Hope Fleet

sondrawinter
1 day ago
5 min read

This year we assisted Hope Fleet with delivering supplies to a children’s charity in Guatemala. It was a super easy process, and we encourage any cruisers heading to the Bahamas, Dominican Republic or Guatemala to consider participating.

Learning About Hope Fleet

I first heard of Hope Fleet from The Boat Galley podcast when Nica Waters brought some materials to the Bahamas in 2023 on her 28’ Bristol Channel Cutter. Nica’s blog post provides more information about the background of Hope Fleet, more details on the steps involved, and about her experience here: Hope Fleet — Fit2Sail

In November 2024 I attended the SSCA Gam in Melbourne, FL where I was pleased to meet up with my former Shell Point, Florida neighbors Kingsley and Sue Ross. When I shared our plans to go to Guatemala with them, they introduced me to Danny Moroney, President and CEO of Hope Fleet who was presenting along with Kingsley at the Gam. It turns out that Hope Fleet had recently made contacts with people assisting children down in Guatemala.

Hope Fleet is a Christian, nonprofit, humanitarian organization working to ensure children in the Caribbean and Central America have everything they need for a safe, healthy, and full life. They are currently working with Bahamas (Abaco & Exuma), Dominican Republic, and now Guatemala.

“We do our research and find safe, trusted, humanitarian projects in Caribbean countries and support them by providing relevant, essential supplies, and services, so that they can build (or rebuild) their communities from within. Then, we plug you into a project that works for you.

Our main focus is children. We love kids and we know that it takes a lot to raise a child, so our projects are mostly geared toward supporting children, with or without families, by providing basic, medical, and educational supplies.”

Another quote worth sharing is from Nica’s blog post:

“Hope Fleet is a Christian non-profit organization. My experience with people in this organization (because we’ve spent time with others in Hope Fleet too, not just Tim) is that their faith is just part of who they are. It’s not something to be foisted on others. Their faith means they want to help (which I think really is the best version of the Bible and other religious texts); there’s no pushing of an agenda in the process.”

Jimmy and I have found the same with the individuals that we have worked with, both in the States and in Guatemala.

How it Works

The simple process as shown on the Ocean Reach website

Here is our experience with these steps:

Join

We ran into a few snags during the first step, with the remaining steps being rather flawless. I take a lot of responsibility for the snags we ran into. Here are my tips for a smoother process:

Make sure you sign up under “Ocean Reach” and not another volunteer sign-up form on their website.
Select which person on the boat will be the Hope Fleet contact for the entire process. This person will need to pay for and undergo a background check ($19 USD) due to working with children’s charities. This person does not need to be the boat captain. I made the mistake of starting the process in my name, then thinking that since Jimmy is the captain, he should be the official contact and undergo the background check. This switch of names caused another slowdown in the process.
If you don’t hear anything back, feel free to send them an email or even call them (contact us page). Our friends on Quest II signed up and had not heard anything as their departure date approached. Reaching out to Hope Fleet directly helped speed up the process and they were successfully able to receive supplies for the Bahamas.

We started this process in December while we were in Daytona. With the delays we encountered in signing up, Hope Fleet ended up coming to Marathon for the Load Up phase.

Load Up

Before they arrived, I cleared out as much space as possible in our quarter berth.

Since we needed a marina to deal with some mechanical issues in Marathon, FL, it made meeting with Hope Fleet a lot easier since they were able to park at our finger pier.

Hope Fleet came with a van full of boxes and we fit as many as we could into the berth.

Manifests in English and Spanish were provided.

Before leaving, they reminded us of the process for delivering the supplies to Guatemala.

For boats at anchor or on a mooring ball, Hope Fleet can load boxes into a dinghy, which is what our friends on Quest II did. Once they got back to their boat, Cam and Denise loaded the boxes from the dinghy up onto their boat and into one of their showers.

Lily and Danny deliver supplies that Cam & Denise moved between shore and Quest II in Florida, and then back to shore in the Bahamas.

Travel

We received the Hope Fleet supplies in mid-February with plans to sail to the Dry Tortugas, Mexico and Belize before reaching Guatemala three and a half months later. Hope Fleet monitors your progress between the loading up and delivery of supplies. Since we were about to do our longest passage to date, it was nice knowing that there was another set of eyes watching Utopia as she headed south to Guatemala.

When our sailing plans ended up changing due to mechanical issues aboard Utopia, we sent Tim & Kim Jeleniowski, Hope Fleet Director of Ocean Reach & Director of International Programs a message explaining our new plans. Then while we were in Belize, Tim gave us a call just to check in with us.

A tip given to us by Hope Fleet is that the materials that we are delivering are to be considered Ships Stores since no money or services are exchanged for the supplies. When checking into Belize and Guatemala, we remained silent about the delivery but did not hide anything either. Belize did a thorough search of Utopia but did not question any of the boxes in the quarter berth. We also understand that if questions are raised while clearing in, a call to Hope Fleet should help clear things up.

Arrive

As we approached Guatemala, Tim put us in contact with Julian Crisp, their local contact. Then we kept Julian up to date with our clearing into the country and of our relaxed progress up the Río Dulce. A few days after we settled into our slip at Hacienda Tijax, Julian arrived by lancha to collect the items. While Julian was at Tijax, we learned more of what programs he is involved with around Guatemala, and he has invited us to see some of their projects with Feeding Faith later in the summer, after returning from our upcoming trip to the States.