Navigation Notes

Here’s a quick overview of the trip:

• 1,400 miles from Rock Hall, MD to Key West, FL
• Then a side trip up Florida’s West Coast
• Back to Key West
• Home to Rock Hall
• About 5 months total

I’ve spend hundreds of dollars on charts and Waterway Guides: I have a stack of paper that’s probably 7″ high. And I’ve spent A LOT OF TIME reading about the routes we’ll follow. Plus, I get online Alerts that arrive electronically: reports of channels that have shoaled; missing navigational markers; and treacherous inlets. Most of these cautionary notes pertain to sail boats with deep draft. We draw only 4 feet.

We also have to pay attention to bridge clearances. Again, these pertain mainly to sailboats: we can pass under bridges with just 14 feet clearance, as opposed to some sailboats that have 50+ foot masts.

Nevertheless, the amount of information that one has to take in can be daunting. If I were the worrying sort, I might be hesitant about the entire trip. But hundreds of people do it every year, and I think I’m well prepared. Perhaps better prepared than many.

Still, it’s a lot to learn, and a lot to visualize. As a consequence, I’ve decided to break the trip into discrete pieces in order to make it more manageable.

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The first “chunk” is the section in the Chesapeake Bay: from Rock Hall to Norfolk, VA, at the southernmost tip of the Bay. Once I get to Norfolk / Portsmouth, I’ll be at Mile Marker Zero, the start of the ICW.

The next chunk is a single leg, from Norfolk/Portsmouth, through the Virginia Cut, through the Great Lock, to Coinjock, Virginia. Then a long run of 68 miles across the Albemarle Sound to Bellehaven. Once I get there, I’ll have a lot of experience under my belt. Each night, I’ll carefully plan the next day’s route and check the weather. It’s simply too much to try and plan the entire trip in detail in one sitting. But if I handle it one day-trip at a time I’m confident it will minimize the inevitable exigencies that will arise.

BTW, I’m dictating these thoughts using an app called Speechify. I dictate into Speechify, copy the text into Word Press and edit the final version. So far so good, but please excuse any garbled content!