I am both excited and terrified about this trek south. I really just want to be in the Caribbean where it’s warm, and we can island hop with day cruises and maybe the occasional single overnight cruise. But we have to get the boat down there first, and that requires traversing the entire Atlantic seaboard. Yikes!
Dave and my Dad have each been doing some route planning on their own and comparing notes for this trek. It’s about 1500 miles to our last U.S. destination of Stuart, Florida, before continuing on to the Caribbean. This will take about 2 months of mostly daytime only cruising, since we will largely be using the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). That timeframe is, of course, weather dependent. We were originally considering bypassing North Carolina with a multi-day/night offshore cruise to save time, but we learned that a snowbird friend of ours will be near Hatteras at that time, so we opted to stop and see her instead. That actually eases my mind a little, because bypassing NC offshore is a commitment of 5 or more days, requiring a good weather window. Not sure how sure a thing that would be during the changeable spring weather, and there are very few places where one can cut back into the safety of the NC coast.
I’m leaving most of the route planning to Dave and Dad, but reading about the ICW and all the potential stops has been on my list of things to do for quite a while, along with the thousand other things that have to happen before we leave in April. I hadn’t gotten around to it until just this week. Dave had to drive up to Augusta to submit his retirement paperwork to the Maine retirement system, and I tagged along so he could drop me off for lunch with my former colleagues up there (yay!). We took along one of our cruising guides for the Chesapeake Bay to Florida and I read aloud from it on the way down and back. Dave has skimmed it mostly for a sense of distance and timing, but neither of us had yet considered places to stop each night that provided whichever amenities we might need at the time. We’d also like to spend a couple of days in a particular place in each of Chesapeake Bay, and in NC, SC and GA, so we got a sense of where those places might be.
Doing this reading has made me feel much less anxious, and even much more excited about this long trek along mostly inland waters. It’s no longer a big unknown, and it sounds like the scenery will be amazing in many places. There are also numerous points along the SC, GA and FL borders where we can opt for a single night’s offshore cruising to speed the trip up a bit. This will minimize the need to stand watches at night while also increasing the likelihood we’ll reach Florida waters before Dave has to fly to Arizona for that guitar build he has scheduled for early in June. By the time we get to FL, I’m sure I’ll feel much more confident piloting Indigo Lady with Dad without Dave on board. I’ll have built up a lot of sea hours by then!
Life on Lady 