Day-By-Day Planning

Forget what I said in my last post about not trying to do day-to-day planning in advance!

Once I broke the trip into segments, it seemed much more manageable to then break those segments down into day trips. I’m sure there are folks who would set out on this trip with a minimum of pre-planning. That’s not me; I’ve always been a planner.

I’d like to get a sense of how long this trip will take, so I have to figure out how far I’ll travel each day and where I will stay each night, so that I can set up marina reservations. But one of the biggest unknowns I’m grappling with is how many miles I should plan on traveling each day. I know how fast Freedom can go, but I don’t really know what the ICW is like: is it like Interstate 95? or more like a wandering lane? I hear it’s a little bit of both.

Anyway, here’s my thought process:

Freedom has enough fuel to travel more than 200 miles per day, but that’s neither safe nor comfortable:

1. That would run her fuel down to ZERO – very foolhardy. In fact, it’s better (more prudent) to always “run off the top half of the tank”. So that limits us to a maximum of 100 miles per day for planning purposes.
2. Also, Freedom’s most efficient cruise speed is around 18 mph. At that speed, it would take almost 13 hours to cover 200 miles… exhausting when you are single-handling.
3. In addition, there will be slower boats ahead of us all the way. We will pass them, but to do so courteously, we have to slow down. There are also multiple “No Wake” zones, and that reduces your average speed.
4. For all these reasons, and based on advice we’ve received from experienced captains, we will plan to travel around 50-80 miles per day average. At an average speed of 16 mph, that’s about 5 hours per day. Perfect.

Now I can get to work roughing out a day-by-day itinerary.

Once I do that, I’ll start to get a time frame for the overall trip.