Our plans for the next year
After a whirlwind of visiting family and doctor’s appointment we have finally started moving south. Friday, we turned in our marina keys at the Harborage and took a 4-hour sail south under the Sunshine Skyway and right now we are sitting in a nice bay along the Manatee River. We are going to stay here for a few days and get our bearings before moving further south.
Knowing this, I thought this would be a good time to go over our cruising and non-cruising plans for the next year. Our plans are to move slowly, and we really have only one hard deadline and that is to get to Brunswick Georgia by the end of March. More on this later…
We recently did a presentation to Apalachee Bay Yacht Club that went over our plans for the next year and beyond so that gave us the idea to give this information to the blog also. Cruising plans are written in the sand at low tide, so they tend to change. For now this is our best guess.
One last note before I start to discuss our plans, if you want to look at photos over the last week you can go here and if you want to look at some videos on our rudimentary Youtube channel you can go here (videos are labeled per date so you know when they were taken). Please don't expect anything fancy from the videos. They are short and unedited.
2023
So, the general plan is to head down the west coast of Florida during November to arrive in Charlotte Harbor a bit before Thanksgiving. There we will spend a couple of weeks going to Cayo Costa State Park, Punta Gorda, and the islands around the area. Cayo Costa opened again from Ian last year, so we are excited to check it out.
After thanksgiving we are going to hit Marco Island and the Everglades and start looking for a weather window over to the Dry Tortugas. The Dry Tortugas are some keys sixty miles west of Key West and only accessible by boat. It’s a National Park and one of the must dos on our list. Word has it there is awesome snorkeling and the water appears to be beautiful. Not sure when this will be, but we expect this to be early or mid-December. Having said this, it may be as late as January. We would like to get a few days of good weather so we can stay there for some time.
2024
After that we will be making our way to Key West via a direct route or back to the mainland and then south. After that we plan to take a slow trek east during January and February through the keys. There are too many places to mention but Bahai Honda State Park, Marathon, Key Largo and the hundreds of other keys are on are radar. We will just go where our interests take us. After that we will take some time going up through Biscayne Bay near Miami and visit anchorages through there.
Since our next season will take us to the Bahamas, we don’t plan to jump over there on this trip. However, for whatever reason we find us in the Miami area extra early, we might hop over there for a couple of weeks. That will be a last-minute decision but for now we are assuming we are not.
We expect to be in the Biscayne Bay area late to mid-February and after that we will start making our way North again up the Atlantic Coast of Florida. Making stops along the way like Daytona Beach and St. Augustine and Amelia Island through March.
That brings us to the end of March where we plan to get Utopia hauled out and put in storage for a few months. During that time, we will have the bottom painted and have any other items addressed that is best done out of the water. The plan is to have the boat in storage from April 2024 to the beginning of November.
While the boat is out of the water, we plan to attempt a through hike of the Appalachian Trail. If you didn’t know, the Appalachian Trail is a continuous foot path from Georgia to Maine and is approximately 2,200 miles. We expect this to take anywhere from 4.5 months to 6 months to complete. The normal route is typically starting at Springer Mountain in Georgia and hiking North to Maine. We are going to do this differently and do what is called a flip-flop hike. We plan to start at the midpoint of the trail in Harper’s Ferry, WV at the end of April and hiking north to Maine. We more than likely will be at the Northern Terminus of the trail sometime in mid to late July. At that point we will take trains, plans and/or automobiles back to Harper’s Ferry and then hike to the Southern terminus at Springer Mountain, Georgia. We expect this to be anywhere from early to mid-October.
At that point we will visit family and then head back to the boat in preparation for launching and heading South once again. Expectations are to re-launch about this time next year at the beginning of November.
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