From New York to the Chesapeake
On the fateful day that the weather predicted was our one vague chance for another week, we set out at first light (~30 mins before dawn), and immediately conditions were pretty bad, as predicted. Just crossing the New York Harbor we were already in 4 footers with random chop, which is pretty uncomf...
New Haven
We'd never stopped at New Haven on our boating travels, and when I asked my parents and relatives about it, their answers were nearly identically "we brought the kids to the Peabody museum a lot as kids..." Hannah had found a pole studio she got really excited about stopping at. So, clearly, it was...
Bath, ME
We headed over to Bath on Monday afternoon, waiting until midday to avoid a bunch of current down the Kennebec River that was there earlier in the day. We always pass by Fort Gorges, an old fort just outside the Portland harbor, which I think is super cool every time. We have an older drone video fr...
Concerts and Beer in Portland
After arriving at the marina fairly early on Friday, we worked for the day as usual, and then Sara joined us for the weekend! Friday night we were super adventurous and went all the way to the restaurant 100 ft from the Marina, Saltwater Grille, which turned out to be a fantastic meal in every way....
Slowly Recovering
Hannah and I have been on the mend this week, slowly both recovering from COVID, and ending up doing very early hops before work to get up to Portland for this weekend. Hannah started a few days after me, so she's still a bit behind on recovery, but we're almost out of it. Today we took a hop up to...
Whirlwind Seattle Tour + Steroids Adventure
This story actually begins several weeks ago, when I had another bout of my magical no-seeming-cause lower back pain, this time turning into some fun sciatica. I ended up going to urgent care after it didn't go away on its own and they put me on a round of steroids (Prednisone). The steroids did, in...
Provincetown
After a generally-meh week in Martha's Vineyard, we took advantage of a weather window and headed up to Provincetown for the weekend to explore. It turns out to be a great little town, full of character -- very similar feeling in a lot of ways to a smaller Key West, but even more flamboyant. The moo...
Martha's Vineyard Recap - "Meh"
We spent another couple days in Vineyard Haven before leaving, but it turns out that neither of us took any pictures, and it's probably because it really wasn't very memorable. While smaller and less busy than Edgartown, it still felt kinda like a fairly soul-less town with higher-end eateries and a...
Martha's Vineyard Exploration
We ended up trying out the escape room, and... it was likely the worst escape room we've ever done. It was full of semi-broken gizmos, had absolutely no continuity, and generally didn't make a lot of sense. We fairly handily made it out, with unsolicited help from the game master overlords, but we w...
Arriving at Martha's Vineyard
The weather this summer has mostly been unusually dreary. New England summers are usually periods of nice weather intermixed with serious storms, but so far this late-spring/early-summer weather has been primarily muggy and drizzly. While it still allows for exploring, and serious storms do not, it...
Hadley Harbor
As suspected, I called the shop at 8am today and they said maybe Monday. I'm not sure which part of "we're leaving Saturday" that I've told them every day this week was Greek to them, but here we are. The mooring field we were staying at ended up needing to kick us out today since we didn't make a l...
Stuck in Fairhaven/New Bedford
We've been more-or-less stuck in this harbor all week. The weather has been fairly dreadful, as predicted, but we're really here because there's the one Spectra watermaker certified repair shop in the entire northeast in town here, and we'd made an appointment with them 3 weeks ago to have them fix...
Sprint to New Bedford/Fairhaven
Due to a combination of work schedules and upcoming bad weather, we ended up having to accelerate our plans a bit and woke up at dawn this morning to head over to New Bedford, where there's a Spectra-authorized shop who will investigate what's going on with our watermaker (with parts of it still in...
San Francisco, Erie Canal, and Mexico/NJ
We had organized to visit Matthew in San Jose at the end of September, and though our original plan was to fly out of Albany, we instead flew once more out of Syracuse. We had an amazing weekend visiting! We arrived late afternoon on Thursday and after I'd finished my work calls, we went out in San...
Oswego Canal and Brewerton
We arrived in Oswego a day ahead of Russ and Jax and tied up against the free wall in the city. With both of us needing some engine work done, Russ recommended a ship yard along the Erie Canal where they had had some work done before with a good experience (a rare thing!), so we had called and manag...
Castles!!!
Our first stop after clearing the US Border was Singer Castle. A privately owned castle where we tied up for the morning on their dock and were able to take a private tour of the castle before tourists arrived on the tour boats! The castle was built as a "hunting lodge" and it is now possible to ren...
Kingston and Gananoque
Since our marina reservations wouldn't start until Monday, we dropped the hook right outside the marina and hopped in the dinghies to shore. While searching for the dinghy dock, we ran into a very nice guy on the dock who offered for us to use his marina slip for the day! We headed into town and fou...
Rideau Canal Pt 2
From the locks at Perth, after I solo-ed the dinghy down through the locks, we headed on Sunday to Colonel By Island, where Russ had read that there were mooring balls. It turned out to be a pretty popular spot - and by the time David and I arrived all the moorings were taken, so we dropped the hook...
Rideau Canal Pt 1
The next day was Monday and we started to settle in to what would become our regular week-day on the Rideau pattern - we would wake up in time to arrive at the next lock right when it opened (at 8am), travel as far as our morning meetings would allow, and then set up for the day of working (either o...
Saying Goodbye to Alex, on to Ottawa
From St Anne, we had only a few more days with Alex. Our plan was to get as close to Ottawa as possible so that Alex would be able to catch a train back to Montreal where he would fly home. We went through a GIGANTIC lock; the entrance into the lock was a massive garage door - something we hadn't se...
Week in Oswego
We spent the week (Sunday evening through Friday morning) working and hanging out in Oswego. Our memory was that it was a cute tourist town, from the couple days we spent here on our loop. It turned out to be a little sleepier than we remembered, which is interesting given that we last visited just...
Perth
We'd stopped at this small side trip off the Rideau, the Tay Canal, because we'd met some boaters a few days ago coming the other way on the Rideau that suggested doing a dinghy trip up the river all the way into Perth. So why not? It's Saturday and we haven't had a good dinghy adventure in a while....
St. Anne and Montreal
As I mentioned in an earlier post, when we left Quebec City, we would be re-tracing our steps, but this time going against the current. We had therefore 2 veeeeeeerrrry long cruising days ahead of us - cruising at around 6kts. These were working days, which despite me attempting to clear, I did end...
Quebec City with 1 Dane, 1 Brit, and 3 Americans
The day after we arrived in Quebec City we were joined by our friend Alex, visiting us from Florida. For the evening, we had been invited by Jamie on No Rush for an evening cruise to view a waterfall just south of the city, so we ate a quick dinner after work and headed over to their boat. It was a...
A Second Exciting Ottawa Day
Saturday night, we'd hatched plans to do an escape room then go do some shopping (Costco, groceries, and possibly some other things). We'd decided to move from the wall down to Dow's Lake to get us through the time-restricted bridge while it's the weekend and easy. Locks and bridges don't open in t...
Two Walking Tours of Ottawa
Hannah and I have been doing walking tours of cities more and more often, when we need some basic context to start understanding the history of a city/region/etc., and can then layer on more things from museums/etc. afterward. So, when we got to Ottawa, we proposed doing the same here, and Inquest w...
Canada!
We woke up early and cruised for about 10 minutes when we reached the Canadian border. David and Russ hopped off the boat and after about 5 minutes we were both cleared! (No questions regarding our alcohol on board after we went through all the trouble to get it stored!). We stopped for the night at...
Repairing a leaky roof
While going north on the last day of our trip up the Richelieu, we got waked pretty bad by some passing express cruisers, and water started pouring out of the ceiling onto the helm. We'd had a similar problem last year that we traced down to needing to re-seal a spot on the roof of the boat where En...
Lake Champlain
The next morning, we headed north a bit and dropped anchor just south of Fort Ticonderoga and rafted up with Russ and Jax on one side and some new friends Jamie and Trish on the other side! Though we had work, Jamie mentioned that they were planning to visit a Star Trek museum the next day. I manage...
Seattle and Locks on the Champlain Canal
Seattle We had another wonderful and busy trip to Seattle, starting out with an impromptu day walking around the Ballard locks with friends - slightly ironic given what we would be spending the next week doing! As usual, every night we had plans to visit with various friends and family. I also spent...
Up the Hudson River
The first stretch of the Hudson is one of the more beautiful boating days on the East Coast. We had an early start since we wanted to make some good distance on the weekend day of cruising. This meant that I took the first shift driving while David napped. The Hudson Valley, blanketed in green trees...
2 Days in New York
Thursday morning, we woke up early to do the 2-hour cruise from Great Kills to Brooklyn in order for me to arrive before work to head into the office for the day. While David napped, I took the helm and snapped these photos as we were approaching this recognizable skyline. Approaching NYC It's so ni...
Cruising Again! Baltimore to New Jersey
Yes, you read that right! After almost 6 months, we are finally cruising again! After watching the weather carefully, we decided to head out of Baltimore on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. Even though there was wind predicted, we wanted to get as far north as we can, which would give us more o...
Final Weeks in Baltimore
After we returned to Baltimore from Disney, we did have a few boat projects to get wrapped up with. Primarily, re-fixing the hydraulic swim platform where our dingy sits. If you recall, when Brent and Mary visited us over the summer, we had a bit of a disaster on their last day where the hydraulic f...
Disney Adventures
Ever since I had first heard about it, I was interested in doing it, but it wasn't until I suggested that Matthew join me in visiting Disney that it became a reality. I'm talking about the Galactic Starcruiser , a Star Wars-themed hotel larp-like experience at Disney World. This is a two-day stay at...
April: We Bought a House in Key West!
Though I did not mention it in our last post, there was actually one other update from the month of March. After the loooooong winter in Baltimore, it had made me realize that one of the reasons I was potentially less enthused about our future plans to return on Highwind to the west coast would be t...
March: Prague and Seattle; Highwind Engine Progress
We arrived in Prague on Saturday, got dinner and drinks, and wandered around a bit. Sunday, we had pre-planned to take a day trip outside of the city to Kutna Hora. We took the train and arrived a 2 mile walk outside of the tourist area. Not realizing that we could have hopped on a bus, we instead w...
February: Long Winter in Baltimore & Big Sky
The better part of February was spent in Baltimore with the one engine out of commission and hunkering down through the cold weather. I managed to get out to two different pole studios in the area and a couple more times to yoga. It feels so amazing to finally get back on a pole with some regularity...
January in Baltimore, NYC, and Key West
With most of the starboard engine sitting in pieces on a tarp upstairs, we've settled down into something resembling a routine (as much as that is possible given our hectic lives). We returned to Highwind from Big Sky a day before the New Year, and picked up the fixed-mount heaters that David had or...
2023 Internet Setup
Hanging out at anchor looking up at our cell antennas and Starlinks As time marches on, so do our needs for internet reliability and speeds. I've been passing around our original post for a while now, but at this point virtually nothing on the boat remains from it, so it seemed like time for an enti...
Limbo
Sometimes you have to just forget about all the craziness, and have a little fun together After arriving in Baltimore late Friday night, we woke up at a decent hour Saturday morning, saw Nick off to the airport, and then settled in to dismantle most of the starboard motor. We had tickets to fly to S...
Stranded at Solomons
After our vacation week, we returned to reality and Highwind in Baltimore, where we both promptly got sick with bad colds, David first and then me a few days after. Unfortunately that meant that we had to cancel David's scheduled surgery (for the 2nd time...). Though we both tested negative for Covi...
Portugal - Coimbra and Lisbon
On our way south from the Duoro Valley to Lisbon, Francisco had recommended that we stop in Coimbra to visit the University library - the Biblioteca Joanina. Coimbra University is one of the oldest educational institutions in Europe. The library tour starts out in the University Prison, which is ess...
Portugal - Douro Valley
Incredible views everywhere in the Duoro Valley For our two days in the Douro Valley, I had organized a private wine tasting tour for the first day and a group tour for the second day - both of which would pick us up from our hotel which was located in Regua - one of the larger cities in the valley....
Portugal - Porto
Porto and Gaia from the Luis I Bridge On our last night in Prague, I was on work calls and wrapping up emails until close to midnight, and David was working until about 1:30am. Our alarms were set for 3:30am for our flight to Porto. We both passed out on the airplanes and arrived in Porto around noo...
Prague with Friends
Sunset on the Charles Bridge Tower After a restful though busy 3 weeks in Baltimore, we were headed to Europe for a 2 week visit - the first week in Prague for David's work and the second for a real vacation in Portugal. As usual, I would be tagging along with David on his work trip and working myse...
Seattle and Baltimore
Our visit to Seattle was only a few days, just for a work event for David, so we didn't have much chance to see people while we were there. Coincidentally Mum and Dad were in the city living on their new boat on Lake Union while it was being shown in the Seattle Boat Show. Since I work on east coast...
New York with My Brother
Highwind and the Skyline Ever since we moved onto the boat, Matthew and I had been talking about how cool it would be for him to be able to visit New York with us. Then Covid and other life-busyness happened, but this year we managed to make it work. It was great exploring Long Island Sound with Mat...
Newport to New York with Matthew
We arrived in Newport on Friday morning of Labor Day weekend, with plans for my brother Matthew to meet us Saturday evening and stay for a week. As per Matthew's usual curse, a few days earlier, our convection microwave/oven had decided to spontaneously perish, and we were having a hell of a time fi...
New England and Cleveland
Our next fixed destination was Boston for the end of the week, where we'd be flying out once again for another wedding. We had planned to take most of the week to get there, but decided instead to make the trip in only two hops, which put us in Boston a few days early. We were staying on a mooring w...
48V Lithium Power System, Updated
General overview of the power system, including the large loads After over a year with the power system, and several tweaks, I'm at the point that I'm very happy with where things have landed, and figured it was time for an update. I also convinced a buddy boat of ours, Inquest, to do the same syste...
Portland, ME to Portland, OR
Our first stop on the way to Portland was a return to Boothbay where we met up with Russ and Jax after work for what might be our last Maine lobster at the wharf and a return to the waffle ice-cream shop. Our last Maine Lobster Next we headed to The Basin where a former colleague of David's lived ne...
Western Penobscot Bay
Moored with InQuest in Port Clyde After our dinghy adventure back to the boat, David and I decided to stay put in the anchorage for the next day to finish out the work week without moving. Saturday morning, we woke up and cruised to Belfast where the wind was blowing pretty hard as we secured to a m...
Penobscot Bay - Dinghy Adventures
After Matt and Amy left, we decided to re-connect with Russ and Jax of InQuest, who were heading towards Penobscot Bay. We hadn't visited much in this area when we were in Maine before and we were only too happy to explore with friends. Our first stop was Stonington, where we picked up a mooring. Da...
Boothbay and BAH HABAH with Mark and Robin
I was finally able to get the perfect sunset shot of this tour boat in Bar Harbor!! We arrived in Boothbay with plenty of day left for exploring. While we had anchored here on our last visits, we wanted to do everything possible to ensure low movement for Mark's seasickness, so this time we grabbed...
Northeast Harbor and more Acadia National Park
Sunset over Northeast Harbor We left Bar Harbor and headed for Southwest Harbor as some more weather was predicted for the week and we wanted to hole up somewhere safe from southwest winds. We ended up anchoring in the next bay north of Southwest Harbor, as we'd spent quite some time in the harbor p...
Maine without Fog
Morning cruising up to Portsmouth alongside Inquest After Boston, we continued north toward Portsmouth where our early morning cruising is directly into the rising sun, which makes it quite difficult to see and therefore dodge the lobster pots that get denser and denser as we head deeper into Maine....
Fourth of July in Boston
After finishing work on Friday, we met up with Russ and Jax at a nearby brewery and another Endeavour-owning couple whose boat is named Bella Gato. After dinner back on the boat, I decided that I wanted (finally) to go and see the new Top Gun Maverick movie before we missed the opportunity to see it...
Eastern Long Island Sound
The next morning, we headed out of Coecles and travelled to Newport. Typical Long Island Sound View Along the way, we started to see more and more crab/lobster pots and I took a few shots of this boat that was clearly bringing in a catch. Ask me how I could tell! Some winds were predicted overnight...
Connecticut, Family, and Long Island Sound
For the Memorial Day weekend, we had made perfect timing to be able to spend it with David's family in Rowayton, and we arrived there on Friday. On Saturday, we were welcomed by John and Joan and had a lovely dinner together at their local restaurant - which happened to be the first restaurant we at...
Atlantic City and New York
With the Platform secured, and a favorable 2-day weather window, we woke up early and began the first leg of the journey to New York, which is down the Delaware River. Last year, we went from Chesapeake City all the way to the New York harbor in one day, but with diesel prices as high as they are ri...
Baby on Board
Brent, Mary, and baby Ember joined us in the afternoon on Saturday. Since this was our first time with a baby on board, we weren't sure exactly how everything would work out, but it turned out her travel crib fit perfectly in David's office, and the boat was actually surprisingly baby proof since al...
The Covid Black Hole
Someone sent us a photo of Highwind at anchor! We worked our way north with a couple of long legs since I was recovering from COVID and would not be able to do anything in towns. We had a night in Swansboro were David grabbed takeout and I stayed on the boat. For the next few nights we stayed on anc...
Seattle, A Wedding, and Covid Strikes
We flew back to Seattle, arriving on a Sunday, and settled in for a standard Seattle visit where we organized evenings catching up with various friends. I even managed to get in one class at Divine! David had a work offsite for a few of the days. This was all gearing up for a busy weekend filled wit...
North Carolina - Myrtle Beach
Myrtle Beach Ferris Wheel After heading out of Charleston, we spend the next week with another string of early mornings in order to maximize our pre-work traveling time to push north. We were aiming to get all the way through the Waccamaw River, where there is no civilization, and to a town with a c...
Charleston
Tied up in Charleston, Golden Hour just before sunset Normally when in Charleston, we stay in a marina that is on the eastern side of the city, but that marina was full when we called to make a reservation, so we ended up at a new-to-us marina on the west side. We had made arrangements ahead of our...
Hellish Experience at Hinckley Stuart
Look, a giant hole in our boat, in the wrong place, that's still here to this day. Note: this isn't really designed to be a standard blog post for readers to read and care about. This is an accounting of an unbelievably horrible and expensive experience dealing with what should have been a very repu...
Northern Florida
After a month away from the boat and a few weeks of visiting with people, David and I decided that we would spend the next week on anchor as we made our way north to St. Augustine. This we did, with very little photographic evidence:). Sunset in a peaceful anchorage We had made plans to meet up with...
Cocoa and Disney
After Mark and Robin left, we remained at Cocoa in order to visit with Sara, a Seattle friend who was in the area with her partner, Drake, for a work trip. In addition, a mutual friend of ours, Bethy, had recently moved to the Orlando area. Bethy and her husband Alex drove out to Cocoa and on Friday...
Boat Projects and the Space Coast
After some negotiation, Hinckley finally agreed to release the boat to us, and mid-afternoon we were able to launch the boat into the water. We immediately left and went to a different marina in Stuart where we planned to stay for the next week to assess the full situation in the boat and complete t...
Big Sky and Return to Florida
We arrived in Big Sky on Saturday afternoon only a little jet-lagged and hoping that David's curse would be lifted and that we'd see some new snow while we were there. Although we had planned to rest and recover from jet lag on Sunday, when we awoke, it was snowing and there had been several inches...
Prague
As we were about to try to fall asleep on the plane, the person in the row behind us told us that the Aurora was visible from the window. We opened our window to see the most amazing view of the lights dancing outside. This was my first time seeing the phenomenon and it was absolutely spectacular. I...
NYC and Seattle
First on our travel itinerary was New York - a work trip for me. We were holding an Employee Appreciation Conference where we flew in the entire team from around the country for the first real in-person event since Covid. Because we arrived for the weekend, and despite David having to work, we were...
Returning to the US, Miami Boat Show and Stuart
David spent the remainder of our time in Bimini working on a few other boat projects including installing a light fixture over the island in the kitchen and a new Sirius weather receiver on our antenna. The wind remained strong through Thursday, but there was a weather window on Friday so we decided...
The Bahamas with Matthew
Drone shot over Honeymoon Harbour anchorage, Highwind in the center For the first half of our cruise, we had some small waves - 2-3ft which made the ride a bit bumpy but nothing that concerned us. Once we got far enough into the crossing, the waters evened out due to some protection from Grand Baham...
Adventures at Key Biscayne Yacht Club / Preparing for the Bahamas
David got a fancy take on a s'more for his dessert at Key Biscayne YC David recalled that one of his colleagues lives in Miami, so we invited them to join us on the boat for an afternoon. We met them at the yacht club, then headed back out into the bay to anchor for some swimming. We had a lovely af...
Anchoring in the Keys
Leaving Key West, we headed to an anchorage outside of Big Pine Key. We planned to do a few hops up the Keys on our way back to Miami/Ft Lauderdale where Matthew would fly out to join us. We set up on anchor for a few days and it was quite a bit different than the business of Key West! Skies from an...
Fixing Leaks
David shows the glued-in wall panel behind the couch how he really feels In the extremely heavy rainfall (the most that we'd seen since we moved onto Endeavour-Highwind), we discovered several leaks - one collecting on the staircase to the pilothouse and the other in the guest bathroom. David manage...
Key West
Key West mural We arrived in Key West on Friday afternoon, so we had a whole weekend ahead of us! Saturday morning, we decided to wander to the State Park/Fort that is on the tip of the island. The fort was pretty interesting and the view was beautiful. Later in the evening we had a lovely meal, and...
Crossing Our Wake
After New Year, a wind storm was predicted for the next couple of days, so we stayed put on our friends dock and set sail later in the week when everything was calmer. We spent one night on anchor (which happened to be my birthday) preparing for our next hop across the Gulf all the way down to Key W...
New Year in Ft Meyers
We had been told that the boat yard would be closed for the week between Christmas and New Year. Even though we technically weren't supposed to be living aboard, we spent the night on the dock and slept in late the next day since we'd arrived home from the airport so late. Morning view from the boat...
Christmas in Seattle and Big Sky
We arrived in Seattle on the weekend and spent our first day in an early Christmas celebration with David's family. The remainder of the week was busy with seeing David's sisters more and visiting with friends. It's always a bit rough for me when we are back in Seattle while working since it means w...
Gulf Crossing to Clearwater
We woke up while it was completely dark, but were glad that we had decided to anchor in the open ocean, since all we needed to do was pull anchor and point the boat towards Clearwater. We did not need to do any difficult navigation in the dark. David was not too pleased about waking up early The wat...
Return to Florida
Highwind underway captured by a Looper we passed After leaving Mobile, we headed east towards Pensacola and ended up in a beautiful wide open anchorage. We set up in the middle of the anchorage, where the water was around 5 feet under the hull. All three of us were working, with David in his office,...
Thanksgiving in New Orleans
Sunset at Turner Marine Our friend from Seattle, Nick, would be joining us in New Orleans for Thanksgiving and then on Highwind for the rest of the week. After work on Wednesday, David and I drove the rental car into New Orleans and we met up with Nick at the AirBnB. We were in a great location on R...
Demopolis and Bilges
Dusk over Demopolis Our week in Demopolis was largely uneventful, with the brief exception of being denied use of the marina's courtesy car due to lack of car insurance (we no longer own any cars!), until the last night, when I decided, at 11:30 pm after my shower to clean out the shower's bilge box...
More of the Same: Inland Rivers and Fall Foliage
Fall Foliage at Pickwick Since we knew we would not be able to travel much while David was on his all-day quarterly planning meetings, we decided to stay on the hook for several days, moving ~10 miles every couple days before morning meetings started to slowly make southerly progress. The anchorages...
The Tennessee River
Getting a haircut on the Tennessee River -- from this angle you can't see the look of fear We headed back from Nashville on Sunday night because we'd learned something annoying on Saturday -- the Kentucky Lake Dam and Locks were closing for the month of November. To get to Kentucky Lake, there are t...
A Weekend in Nashville
We're in Nashville! While in the car on the way to Nashville, Dad had managed to make us reservations at Etch. It was late when we arrived, so after putting our stuff in the AirBnB, we immidiately hopped in a Lyft and headed downtown. The dinner was absolutely delicious! After dinner, we walked thro...
Mississippi and Ohio Rivers with Crew!
Highwind passing the St. Lous Arch We needed to make good time with Mum and Dad aboard as our plan was to get to Nashville for the weekend where they would fly out early next week. This meant we had some 200 miles to go on the Mississippi River before we would then turn upstream into the Ohio River...
A Week in Prague
Panorama of Prague One of the reasons we wanted to stop in Alton was because loopers get a discount for staying 5+ days in the marina. David's company was sending him to Prague to meet and work with the team there, so we needed somewhere to park the boat for ~9 days, and I decided to tag along on th...
Cruising the Illinois River
View of the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers Our plan on leaving the Harborside Marina was to do the next night on anchor, but on a whim we decided to follow the couple we'd been cruising with to the Heritage Harbor marina. It turned out to be a fortuitous decision as one of the mar...
Chicago and the Chicago Sanitation Waterway
Chicago at Night As we left Grand Haven, we quickly determined that the keyway issue with the prop was not, in fact, the cause of the vibration we were getting. We had suspected this, but were hoping against hope that this obvious running gear problem would have some effect on our situation. It real...
On the Hard in Grand Haven
Highwind at the end of the rainbow [Leland] The packages finally arrived and David was able to put the belts on the Port engine. After our unexpected week in Charlevoix, we were ready to get moving - albeit with the loose prop on the other engine still. At this point we were starting to get nervous...
North Lake Michigan and Engine Trouble
Panorama from the fort on Mackinac Island On our last night in Sault Ste Marie, after we returned to the boat for dinner, we walked through a group of Canadians having drinks on the dock who invited us to join them. They confirmed that there was a US border crossing checkpoint in the marina just acr...
The North Channel and Sault Ste Marie
Sunset over the Benjamin Islands For one evening in Killarney, we validated that the cell reception was bad and the marina wifi was worse, so in the morning, we booked it over to Little Current, which is a small town at the confluence between the Georgian Bay and the North Channel. You have to pass...
The Georgian Bay
Devil's Door Rapids near the Bad River Inlet Going through the Erie Canal and the Trent-Severn, we'd been lucky enough to have wildly unseasonably good weather, basically the whole way. Very warm, clear sunny days, with very little wind. Great for living and traveling on the boat. However, the day a...
The Trent-Severn Waterway
The Big Chute - Second to Last Lock on the Trent-Severn Recently I've been trying to post roughly every week, but for some reason, I have been avoiding writing up our time in the Trent-Severn. I don't have a reasonable excuse for this because we loved the 10 days that we spent working our way up, an...
Erie and Oswego Canals
Upon returning to the East Coast, we spent the day visiting Kingston, which we hadn't had the chance to do before we left for Seattle. We visited the maritime museum, which discussed the ecological impact of humans and boating on the waters of the Hudson, and some of the history of the Erie canal. M...
A Week In Seattle
Seattle skyline from Gasworks Park Due to some things on the boat being hard to plan, like how far we will be from NYC by the time we need to fly out to Seattle, we ended up getting tickets out of JFK, but our boat was in Kingston, 90 miles north of the city. A train would get us all the way, but we...
New York City and the Hudson
Sunset at City Island After a couple of days at Port Jefferson, we needed to head towards Brooklyn where we had a reservation for the latter half of the week. Since David was still bedridden, we decided to reserve a mooring buoy with the City Island Yacht Club, which had a free pickup service that r...
Friends and Family in Long Island Sound
We woke up to gloomy skies over New York City, which seems to be our normal weather condition any time we are going north or south on the East River. However, it still doesn't get old driving our home past the familiar skyline. Our third time running the East River - still very cool We arrived at th...
Fun 4th On the Chesapeake
In Solomans, we met up with Mark, Robin, Jan and Jim for a lovely dinner, which of course we forgot to photograph. We did however see a beautiful sunset on the way to the restaurant. Sunset at Solomans - a similar view to last year! Looking at all of our options for fireworks on the Chesapeake durin...
Waiting in Deltaville
Deltaville may be boring as hell, but the sunsets on the coast sure are nice. Monday rolled around and the boat yard managed to find a local turbo shop that would turn around the turbo in ~7 business days, and an injector company that would to the injectors in ~10. The rebuild of the injectors was l...
Back In The Water
The last week, our patience wearing thin, we got down to business riding the shop pretty tightly on a daily basis. They actually got the running gear back together, the cutters came in and got installed, they fixed the fiberglass damage below the waterline from when Hannah wrapped the line around th...
Deltaville & Seattle
After spending a great weekend in Norfolk, we started thinking about our plans for heading north and the Chesapeake. Our shaft seal on the port side had started leaking again, so we knew that we needed to get hauled out sometime soon. We started calling around and managed to find a boat yard in Delt...
Coinjock & Norfolk
You know you are in Norfolk when you see two aircraft carriers docked next to each other. In favor of pressing northwards, and avoiding the bug situation in the Pungo and Alligator Rivers, we decided to do a long push all the way from RE Mayo to Coinjock, totally bypassing Belhaven. (Yes, we continu...
Quite a Lot of Places
Highwind at RE Mayo Seafood The theme of the past two weeks has been the realities of both being quite busy with our jobs and therefore not having much time for living "the boat life". However, I'm going to start off this post with a picture that I didn't share in the last post when we were at Butle...
All of Georgia and Charleston
Someone sent us a photo of Highwind underway! After buying all the available O-rings within a 10 mile radius from our marina (only slightly joking), David was able to find one that fit, and with much effort was able to get everything back together! With the oil leak fixed, we were finally ready to h...
48V Lithium Power System
Note: This post has been superceded by an extensive newer post going into the details as the system has evolved over time. We've been running the power system at full strength for over a month now, with a couple weeks away from a marina at this point. Improvements will continue over the year, I'm su...
Leaving Cocoa, New Smyrna Beach and St. Augustine
On the... road? again We finally wrapped up most of our projects, and got to see a launch (ish), so we decided it was a good time to set out northwards for our second attempt at the loop. We had everything stowed away and were ready to set out for New Smyrna, where I hoped to actually get some time...
Folding Instrument Tower
The Endeavour TrawlerCat 48 is a tall boat. It's around 17 feet from the water to the flat top of the skylounge roof, with anything on top of that obviously making it worse. That flat roof is around the same height as the top of the anchor light was on the Meridian, for comparison. With harsh bridge...
New Water System
One of these faucets is about to be made obsolete... I'm going to start breaking completed larger projects out from the travel blog posts so people can properly ignore the posts they don't care about.:) The moment we got our first boat, I got a bunch of advice from people about keeping bottled water...
Finally, a Launch!
About a year ago, we posted a story about our first attempt to watch a rocket launch ( Titusville and New Smyrna: Poor Social Distancing and Rockets ). This involved taking the boat out from the Titusville marina, anchoring, waiting, and hearing "Abort" right after 0 was reached. Unfortunately, we l...
Looooong Month of Projects
What the salon has looked like for most of the last month... We've been more than a little slow about a new post. I kept intending to make a post with some wrapped up projects, but it's hilarious how many projects we've been progressing on in parallel, and just starting to wrap a bunch of them up th...
Projecting in Cocoa Village
Highwind at Cocoa Village Marina We moved across the ICW to the new Ft Pierce Marina (Causeway Cove) and settled in for the week of the work on the bow/anchor area. Other than working, some more unpacking, and receiving many packages, not much of note happened, other than it being the worst week of...
Final Week in Key Largo and Moving Onto Highwind II
We spent the last week in Key Largo in the house surrounded by boxes full of our things, but it was a nice relaxing time. The sun came out for long enough that we w even found a moment for a dip in the pool - our first and last of the stay at the house. On Wednesday we rented a uhaul and spent the e...
Third Bedroom Office Conversion
We've been remiss in writing a new blog post. We'll get on that. In the meantime, I wanted to share one of the bigger projects we're already undertaking on the new boat. The old working situation. Worked great, when only one of us was on a call at a time. One of the primary criteria for a new boat (...
Key West and Marquesas Keys
Marquesas Key When originally planning our stay in the Keys, we decided to take a week off work in the middle, when Matthew was there, to fully enjoy ourselves. We had been looking at either chartering a boat or taking Highwind to the Dry Torguas, an island with a fort 80 miles off shore from Key We...
Key Largo and a New Boat
After our lovely new year's eve on Key Biscayne, we had a pretty uneventful cruise over to the house on Key Largo. On advice from some other boaters the previous week, we took the Angelfish Creek cut through from Biscayne Bay out to the Hawk Channel. First look at the tropical water of the Keys - su...
Sea Trials, Highwind Adrift, Miami and New Year - Quite the Week
After Chrismas our plan was to spend the next week in the Ft Lauderdale area. We had managed to confirm an engine survey, hull survey, and sea trial for the new boat in the week between Christmas and New Year. We would be renting a car and driving up to Stuart for two days to oversee this process. W...
Stuart to Ft Lauderdale, Christmas on Highwind
Sunset at Stuart After looking on the potential new boat at Stuart, we decided that we were interested enough to make an offer, so we decided to head back to another anchor spot east of the marina for a couple of days during the negotiation process (to avoid marina fees!). However, on one of the (we...
Daytona Beach, Anchoring, Fort Pierce & Stuart
After St Augustine, we headed to Daytona beach, and dropped anchor in a spot just off the ICW. Unfortunately, we were spending only one night here, on a week day, and the weather was starting to get a little cold, so the odds were stacked against us actually visiting the beach. However, after a busy...
Jacksonville Beach and St Augustine
As we pulled out of the south end of Dunbar creek and rounded the southern tip of St Simons Island, we drove very close to the salvage area and got an even closer view of the overturned ship. For this leg, since the weather was good we decided to try going outside of the ICW. Though the waves were p...
Thanksgiving on St Simons Island
Dunbar Creek by drone , Highwind moored bottom left From Sunbury we headed south to St Simons Island, our intended destination for Thanksgiving weekend. We had not stopped on the island on our way north, so this would be a new place for us to explore. We had been invited by some friends from Meydenb...
New Internet Setup
NOTE: This post has been left for posterity, but there's an updated internet setup post for 2023. If you're arriving here from a link, you probably want to skip to the newer stuff. Warning: Nerdy informational post. Skip if you just want to hear boating stories. We've been using the Cradlepoint, Rog...
Beaufort, Savannah and Sunbury
Sunset after the storm Since the weather was pretty dreary, it was the middle of the week and we knew another storm was coming, we decided to head to Beaufort, rather than all the way to Savannah. First day in Beaufort was pretty dreary We actually did something unusual for this leg, which was to se...
Charleston and the Election
Sunset over McClellanville Zeta ended up not being a big deal in the end. A couple days in the marina with a fair amount of wind, but nothing to write home about. So we hung out, chatted with our neighbors, and when the weekend came, headed south. With a full weekend of calm weather ahead of us, but...
North Carolina
From Coinjock, we headed south towards the Alligator River. Along the way, we ran into a problem getting up on plane; Highwind just wasn't getting up to speed as she should be. We were getting to the right RPMs, but fuel usage was way high at those RPMs, so the motor was having to work too hard to m...
Solomon's and Speeding Down the Rest of the Chesapeake
Our anchorage for several days of wind/rain on the Great Wicomico River We spent Sunday night on anchor just up the creek in Solomon's and pulled into the marina on Monday morning. Since it was Indigenous People's Day/Columbus Day, I had the day off; however I'd forgotten to block off my calendar, s...
Fleeing Fall
It's only been a week since the last post, but we've clicked off nearly a quarter of the east coast in that time. With how long we lingered up north, and fall rapidly approaching, the weather has been quickly degrading, with days of sustained winds making travel difficult. We made the decision to bu...
Rowayton, NYC and the Jersey Shore
Sunset at Sandy Hook We pulled in to Rowayton and this time around, our mooring went much smoother than last time, now knowing how to use the system. John and Joan were returning home on Sunday, but had graciously given us access to their house to do laundry and to borrow their car for running erran...
A Lot of Wind; Long Island Sound (again)
Weather windows are becoming few and far between at this point, so we had a windy ride to our next destination - Cuddyhunk. In hind-sight, we probably should have given this spot a miss considering it's not that well protected. The wind prediction was moderate, but reality turned out to be far worse...
Boston!
After leaving Handy Boat, we headed back to Isle of Shoals for a night. It was a beautiful weekend day, so we were a bit nervous that there would not be an available mooring buoy for us to pick up, since our arrival was late in the afternoon. If you recall, there are two yacht clubs with several moo...
Attack Sailboats, Electrical Fires, Old Forts, and More
Drone shot of Fort Gorges, one of the highlights of our Portland weekend We headed out from Tenants Harbor a couple of days later than we thought we would due to work schedules. Now that the Summer is nearing its end, we are starting to make our way back down south. Our next destination was Round Po...
UPS is Bad at Delivering to a Marina
Sunset from Starlight at Dix Island Our first destination after Hinkley's was Buck's Harbor. We had intended to anchor, but upon arriving in the small cove, we realized like most of Maine, that everything was taken up with either a mooring buoy field, or lobster pots, so we hooked onto a mooring and...
Making Water (Potable) and a Return to Somes Sound
Incredible south-facing view from Valley Cove down the Somes Sound entrance Back once again to Hinkley's and ready for our water maker install, we got tied up on their dock. Awaiting us was a cart load of boxes from Amazon and some items sent to us from Seattle, in addition to the water maker, since...
Chilling Around Mt Desert Island
View from Cadillac Mountain of Bar Harbor After a lovely week at Roque, we decided to start heading back west towards MDI where our appointment with Hinckley for the water maker install was coming up. We decided to stop in Jonesport on our way back, since I needed to do laundry. We reserved a moorin...
Bar Harbor and Roque Island
Bar Harbor at sunset, with the "experience cruise" sailing ships coming in for the night We ended up spending the whole week in Bar Harbor. The internet was good, the buoy was reasonably cheap, access to restaurants/supplies was excellent, and it's really pretty there. In between the rainstorms, tha...
Repairs and Acadia
Highwind is decidedly not in the water, at bottom center We ended up spending a full week on the hard at Hinckley. They ordinarily don't allow people to stay on the boat while it's in their yard, but with all the hotels in the area closed, we didn't have a lot of options, so they graciously let us s...
More Fog and Finally Hauled Out!
Sunset from Beal's Lobster in Southwest Harbor The lack of blog updates unfortunately reflects our reality -- that we've just been in holding patterns for the last two weeks. Wayfarers kept delaying getting back to us with either a day when they could have a mechanic come on the boat or when we migh...
Maine is Foggy
Our view, almost every day Now that we have reached Maine, we have been able to slow down our break-neck pace to rush northwards and have generally been staying in places for a couple of days at a time. It has been nice to be a bit lazy. Snow Island was a great stop - we were the only boat anchored...
Maine!
A pretty old schooner welcomed us to Portland, ME Expecting heavy wind the next full day, in the morning, we decided to head into the Marion harbor and pick up a buoy with Barden's Boatyard. We pulled up the anchor, went to wash it off, and... nothing. Apparently the washdown pump had decided it was...
Starting a Side Trip to Maine
Hannah demonstrating the rapidly-extinguishing sunlight, and our questionable decisions, to her parents over video chat as we head toward the Marion anchorage We headed out from Rowayton on Tuesday morning, before work, heading east. For the next month or so, every bit of travel will have to be undo...
Side Quest to Oyster Bay
John and Joan's sailboat Starlight at sunset at its mooring on Five Mile River John and Joan offered us amazing hospitality over the last week and we have really enjoyed spending the week in Rowayton. We borrowed Joan's car to do a couple of provisioning runs including topping off our propane tanks...
Open Water
Our 5 day stay in Delaware City waiting out tropical storm Arthur was uneventful, which is all one can hope of a week with a predicted storm. We pulled out Gloomhaven (board game) again, and otherwise spent the time working, relaxing and doing laundry. David also decided to install the fixed monitor...
Logistics: Waiting for Arthur
Late last week, my laptop had broken and decided to stop charging, so I'd been stuck using my desktop (a bit power-hungry when on anchor...) Being on a moving boat, with repair shops all closed due to Coronavirus, there's essentially no way to get a laptop repaired and back in my hands in a reasona...
A Week With A Stowaway
Sunset dinghy ride on the Sassafras River The next day, our friend Peter joined us for the week. He had been out east on a work trip when everything locked down, and he ended up just staying with his mom outside of DC while things blew over. Two months later, he was still there, and desired rescue....
The Patuxent (Pax) River
Drone shot over Herrington Harbor South Marina Pulling anchor at the mouth of the Pax We had planned an itinerary of a couple of places up the Patuxent ("Pax") River for the next few days, so after a night at the mouth, we pulled anchor and headed north towards Battle Creek, a spot recommended to us...
Windy Weather and the South Chesapeake
We made it to a beach! The next morning, about 30 mins after I woke up, I heard a horn outside of the boat and went out to investigate. A Norfolk Fire Department boat was coming over to see if everything was alright. Perhaps not too many people anchor in that spot? It was also pretty windy - so mayb...
Internet Connectivity
I've since thrown away most of this setup and gone with a new setup described in a new post. So this is just here for posterity. (Content last updated 7/16/2020) People ask us all the time what we use for internet access on the boat. It's a vaguely complicated setup, so I figured I'd write it up in...
Civilization, what's that?
Sunset at the Alligator River. Wide open space and no other boats. We departed Belhaven with a plan to spend the next few nights on anchor. With my new job, we knew we wanted to do only short hops and our only schedule constraint was to arrive in Norfolk on Sunday to receive a shipment of new house...
Oriental and Belhaven: Small Town America?
Oriental, NC's downtown area. We're at the marina at bottom center. In between high school and college, I took a year off (read: I was told to take a year off to get my shit together) and spent the summer portion of that gap year in the tiny town of Bettles, AK. 100-something miles northwest of Fair...
Weathering a Storm
Drone view over Surf City. Highwind is the boat in the bottom left-ish corner of the shot We left Tina's pocket and continued northward towards Wrightsville, which was to be our last anchorage before heading to Topsail Island, Surf City for re-provisioning. This turned out to be a pretty busy anchor...
On the Hook
Sunset selfie at Butler Island. David didn't want to get up from his computer to join me:) We've been working our way up South Carolina and are now in North Carolina, so that is state number 4 of the trip! Since we left Charleston, we decided to primarily anchor out, and that's what we've been doing...
Living our Best Lives (Savannah to Charleston)
Alternate titles for this post could have included: "the week of mediocre sunset pictures" or "now we really don't do much in towns". Cruising in South Carolina Savannah marked our last stop in Georgia and next week we will be cruising into North Carolina. After leaving Savannah, we spent a night on...
Northern Georgia (Teakettle Creek to Savannah)
Sunset over Sunbury After fueling up at Brunswick (we are basically taking every opportunity, when the price is right, to fill up), we headed out towards Teakettle Creek to anchor for the night. Another Looper boat pulled in after us and anchored a little further down the creek. Around happy hour ti...
We Made it to Georgia! (Jekyll Island and Brunswick)
Our Great Loop guidebook gave us three options for our first stop in Georgia, all pretty close to one another - 2 summer-beach-resort islands and an inland town. After getting some advice from a former colleague of mine who hails from Georgia and currently lives in Atlanta, we decided to spend one n...
Black Creek to Fernandina
Amazing sunset view captured from the drone We knew that we wanted to spend the weekend on the St John's river, but this particular side trip isn't detailed in the Great Loop book that we have generally been following, so we had to wing it. I did a bit of online research and found a blog post detail...
Getting Better at Social Distancing (Palm Coast to Jacksonville)
Coming into Jacksonville after a long day at 8 kts on the ICW At some point in the last couple of days, we surpassed our previous record for longest continuous time spent on the boat (on our Canadian summer trip two summers ago). Despite that, and even the current need to practice social distancing,...
Picking Up The Pace, COVID-19 Adjustments, and More Repairs
The ICW has lots of large power line stays just a few dozen feet off the channel. It's a bit otherworldly going through the gaps when the water's super calm. After being holed up at a windy Nettles Island for three days, and finally free of set-in-stone scheduled destinations, we were ready to get m...
Titusville and New Smyrna: Poor Social Distancing and Rockets
Starting our day at the Kennedy Space Center Friday, we did our now-usual routine of waking up early and heading northward up the ICW, this time heading to to Titusville. This had been a planned stop for a couple weeks, aiming for a weekend day to see the Kennedy Space Center, so we got a spot in th...
Nettles Island
After we landed back in Florida after a great weekend celebrating David's grandmother Marian's life with his family, we immediately loosed the lines and started heading northwards, aiming to find an anchorage in Jensen Beach, just south of Ft Pierce. Turns out that there was a wind advisory for smal...
An Average Day
Quite a few people have been asking us if we are under way and if we are on the boat while working, so I thought I'd describe an average day so far on the trip. We woke up this morning in Boynton Beach and our destination for today is West Palm Beach. So far, we have been doing all our traveling ear...
Under Way
The last few days have been pretty solidly filled with finishing the last projects to get the boat back together and ready to start the trip. We swapped out a fixed cooler for a powered CFX3 unit (basically a second fridge), since we didn't want to be beholden to buying ice every couple days, which...
Settling In
Current Status: Messy But Manageable The only set-in-stone date on our trip for the next several months is having to be in DC for the March 6-8 weekend for a funeral. A couple months ago, with that date in mind, and expecting that we'd want to deal with some stuff on the boat before heading too far...
And So It Begins
When David randomly (at least to me it felt pretty random...) said to me about three years ago, "I think we should get a boat", I never would have dreamed that three years later we would be celebrating the first day in a year-long adventure on said boat in Ft Lauderdale, Florida. I must admit that w...
Final Preparations and Initial Plans
As I go to bed tonight, we tick down past the 8-days-to-go mark. So, we're just finishing up some fairly frantic last-minute planning and logistics, and are ready to move into see-what-happens mode. Today, we dropped off the last pile of stuff at the freight company to be sent out to the boat. Since...
Arrived, But Not Quite in One Piece
Highwind getting unloaded at Port Everglades, Ft. Lauderdale, FL As the date of the boat's arrival in Florida got closer, we were thinking that it was probably too early to fly out and start our loop in late January. I'd told my job that March 1st-ish was when we'd start, and while I could have gott...
On Its Way
After several back-and-forths with Florida on Thursday and Friday, we got our ISF filed (customs forms) and were cleared to load. 3pm Friday, they loaded it up, and 7am this morning the ship departed Victoria, headed to Ensenada. There's no going back now. Progress as of this posting from the InReac...
A Journey of 6000 Miles Begins With a Single Email
I hadn't heard from the boat broker in a month, so last Tuesday night (Dec 16) I fired off a quick checkin email to see if he had any update on when the January/February sailing was going to happen. I woke up to a lovely response: Hi David , when would be the earliest you could be ready to go ? Wou...
Preparation for The Loop
TL;DR: Early in 2019, Hannah and I made the decision to start seriously planning on doing The Great Loop , a year-long marine circumnavigation of the eastern third of the continental USA -- up the east coast from Florida, into the great lakes, down the Mississippi, and around the gulf. After much pl...