Steve and Laura's Excellent Adventure

And so the 900 mile southbound journey began on the morning of December 9th.   Objective:  Make it home for Christmas Leaving Deltaville  The biggest variable for our trip was whether we would get a weather window which would allow us to sail offshore for any portion of the trip or whether we would have to stay in the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) the whole way. The benefit to sailing offshore is that overnight travel is possible. The ICW is too dark and fraught with obstacles to travel safely at night. We had no good weather window for the first eight days, so from December 9th until December 16th, we got up at 5:30 am every day and sailed/motored through the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds, and on various rivers which are part of the ICW for between 11 and 13 hours per day.  The screenshot below shows each of our stops along the way, indicated by the 1 in the yellow bubble. Dec 9: Deltaville, VA to Chesapeake, VA  I had actually been dreading the trip down the ICW, as I had imagined it to

It's already more than a month since my last post, so let me catch you up on things. As I mentioned in the last blog, we decided to delay our southbound departure to accommodate installation of an enclosure for our helm.  We had a new hard top installed back in June, but had been unable to find someone to make a new enclosure.  We had jury-rigged the old enclosure for the trip up but its windshield was wavy and scratched when we bought the boat, and with the weather turning cold, wanted to be able to keep the enclosure in place without compromising visibility. The last couple of weeks at Deltaville were a bit tortuous, mostly because we were anxious to get back on the water.  Sitting in a boatyard on the ground is not idyllic, and the weather was much colder than we had expected.  We had several nights with lows in the upper 20's and even had ice INSIDE the boat one morning! We had electricity while on the hard but not enough to run the heating system, and we couldn't run t