were nothing but the target group of a big industry. Talking money, one of the impressive things to see was the unbelievable mass of money floating around. I mean, BIG money, like zillionaires. With our little 35-footer we more than once felt underdressed among all these mega-mega-mega-yachts.

What we remember best of our Caribbean adventure are the precious moments we spent with our friends and family. It was nice for all the four of us to have plenty of visitors from Switzerland. After one and a half years away from home we enjoyed sharing our experience (of course, we also enjoyed the chocolate, cheese and other stuff our guests were asked to bring with them). On the way north, we kept running into boats and crews we knew from Brazil. Arriving at a new anchorage to meet old friends who follow a similar itinerary was always very nice - well, at least most of the time. And then, we made new friends. Most important among them was the Hawaiian catamaran Corazon. We had met them already on Grenada, and finally sailed a lot together between Les Saintes and the BVI. What had started as a practical thing (children of the same age, daddies can scuba dive together) grew into a true friendship. In the end, we were really sad to leave them behind. But this is just an inevitable part of the cruising lifestyle. Among our fellow yachts, some go through the Panama channel, some spend the Hurrican season in Venezuela, some sail North, some go back to their previous lives - and Anahita set sail for the Med.