30°16′33″ N 81°43′2″ W

July 1, 8:00am

This morning we were preparing to cast off from Ortega River Marina in Jacksonville & get underway by 7:00am.

We had a few technical issues with the chart plotter but managed to get them sorted out and we able to cast off.

The photo above is Jacksonville city centre-right on the water.

We are making better progress than I anticipated & are averaging between 7.5 & 8.0 knots instead of 6.5 knots so we will get to our first destination of St Mary’s Georgia an hour (or more) sooner.

It’s a beautiful day but very hot. This is going to take some getting used to. Lots of bottled water on board & chilling in the fridge.

Cheers everyone!

I have been planning the trip north for several weeks now. The boat is all set to go and so am I. I’ve assembled lots of digital and paper charts of the route, cruising guides and have also learned many details from other boaters who have taken this trip before and been kind enough to share their experience with me.

The table below shows an estimate of the distances and travel times between major milestone locations. Several boaters who I have talked to and chatted with on the internet advise that if I am travelling at 6.5 knots then I should plan on averaging about 50 nautical miles (NM) a day and make further allowances for rest days, sightseeing, delays because of poor weather, etc. If I was going “flat out”, pushing hard each day and not stopping for rest days I might be able to make the journey in 30 days or less – but what fun would there be in that?

Click anywhere on the table above to enlarge it

There are a lot of interesting places to see and visit along the way so I don’t want to rush by because I may never travel (by water) this way again. Also, I have several friends who live in Georgia and the Carolinas, so I’m trying to plan my rest days to coincide with some visits and sight-seeing. As a result I have planned on taking between 35 and 40 days to get to Albany, NY. It will be interesting to see how my time/progress estimates work out.

I have only calculated the time and distance from Jacksonville, FL to Albany, NY because I am not yet certain where I will go from Albany. North of Albany the New York Canal System divides into two directions. I can take the route to Buffalo on Lake Erie or follow another canal to Oswego on Lake Ontario. If there is enough of the summer left I would like to go Lake Ontario, cross over to Kingston, ON and then up the Rideau River to Ottawa. If I decide not to go to Ottawa then my destination will probably be Port Stanley, ON.

I’m anxious to get underway. Weather permitting, I will leave Jacksonville early next Friday morning (June 30) and will stop for the night at a marina in St. Mary’s, GA. It’s only a 6 – 8 hour trip to St. Mary’s – a nice distance for the very first day of a long journey ahead. My good buddy Chris Cavanaugh is going to join me for the first couple of weeks and then Catherine will come on board for a week or two while Chris flies home for some summer sailing on his boat “Twocan”.

Each day of the journey I will be making a blog entry about our adventures for that particular day. I will also include the latitude and longitude my starting point in the morning and my end point for that day so you can see where I am on Google Maps.

We finalized the purchase of the Marine Trader in April and then contemplated our choices for bringing the boat home. We could have it trucked or we could “sail” it home. I have always wanted to cruise the east coast of the USA on the ICW, through the Chesapeake and up the Hudson River, Erie Canal, etc. so it was a pretty easy decision to make. “All hands prepare to cast off!”.

Prior commitments prevented us from setting out before the end of June so the boat has been stored at a dock at a marina in Jacksonville. I also have some work to do on the boat prior to starting the trip home. Those projects include:

• new house & starter batteries
• new 110v inverter
• power supply modifications at both helm stations to accommodate my favourite laptop navigation system
• new water muffler
• galley renovations (stove, countertop & storage space)
• refinish all interior cabins (new varnish)

Late in May I flew down to Jacksonville and spent 10 days completing the (temporary) renovations to the galley. You can read more about that project work by following this link: Santosha Galley Renovations. I also manged to get four coats of varnish on all the woodwork in the main cabin (galley/settee/inside helm station). With so many windows in this part of the boat the original varnish wood finishing was suffering from heavy UV damage so several new coats of varnish were badly needed.

Santosha Galley Renovations

I was hoping to get more varnishing done for the forward and aft sleeping cabins but ran out of time (& energy)!

On June 17 we are attending Catherine’s nephew’s wedding at a location near London. After that I will head back down to Jacksonville on June 19 to finish my project work.

My good buddy Chris Cavanaugh is going to join me on June 30 for the first leg of the journey. “The Human Seagull” (me) and “The Bad Bird” (Chris) take on the ICW. Should be interesting times aboard Santosha!

Catherine will fly down a few weeks later to meet us along the way and to relieve Chris so he can return to his home waters on Lake Huron for some of his own summer adventures aboard his beloved Twocan.

Cheers everyone!