| Doug and
Bobbi Wilson (dbwil@global2000.net)
describe a 3500 mile tour of the east coast on Zuma (#960).
Zuma is back on Lake Champlain after a 3500 mile tour of the
East coast from the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York
to the beaches of Florida. Every day provided a new experience
for this pair of lake sailors as we made our way down the
Champlain Canal to the Hudson River, down the Hudson to New
York City, past New Jersey in the Atlantic, through Cape May
and up the Delaware Bay to the C&D Canal, down the
Chesepeake Bay, then down the Intracoastal Waterway through
Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
We left the lake on September 18,1997 and arrived in Florida
during the first week of December, having experienced some
serious delays along the way caused by some nasty El Nino
weather and a death in the family.
Tides and currents, bridges to open, big ships and
barges,ocean sailing, salt water, canal locks, monitoring
depths on the ICW (we learned all about going aground),
provisioning, dealing with all those home matters (mail,bills.etc.)
that don't go away while you're traveling, were some of the
new things we experienced. Zuma handled it all very well. Even
a big boat will get smaller on a 9 month journey, but a 34 is
a good sized vessel for this trip. The M25xp diesel never quit
on us (it did overheat a couple of times-junk picked up in
canal locks), but still seems a little too small for the boat
for this kind of cruise. About halfway through the trip I
switched from the two bladed folding prop we left with to a
three bladed cruising prop that I had re-pitched to 15x10,and
our motoring speed improved.
We spent most of the winter exploring the Florida coast.
Even though we didn't get over to the Bahamas (El Nino created
seemed to create some havoc offshore when we had the
opportunity to go), we thoroughly enjoyed our first winter
without snow, the southern wildlife, and the great boat people
we met along the way. The variety of boats and people, the
historic and scenic places to visit,the challenge of
navigating offshore and through bays, sounds, rivers,
crowded harbors and the ICW made this cruise one of the great
experiences of our lives. Hundreds of people make this East
coast trip every year in an amazing variety of boats, big and
small, over-equipped and little equipped, electronically
navigated and road map navigated (really!), big crews and
single-handlers, power and sail (and some interesting
combinations thereof),and it was great being part of it all.
The return trip was more enjoyable because the weather was
warming as we returned north and we were familiar now with the
areas we were traveling through. After a very rainy trip up
the Hudson (and some delays because of high waters in the
canal locks), Zuma brought us safely back to the waters of
Lake Champlain at the end of June. There is so much more to
show and say about our trip that I hope to set up a web site
to tell about it all and show some of the many photos we took.
If anyone has questions they would like to ask about our
voyage,our e-mail address is dbwil@global2000.net
.
Doug and Bobbi Wilson
Zuma -- Cat34 #960
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