Charleston to Beaufort, NC

Jim arrived Friday afternoon and Martin gave him a tour of Blossom and the low down on her systems. We used our pre-departure and departure checklists Saturday morning and feel like we’ve just about gotten them pinned down. Martin did great leaving the dock and getting us out to sea. Jim showed me how to single-up the dock lines so I can manage when I’m alone and have no one on the dock helping me untie the boat.  It’s pretty straight forward.

Leaving Charleston

I started writing this post while cruising off the coast of Myrtle Beach. We left Charleston about 9:30am.  What a different experience!  The waves were about 3 feet with the wind at 17 knots.  It felt completely different from our flat passage up here. We were pitching (the bow of the boat bouncing up and down) quite bit.  Even with my scopolamine patch I was a bit queasy at the outset. I hope I get my sea legs like I did with Lucky. It took a week or two of feeling “malaise” before my head adjusted. I have my fingers crossed.

We’re also running with the AC for this passage. It makes a huge a difference to be able to lounge around the boat and be cool.  All of Saturday it was too bumpy to go out on the deck. No hula hooping this time!  But the salon was much less bouncy and I was able to do a little bit of my hand applique when I wasn’t on watch.

Current project

Sunset at Sea

Conditions were much better when I woke up for my 6am shift. The wind had calmed to 8 knots and we had gentle swells on the beam with much more mellow pitching.  It was a pretty sunrise with rain showers off in the distance.  We used the same 3 hour shift schedule last night. I definitely have the best shift times, being able to sleep from midnight to 6 and then see the sun rise J

 Sunrise at sea

As we neared Beaufort we were escorted in by a family of dolphins. It looked like the adults were spotted and the smaller kids were solid gray. They stayed with us for quite a while.

Dolphins on the bow

We're staying at the Beaufort City Docks tonight. We got in around noon.  It was crazy busy with holiday festivities and there were boats everywhere. Martin is learning fast and under tricky circumstances!  Once again, he did a great job docking.

Blossom in Beaufort

Blossom is running well with just a couple issues. The engine room is still too hot, even with the added ventilation duct. The duct was designed to help circulate more air.  We’re running slower (having passed our 100 hrs on the engine) at about 1850 rpm, maintaining about 8 knots and the engine room reads 131 degrees.  Granted, the sensor is in a hot spot but still…  

At dock, we've encountered another issue with our AC tripping the shore power supply. Martin and Jim are currently working on this. Jim is incredibly knowledgeable of boats, especially Nordhavns, and their various systems.  He's been a big help trouble-shooting and answering questions that Martin has about various systems on the boat.  He's also very familiar with cruising the east coast which makes planning our route so easy!

Tomorrow we’ll start traveling on the inside. This means slower speeds, less autopilot and more driving for Martin.  Our new goal is to reach Atlantic Yacht Basin on Tuesday. We're thinking about keeping Blossom there when we aren't aboard so it's nice to have a chance to scope it out.  If the dometic folks will come to Atlantic, we hope they'll be able to put the new harness on the second chiller and help us trouble shoot the AC pressure loss. If not, we'll head for Norfolk to get the work done. Once our AC issues are taken care of we'll be free to take our time and enjoy the Chesapeake on the way up to Baltimore.

This evening we're all going out to Jim's favorite restaurant on the ICW - I can't wait!

Enjoying Charleston

Today was our first day that felt like a “day off”.  We woke up and I cleaned again. Who knew semi-glossy wood could show so many finger smudges? So I wiped down the walls and the pilot house helm… I can see that keeping Blossom “sparkling” is going to keep me busy!

My Mom and her friend Desnee came late morning and we had a great day. We gave them a tour of the boat and then we did a quick run to Staples to pick up some clip boards that we need for engine room checks and pilot house monitoring. That taken care of, we took a cab into downtown Charleston to sight see.  We had lunch and then walked through the downtown market. Then we enjoyed a carriage tour of the city, followed by an ice cream cone.  All in all, a pretty darn good afternoon J  

Desnee and my Mom

They had to head home way too soon but I was thrilled to get to see my Mom and meet Desnee.

Martin and I enjoyed dinner in the cockpit and a nice glass of Peju wine.  We turned in for an early night. Our next training captain, Jim Mobley, will arrive tomorrow afternoon and we expect to head out Saturday morning for Beaufort.  

Resting in Charleston

Resting in Charleston

I’m sitting in the pilot house now, enjoying a beautiful breeze, while it lasts. The heat is supposed to return tonight and we’ll be back to AC and sweating a lot when working around the deck of the boat.

Jeff left this morning. It was bittersweet to see him go. Harsh, because we loved having him aboard with us. We learned so much and had such a great time.  He even surprised us almost daily with gifts (the hula hoop, Charleston Chews, Olives and even a game that he developed himself!)  He wasn’t the least bit put off when Martin and I got a bit “testy” because we were anxious and/or hungry.  He helped us develop protocols and check lists and good practices. And most importantly for this trip, he helped us gain some confidence in our boating skills.  Plus, he’s just fun to hang out with!

Dark & Stormies and Charleston Chews on the Fly Bridge

Blossom seemed to take a special liking to Jeff. She tried to gain his attention…

When he rudely ignored her for his phone, she tried harder…

The “sweet” of it is a bit less dramatic. His departure means that we’re that much closer to our goal of running the boat alone, just the two of us, as we’ve been dreaming to do. 

The past couple of days have been filled with cleaning, tasks and paperwork.  We did get into Charleston both evenings for fantastic dinners. The first evening we asked the taxi driver to take us somewhere restaurants would still be open (it was getting late). He dropped us off in front of a restaurant called “Blossom”. Seriously?  Serendipity?  Well, of course we ate there and it was fabulous!

Dinner at Blossom

It's a busy marina with boats coming and going all day. This was the view as a particularly large boat went by, leaving the marina: 

We started our day to the sound of hundreds of birds. Looking our the port light, they were enjoying the sailboat rigging at sunrise: 

MacMorris, (MacGyver + Morris J was at it again and built a new intake duct for the engine room from a dryer duct pipe.  We hope this will bring down our engine temp a bit. We’ll be able to test it on our trip when we leave here for a 26 hour trip to Beaufort, NC.

We’ve been enjoying the marina as well. We’re way, way out on the Megadock, it’s a good walk back to land!  They have everything you could want here – dock side pump out and diesel, a restaurant, bar, mini store, liquor/wine store and free shuttle to town. 

Local folks passing by

Local planes passing by

This morning, after seeing Jeff off, we took the marina shuttle to the West Marine and Harris Teeter grocery store. (It leaves every day at 11 and picks you up at 12:30 – what a great service!)  We picked up a few odds and ends.  We came back and pumped out for the first time (emptied the black tank).   

Then we spent some time plotting our next passage. We’ll go over everything with Jim but we wanted to see what we’ll be doing this weekend.  It looks like it’s about 26 hours to Beaufort.  Tides and currents look good for a 10-11 departure on Saturday with a noon-ish arrival on Sunday.  We’re thinking that we’ll probably leave on Saturday as the seas are calming down for a couple days Sat/Sun. If that holds, those will be our travel dates and we’ll try to sneak up the coast before the seas get much bigger than 4 feet.

This afternoon we were doing more tasks. I want to attack some rust I found on the swim platform rails. Martin rigged up our burgee (little flag pole on the bow of the boat) and is off building something else in his work shop. We call it the basement, but it’s really his workshop...

Unassuming view of the hatch in the guest stateroom:

 Yet lurking below is Martin’s lair:

We’re primping a little so she’ll be in good shape to show off tomorrow to my Mom and her girlfriend, Desnee.  We're excited to have guests tomorrow aboard Blossom!

Boating is not just fun, games and glamour…

Some days it’s fixing toilets and scrubbing the decks :)

Our first day in Charleston was a busy one. Jeff’s friend Simon, who is a captain of a local boat, came by and very generously spent the day with us.  We were able to get a tour of his boat and then stop at a West Marine and Lowe’s to gather supplies for the toilet and AC projects. 

Martin creating his charging device in Lowes

Blossom at the dock, Charleston Harbor Marina

This morning we moved over to the Charleston City Marina megadock.  Once again we waited for slack tide and then we left the dock. The wind was blowing a bit and we had to navigate down a fairly narrow channel in the marina lined with very big, very expensive mega yachts.  Martin did great!  We had a bit of argument with the dock hand who wanted us to pull up 5 feet away from the boat in front of us. We agreed to 10 feet and feel far too close with a tropical storm coming up the coast (even if it’s not expected to affect us too much, any swell could make us bounce…)  Apparently a very large boat is coming in behind us tomorrow.  So this meant that we tied the boat down and then had to undo it, move it forward and redo the lines. Good practice, yet annoying.

Blossom bowsprit to the left, Marlow to the right

This marina is right in Charleston and I’m looking forward to getting the bikes out and going in to town this week.  But today we had business to take care of. Martin transferred fuel to the starboard tanks and we’re almost level now. 

Conducting the highly technical "blue tape test" to see if we're level

Then he and Jeff fixed the master head toilet this morning – major victory!  

It always looks worse before it gets better...

While they worked on that, I scrubbed the decks and wiped down the stainless rails. 2.5 hours of cleaning – dang!  Today was a good day to work around the boat, it was only 85 degrees with a breeze. This morning was the first time I was actually a bit cold on the east coast since March. In the afternoon, Martin pressurized the tempered water loop after creating a device to do so and filled our water tank using his home made filtration system (he's turning into MacGyver!).

 Jeff and I ran up to the marina store and found Ginger Beer in cans (total coup, we’ve never seen it cans before and we avoid glass as much as we can – wine being the big exception of course), as well as some Mt. Gay rum.  Dark and Stormies for happy hour today! 

It's all about the rum!

Today was left for boat chores so we could get keep up with the growing list. The boat is big enough that if we let things like repairs, cleaning and maintenance items slide, we worry that could get overwhelmed and have a hard time catching up.

Tomorrow we’ll work on more Blossom protocols and paperwork with Jeff and I’ll clean up inside. 

My favorite place to get work done on the boat

I want the boat nice and clean for my Mom!  She and her friend Desnee are driving down from Myrtle Beach to spend the day on Thursday.  I’m so excited to see her and to introduce her to Blossom!  

Time to sign off, it's cocktail hour on the fly bridge and we're having dinner in Charleston tonight...

Overnight: Cape Canaveral to Charleston

Our first overnight passage was great!  We ran for about 32 hours.

We left Ocean Club Marina a bit late so we were unsure of our arrival time in Charleston.  We toyed with the idea of stopping in Jacksonville, FL or elsewhere along the way to better time our entry into Charleston but after seeing that the weather was due to deteriorate a bit on Sunday we decided to push on.  The reason that timing is a concern is that there are very strong currents in Charleston so your entry into the harbor should be planned at slack tide. You also don’t want to arrive at an unfamiliar port at night…

We decided to see what kind of time we would make, knowing that we’d probably catch the Gulf Stream for a while and that would speed us along.  We figured if we made slow time and it looked like a late arrival to Charleston, we’d try to stop early in Hilton Head rather than risk a night entry.

The seas were calm, but not quite as glassy as the day before. We ran the boat from the pilot house this trip. We passed time during the day by playing with our rainbow hoop, a new toy that Jeff brought us. He also showed us how to do the “calm seas dance”. (It seems to have worked J)  We had dolphins playing at the bow early in the trip though we didn’t see any turtles. 

It was calm enough that we cooked a real dinner. We rotated 3 hour shifts beginning at 9pm and we all managed to get at least 5 hours of sleep overall.

  Running at night.

Snack Time

We got a lot of work done, finalizing our engine room checklist/temperature list, trip log and provisioning list. We tried to establish good practices for long voyages/overnights.  It was great experience using the monitors and tools at the helm for me. I also played around with using Coastal Explorer and Active Captain as we were under way. 

Some of the cameras we have set up on Blossom. 

We can watching engine room checks from the helm.

As it was, we made fantastic time!  I was on night watch from 9-midnight just as we touched the Gulf Stream and saw us hit 12.1 knots. At only 62% load that’s an amazing speed. Once we left the stream we were back to a more normal 8.4 knots.  We would have liked to have run the engine harder but our engine room temps were too high to push the RPMs any higher.

One of the highlights of the trip was walking out to the bridge and looking up to see a sky full of stars and the Milky Way.  It was 84 degrees overnight so it was nice to be able to step out for fresh air. 

Sunset at sea

We arrived in Charleston right at slack tide and had an easy entry into the Charleston Harbor Marina. Martin did a great job docking.  I think it's very cool that this is where my Mom and I stayed for a long weekend back in 2012 when we met Sean & Louise - and got to see Vector for the first time. We're actually docked in the exact place that Vector was :)  We are across the bay from Charleston proper, that's our starboard view actually!  To port, we look over the marina and the USS Yorktown.

View of Charleston Harbor Marina and the USS Yorktown

Blossom ran well and was very comfortable. Boat check: we had a few minor issues on this leg:

*  Once again, the engine room temperature was extremely high. We have to figure something out because we can’t have an engine room averaging 45+ degrees more than ambient temperature.

*   Martin noticed during an engine room check that our AC water loop pressure is decreasing so we think we have another leak.  He knows how to pump it up so we’ll take care of that as soon as we arrive.  It’s so hot, there’s no way we can do without AC.  We haven’t used it underway and have managed, but barely!

*  Our steering wheel in the pilot house (that we didn’t need on this trip) is squeaking away as the autopilot corrects/auto corrects our heading.

*  Blossom has a very strong list to port. Martin and Jeff transferred fuel until we evened out. No more leaning left!  We need to figure out how to redistribute weight or add some ballast.

*   On a good note, our steering fluid and pressure held up throughout the trip. We had no autopilot errors so we know that the leaky pump is isolated.

While it’s a bit disappointing to be having these issues, it’s expected.  This is why a maiden voyage is called a "shake down cruise". We wanted to run her pretty hard right away and shake loose the bits that would need fixing. We have 1 year to work out the kinks under warranty. Better now than a year from now!

It looks like we may once again change our itinerary. This has been a great example of how difficult it is to make plans on a boat. We had hoped to get to Norfolk with Jeff. But the seas are picking up enough that we’d rather not head out tomorrow. The boat can easily handle the current forecast but we aren't as hardy yet and it's hurricane season. There's a tropical storm with a current forecast to pass us by Friday. No sense taking risks, so we’re going to stay in Charleston with Jeff and having Jim fly in here to meet us. We'd like to try to make it to Norfolk and then Baltimore with Jim. That looks possible right now... But if our worse case scenario is being "stuck" in Charleston to train for a while, well isn't that horrible? ;)

 

Sunrise over Charleston

We’re learning and having a lot of fun. Life is very, very good.

How to Break a Head

I can't believe we caught this on video.  After careful review, we've decided it was really Jeff's fault :)

How to Break a Marine Head

Stuart to Cape Canaveral

We had a very easy first day, leaving the dock, passing through the narrow bridges and anchoring just a couple miles down the St. Lucie River.  It was a mellow evening. After anchoring and going over a few check lists that we were working on, we grilled steaks and went to bed.

Martin navigating the river

The first night was a long one for me. We ran the air conditioning on our 9K generator but had to use house batteries for the rest of the boat. Martin knew it wouldn’t be a problem but I had to wake up every two hours to check the status of the batteries, because that’s how I roll.

Yesterday we weighed anchor and headed out the inlet. We had one brief “pucker moment” (thanks Sean, a very apt, descriptive term J when we briefly brushed the bottom at the cross roads. Thankfully it was a sand bottom!

Then we cruised up the outside from Stuart to Cape Canaveral.  

It was so calm, at one point it was like rolling glass.  It provided for some amazing photo ops while under way :)

(Don't try this at home)

We were happy that it was such a calm day as Martin and Jeff were fighting a few gremlins that turned up and it ended up being a bit of a stressful journey.

A few things we had to deal with:

  

*  The Simrad autopilot wasn’t communicating with our Furuno system up in the fly bridge so we ran from the pilot house. Martin fixed that issue.

* We had an oil leak in our #1 auto pilot pump and were losing pressure from our steering reservoir. Martin and Jeff had to find the leak and isolate the pump.  We'll get the pump fixed in Norfolk or Baltimore.

* The engine room is running very hot, despite our Delta T exhaust fans.  The hand rail was exceedingly hot so we have to remedy this as it would be dangerous in rough seas.

* We broke a toilet! After emptying the holding tank when we were more than 3 miles off shore, a bottle cap was accidentally dropped in the master toilet when filling it with the bacterial treatment. Martin & Jeff thought to suck it out with a wet vac which retrieved the cap but collapsed the flushing mechanism. Hopefully it’s just the valves that need tweaking and we can get the toilet back working, asap.

While the day was fairly stressful, we also had some lovely moments.  We saw dozens of huge turtles and flying fish.  I tried to get a picture of a bird taking a rest and a ride on the back of a turtle but it was too far away.  We had dolphins come play at the bow twice. One pod had a mom and small baby. 

Dolphins are always a highlight of a boat trip.

Mart resting while I was at the helm.

My view from the helm (prior to losing auto pilot :)

Martin did a great job at his first try docking the boat. We entered bow first to remove a snubber shackle that was banging on the bow eye and then he pulled her around stern in. Great job Mart!!

Driving from the docking station in the cockpit.

Shackle removal

  

Aren't those fenders tied up perfectly?

Over all, it was a stressful, beautiful and exciting day! Martin did a fantastic job. He was captain, engineer and mechanic.  He and Jeff were able to trouble shoot our problems without getting anxious, taking it all in stride. That's not my forte, however, I did hand steer the boat for an hour with no drama and I'm very proud of that :)

Today we head out for Charleston on our first overnight passage. We'll each take 3 hour watches. This will be our longest time ever running a boat at sea - exciting!!

See you in Charleston...

Moving Aboard

Moving Aboard

The past week has been incredibly exciting, busy and exhausting as after months of anticipation, we’re finally moving aboard!  We've been living in an apartment, just a few miles away from the commissioning office for 7 months. In that time, everything we put in the apartment was intended for the boat with the exception of a few items that we rented.  I knew we had a lot of things but wow, every time I think “that has to be the last car load”, somehow there’s more, much more.  (The bulk of it seems to be quilting supplies and wine, I think I may be in need of an intervention or two…)

As of today, Sunday, we have a good grip on it and Blossom is looking amazing. A testament to the boat, all that stuff is finding a home and we still have some empty cupboards, albeit they’re the small ones J  With all our things in the boat she’s so comfortable and she feels like home.  Here are a few pictures of what she’s looking like so far:

The Salon and Galley

Our wall cupboard wine storage system. It’s a great use of a strange, narrow space that couldn't be used for much else.

The Master Stateroom

The Guest Stateroom/Quilt room

The Pilot House

The next few days we’ll be continuing to stow things away, work on small projects, provision and get ready to leave. Martin has been very busy tying down various things in the lazarette and in the space under the helm of the fly bridge. He converted a car bike rack to be used in the laz to store the bikes, has put up our boat poles and is making fender boards for the boat. 

We still have a couple issues with the boat.  The latest is a bad harness on chiller #2. This means we only have 1 chiller and if this goes kaput, we have no air con.  I’ll leave Martin to discuss all things mechanical. I understand what’s going on but I don’t have the language to explain it in a respectable manner. The upshot is that it’s not the main unit (as thought for a day or two – this would be a horrible thing, requiring a few days to fix with no air conditioning).  The tech thinks that it's a harness which only requires a couple of hours to fix.  There is no tech available next week in Stuart so the part is being shipped to Virginia. We’ll have it installed when we reach Norfolk.

So what’s next?  We leave Stuart, learn to operate our boat, and set out on route to rendezvous with our friends, Sean & Louise, who are currently anchored out in NY.

Part 1: Destination Norfolk, VA.  Our salesman, Jeff Merrill, is coming to Stuart tomorrow. We plan to head out on Wednesday or Thursday. We’ll probably stop in Cocoa Beach overnight and then head to Charleston, SC. We’ll stay there a night or two and then go on to Norfolk. We’ll be training in close quarter maneuvering, docking, etc. along the way. To begin with, Martin will be learning to captain, I will learn to stand watch and handle the lines.  This is the minimum required for the two of us to operate the boat without help. We are so excited about our time with Jeff. Jeff not only sold us the boat and is a great captain, but we consider him a good friend and he’s a pleasure to be with. We can’t wait!

Part 2: Destination Baltimore, MD. Jeff will leave us on the 27^th from Norfolk and we’ll be joined by our second training captain, Jim Mobley on August 29th.  We’ll head north to Chesapeake with Jim, destination Baltimore. 

Part 3:  Cruising with friends. Once we've made it to Baltimore we may drop Jim off or he may stay with us a while, that's tbd based on other commitments he may have.  At that point, we’ll see where our friends are and rendezvous.  They should be a bit north at that point. We'll then return south to Baltimore by the 20^th to meet with our designer, Scott Cole, who will be photographing the boat, and to attend Trawler Fest, the 25-28^th.

We have lots of ideas and even one “plan” for the fall. All in good time in another blog post...

Successful Sea Trial!

I’m typing the beginning of this post from the Little Bahama Bank. We’re flying along at 9.3 knots after slowing down to dodge a thunder storm that stood between us and Stuart. We have John, our commissioning manager and Chris, one of our commissioning techs with us. This is our final sea trial, a two day trip to test all systems and assuage our concerns over a difficult 6 month commissioning process.

Heading Out

We left Stuart, FL around 7:30am yesterday and cruised about 11 hours to the Bahama Bank. It was a gorgeous, hot day. We had calm seas across the gulf stream and bathwater on the bank. There were hardly any boats out on the bank other than some lobster fisherman. We anchored on the bank, put out the flopper stoppers, retrieved the flopper stoppers, grilled dinner, stared at fish in the underwater lights off the transom and spent our first night at anchor. It was great!

Crossing the gulf stream

We learned a lot from the trial and were able to test several systems. Blossom ran like a dream and our temporary four blade prop performed well. (I’m sure Martin will post in the near future on some of the technical issues that we’ve encountered). John ran the boat from the fly bridge and it confirmed that we made the right decision for us in getting the hard top flybridge with a side seat. It was very comfortable underway with all of us up top. We could have easily had a couple more people along for the ride. It was also the perfect space to enjoy a cocktail and watch the sun go down.

Anchored on the Bank

 We learned that we’re going to need to practice the heck out of deploying the flopper stoppers! For friends who don’t know what flopper stoppers are, they’re wing-like poles that stick out at a 90 degree angle from each side of the boat. You hang large metal “fish” from them that are hinged. The system is designed to reduce rocking and rolling at anchor. This involved several ropes and a very coordinated effort.

Deploying port flopper stopper

Skip Jack Tuna

We also had a beginner lesson fishing. We bought 2 fishing poles and some lures and Chris set out to show us how to do it. We caught a 12 inch Bonita on the way out and a 10 lb skip jack tuna on the way back. Not great eating, both were released and we enjoyed hamburgers for dinner. We used one of the two water makers for a few hours and added to our 600 gallon tank. No military showers aboard Blossom! We practiced anchoring, which is a bit different from our former boat, Lucky, with automatic (as well as manual) chain counters and releases, and a blasting salt water wash down. Our Ultra anchor set like a dream. On our way back over the gulf, we emptied our gray and black tanks, another system check.

It’s windy today as we head back with some thunderheads forming and reforming along the horizon. We’re all a little tired, having spent a very hot night on the boat. In hindsight, we should have run the gen and turned on the AC. Martin and I have some left over hang-ups from Lucky that we need to get past. Like running the gen at night was unthinkable because it was so loud. That’s not true on Blossom and we all would have had a much better night sleep had we just run the AC. Lesson learned.

I also used this trip to test the transdermal patch. I’m very prone to sea sickness, especially if I haven’t been aboard a boat in a while. I was useless on the last sea trial as all I could do was stare intently at the horizon and hope not to have to make an emergency run to the cockpit. Miserable. This trip I've had no problem at all. Granted, the seas have been very calm but I spent 3 hours below, comfortably, in mildly lumpy conditions that would normally send me into a cold sweat. And it didn't make me tired. Definitely an example of better living through chemistry!

I've been noting things down for the past two days and have quite a list compiled. We’ll spend the weekend organizing, arranging, moving and completing some of the dozens of tasks that we've identified need to be done. We have a few things to work on before we head out, most serious is that our Simrad autopilot is not functioning on the fly bridge, (but it’s fine in the pilot house). Our electrician is coming Monday to sort that out. We’ll have put approximately 22 hours on the engine during this trip.

The boat has performed fabulously. John says that he can’t believe how fast she is, he thinks she runs about a half knot faster than the norm for an N60. Maybe it’s because of the bustle we had added under her swim platform to prevent it from slapping - that extended her length at the water line by a bit. The longer a boat is, the faster her hull speed.  We’re not sure, but it’s a good thing and nice to see 9+ knots.

We plan to take ownership of the boat next week and then we can formally move aboard and begin more intensive training. We still have lots of details to finalize but our general plan (such that it is – boat plans being written in sand and all that…) is to head north the week of the 18th with the ultimate goal of meeting up with our friends Sean & Louise - check out their blog - with whom we’ll be cruising. We can’t wait!!!

As I close this entry, we’re hanging out off the coast of Stuart. We made such good time that we have time to chill out wait for high tide. Conveniently, we are also trying to wait out a big thunderstorm that’s hovering over Stuart. Chips, salsa, breeze on the fly bridge and calm water. Life is good and Blossom is amazing :)

One last picture, this was our welcome home sunset in Stuart.