Day 298, Year 9: Planning Day
Date: Friday, August 15, 2014
Weather: More Sunshine, Warm Day (80’s F), Cool Evening (60’s F)
Location: Staying at Heather and Jed’s, East Falmouth, MA
Today was a gift of time since Mark did not have to go to work, so we decided to allow ourselves to start planning for cruising south this winter. The destination will be Puerto Rico which we will use as a home base. But we hope to cruise in the US Virgins to St. Thomas and St. Johns and possibly into the British Virgin Islands. The question is how to get to Puerto Rico. We will leave here and go offshore to the Delaware Bay. There we will head west and go through the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal to the Chesapeake Bay. On November 1, our insurance allows us to leave Norfolk and we will head down the Intracoastal Waterway to Little River in South Carolina. We know this path, so no planning is necessary. It is the trip from Little River to Puerto Rico that we are researching. We can go offshore from Little River out to somewhere between Longitude 67 and 65 and then head south. This makes the trip about ten days. The problem is that you can run into heavy weather. You can usually plan five to seven days out for weather, but ten is a challenge. You just don’t know what the weather might do. Another option is to go from Little River to Ft. Lauderdale by combining travel in the Intracoastal with a few day hops outside and then go across to the Bahamas and down through the islands to the Turks and Caicos, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and then Puerto Rico. Doing it this way in a series of day hops is a much safer bet weather-wise as you can duck in at any point along the way, BUT it is the l-o-n-g way. It could easily be late December or early January before we arrive in Puerto Rico going this way. If we do this, it is the trip that becomes the focus. We would enjoy our time in the Bahamas and we would get to snorkel in the Turks and Caicos—something I’ve always wanted to do. The stops in Haiti and the Dominican Republic are possibilities if the weather is bad, but if not, we could probably do a couple of overnights from the Turks and Caicos to Puerto Rico. Or long-time cruiser Don Street recommends a third option. Go to Florida and across to Grand Bahama Island. Wait there for northerly winds and take off for Longitude 65 and then head south. The problem is that it is still a seven day trip from Grand Bahama Island, so I really don’t see the advantage to this one. Mark worked on navigation issues today on his computer and I researched Puerto Rico, the US and British Virgins, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. I did what I always do first when planning a trip. I went to Noonsite online and copied all the information there on all those places into Word documents. That way I’ll have the information even if I don’t have internet access. I also found some free cruising guides that I downloaded. I’ll try to read through all of this information over the weekend. We have a few guides, some very old, some fairly new. But as we research, we’ll decide whether there are other resources we need to buy. There is so much on the internet these days that buying guides becomes less and less important. Active Captain is an interactive cruising guidebook on the internet that includes everything from maps, charts, anchorages, moorings, contact information, and up-to-date reviews by cruisers out there using those anchorages. It is totally interactive if you have internet, but if you don’t you simply make sure you have the program downloaded on your computer and you can use it anytime and simply update when you do have internet. It really is fantastic.
Tomorrow we will take time out to go check on Windbird and possibly do a little waxing on the topside, especially along the waterline, with AwlCare. We can continue this once we are back in the water, but it is much easier to do the part near the waterline while the boat is out of the water. We’ll combine a little work with a little more research.
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| 140815 Day 298 Cape Cod, USA–Planning to Cruise |
