Home now in its warm comfortable atmosphere and reunited with Brenda one can relate to the intensity of such a long adventure, 30 days and 1695 miles.
The Adventure: Brenda could very well have been right that it's a mile to far and a day to long. Only a stubborn old man could have endured to reach our destination of Key West.
The C-Dory 22 "Falcon": The boat offered us shelter from the cold, the rain, the wind, and gave us confidence when the waves grew uncomfortable out of sight of land. The only problem was with the table that kept coming loose.
The Honda 75 HP: About 30 miles out of Apalachicola we hit a log or something and bent the prop. We switched to our spare prop and Wefing Marine put a new prop on in an overnight shipment from Honda, good service by good people.
The Garmin 188C GPS: Man even an ugly old man like me can navigate to anywhere with this thing. However the VHF radio on high can interfere with it so to solve this my son gave me a hand held radio for Christmas that eliminated the problem and also gave us shore communication with the boat.
Anchoring: It seems like there is always a better place to anchor. Sometimes we would just anchor a safe distance from the ICW, sometimes we would find a nice little protected cove, but most of the time we would anchor near other boats at anchor.
Marinas: After we reached the ICW at Morgan City marinas were easy to locate with the help of our GPS.
Food: The Wallas stove was cranked up every morning for coffee, toast, and eggs. Other times marinas often had restaurants close by, some just nice and some elegant and expensive.
Hygiene: Motels near marinas were taken advantage of and some marinas have showers but don't depend on them so we set a routine that worked and no one was thrown overboard. It seemed that the boat was always wet and all our efforts to dry out were met with more rain and high waves.
Weather: High winds prevented us from launching on two occasions and possibly should have kept us tied off even more and prevented some uncomfortable crossings of the big bays.
The Adventures of Bill and Ed aboard The C-Dory "Falcon".
Bill and Brenda Russell
Some of us were just circled about during the Seattle trip and we could not resist.