Don and Denise have been spending their time between their home in Utah and the Atlantic coast on their boat, Blue Pearl, which has been traveling along the US east coast, the Gulf side of Florida and the Bahamas. We have received a lot of requests to share our experiences with friends and family so decided to start this blog.
We started our cruising adventures in 2010 aboard our first yacht, a 55 foot Fleming motor yacht named Sundancer. We were lucky to share some of that experience in a magazine article published in Fleming’s Venture magazine in 2012. If you would like to read that article, click this link and wait a minute – it could take a short time to load:
www.burryachtsales.com/articles/A%20Rookies%20Voyage.pdf
We sold Sundancer in 2012 and purchased our new yacht in 2013; a brand new 65-foot Fleming motor yacht we named Blue Pearl. She is a beautiful yacht with state of the art mechanics and electronic equipment that helps keep us safe while we explore the risky environs of our oceans.
We are not professional photographers but we enjoy taking photos. The photographic equipment we are using includes a Canon EOS 5D Mark III with a variety of lenses and a Nauticam underwater housing, a Go-Pro HERO4 video camera, a Canon point and shoot, and sometimes our iPhone cameras. So there will be varying quality of the photos.
It’s just the two of us on the boat almost all the time. You might think that two people living together 24/7 on a boat is a recipe for marital disaster. But, quite the opposite is true. In order to keep this machine running safely at top performance and to safely explore our environs has caused us to grow closer – it has been a lot of fun!
We hope you enjoy!
Great job on the blog guys! Looks good. #DINKLife
Thanks Jesse!
Absolutely beautiful pictures! Thank you for sharing your adventures with us!
Dear Don and Denise,
I am so enjoying following you around through your adventures. Thank you so much! Big hugs to you both! Love, Annie-Pie
Thank you Annie! We are so glad you are enjoying! It’s a lot of fun!
Hi there, lovely post on Cuba, thank you. Is boat registered in US, are you both US citizens? If so, do you have suggestions for managing the US regulations on an extended stay in Cuba? Thanks! (If the answer somewhere in the rest of your posts, please disregard, I’ll find it. )
Thank you Jonathan. Yes, our boat is US registered. To get permission from the US government for a US citizen to visit Cuba you are required to meet one of 12 reasons for going; and sight seeing or vacationing do not qualify. For boaters, the first thing I would do is purchase the new Waterways Guide authored by Addison Chan and Nigel Calder that was published in February 2017. It is full of information about traveling to Cuba. We found that the easiest way to wade through the paperwork was to hire a touring agency and an attorney. The attorney was able to get us the permission for the extended stay (more than 2 weeks) and the touring company arranged a lot of the paperwork and helped us with the itinerary. The attorney we used is Moore and Company in Miami, FL and the touring company we used was Cuba Tours and Travel in Miami. We also worked with SeaKeepers International (www.seakeepers.org) as part of their Seakeepers E3 Program. Hope this helps.