9/8/14 – Catawba Island, Ohio
Posted by Bill

It took a day and a half to recover from the move. Man am I sore! We have stuff piled all over the place in the house. I couldn’t sleep so got up and started route planning. The general plan is to sail for Vermilion on Saturday the 13th. We have dinner plans with friends that share the same birthday as Tricia and are celebrating at one of our favorite restaurants, Chez Francois. Sunday we plan to leave Vermilion and sail 30 hours overnight to Buffalo, NY. I figure we leave at dawn and will be there around mid day on Monday. After an overnight stay we take the mast down and enter the Erie canal on Tuesday. It will take probably 6 days to get through the canal if the weather is permitting. The canal terminates at the Hudson River, which will take 2 – 3 days to transit ending in NY City/Sandy Hook, NJ. There we will wait for good passage weather for an overnight sail in the Atlantic Ocean around New Jersey to Cape May, NJ. After an overnight stay we will move up the Delaware Bay to the C&D canal which will take us into the Chesapeake Bay. We would like to be in Baltimore by October 6. Assuming the weather follows the current forecast (uh huh), we can make it. If the weather goes bad we will sit it out and be late.

So after looking at the weather and route, we decided to bust ass this week and get the boat loaded. Sunday we dis-positioned all of the stuff we brought in the move and started to inventory everything that goes on the boat. Island Packet boats are known for their ample storage but it is still a 42 foot boat, so you can imagine the challenge of trying to find a way to load all of our land based stuff, in addition to all of the things you need to manage and maintain a sailboat. Once loaded, it can be a significant task finding something you want, so everything gets put into an inventory spreadsheet with storage locations noted. We inventoried around 70% of what we have, went and bought engine and rigging spares, and took our first load to the boat.

The process repeats starting with the most important “must take” stuff, followed by less important stuff until the boat is full. Also this week we need to get rid of 2 cars, make a trip down and back to Columbus, and I need to install some 12V cigarette lighter adapters in the boat to power our Engel freezer, laptops and phones. It is going to be another crazy week with lots of activity, but it appears do-able (yeah – sure it does).

If we don’t make it for some reason…no big deal…we have plan B!