It’s been an intense two months. The first was a fast run up the coast from Florida to Virginia with nearly daily travel, made fun by traveling with friends. Next was a busy month of appointments, projects, and happenings. Throughout it all, we find ourselves reflecting more and more on Life After Boat.
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re7 — a prefix, occurring originally in loanwords from Latin, used with the meaning “again” or “again and again” to indicate repetition, or with the meaning “back” or “backward” to indicate withdrawal or backward motion: regenerate; refurbish; retype; retrace; revert.
We returned to the US from our six weeks in the Bahamas relaxed, refreshed, and rejuvenated. That’s a lot of power in all that ‘re.’ Then we had to do an immediate rechanneling of our mental energy toward a speed run up the ICW as we reluctantly faced reality. Specifically, the need to get to Norfolk by the end of the month. Thus we went from watching a final spectacular sunrise in the Bahamas on April 1 to saying good-bye to Patty and Ciaran as the sun rose in Florida the very next morning and headed for the ICW solo. What a complete reversal.
This would be our sixth trip on the Atlantic ICW. Between this and given we were on more of a mission than a meander, we relied on many of the old standard stops and there wasn’t a lot new. But there were a few opportunities for new exploration. One thing we both noticed was a slight element of feeling more like a commute than an adventure. It was just a hint, but it was the first time we had felt it. Admittedly some of this might have been because we were looking through the lens of immediately coming off our great Bahamas experience. Whatever the cause, both Dave and I start getting a little restless when life starts feeling too routine. Combined with longer travel days we found our conversations turning more about what might be next in our Seefari and pondering the possibilities, making for some more ‘re’ power: review and reassessment.
Florida
Melbourne April 2
Cocoa Village April 4
Daytona April 5
Jacksonville April 6
Fernandina Beach April 7
Melbourne was sort of a new stop for us. We had been here for one night in 2021 when we first bought the boat, but we were such newbies and engrossed in the whole concept of cruising that we didn’t remember much about it. This time, we had an extra day to explore the historic downtown with its charm and personality. We really liked the town; it ranks up there as places we could see ourselves snowbirding.
Cocoa Village was also new. Just the name takes me back to a childhood fondness for I Dream of Jeannie and starts the theme song playing in my head. We had the afternoon to walk through the several blocks of shops, restaurants, and art galleries. Not a single reference to Jeannie, though. The closest thing was when we took Roxy out at sunrise the next morning, and an illuminated jet trail from a rocket launch earlier was a reminder of nearby Cape Canaveral where Major Nelson was stationed.
On the way to Daytona, we passed through my favorite Haulover Canal and saw dozens of manatees – the biggest concentration we have ever seen — and sightings continued throughout the day. Once tucked in at our slip for the night, we paid a visit to our favorite fine chocolates store and then stumbled upon the First Friday Food Truck extravaganza, and dinner was served!
Fun With Bridges: Coming to one of the rare drawbridges for which we need an opening, we hailed the tender on the VHF, receiving a response of “Hold a couple minutes – I’m using the restroom.” Yeah… that was extreme oversharing. So we held station, watching a guy fishing on the bridge right next to the big sign that said No Fishing From Bridge Span. Then the following day, there was a railroad bridge with a very long and slow moving train crossing it. But we were entertained during the ~15 min wait by a pair of dolphins swimming circles around the boat the whole time.
We grabbed a mooring ball in Fernandina Beach and hung out in one of our favorite towns for the afternoon. That evening, we watched another pair of dolphins silhouetted in a leisurely swim against a backdrop of the final oranges of one of the famous Fernandina sunsets. It was a reminder of all that is good about this lifestyle.
Georgia
Cumberland Island April 8
Kilkenny April 9
Cumberland Island was a new stop for us – and now ranks as a favorite. Located just a few miles from Fernandina and across the state line, the King’s Bay submarine base is right on the other side of the St. Mary’s River. We saw not one but two submarines departing the day we were there. Talk about a blast to the past…
Accessible only by boat, Cumberland Island National Seashore has a history that reads like a James Michener novel, featuring:
- wild horses from Spanish settlers.
- a famous Revolutionary War General, debts, family estrangement, and his widow’s scandalous relationship.
- a plantation owned by a cousin of Jefferson Davis, the accidental death of his grandchild and suicide of the child’s father.
- Post-Civil War, the plantation land was sold to Thomas Carnegie (brother of Andrew), but very reluctantly because he was a ‘Damn Yankee.’
- Thomas dying prior to completion of the exotic Dungeness but his widow continued expanding the family land ownership on the island, building large homes for each of their nine children. All of these were left empty by 1925.
- a fire destroying Dungeness in 1959, rumored to be arson by a poacher in revenge for being shot by a caretaker.
Why hasn’t anyone made a mini-series out of this yet?
The National Park Service took over management of the island in 1972. We took one of the NPS walking tours, led by Ranger Michelle from Itasca MN. We were joined by one other family for the tour and they were from…St. Cloud MN. What are the odds?
From here it was pretty much travel daily unless weather precluded it. The rest of Georgia along the ICW wound through marshes and past many creeks and tributaries, flush with shorebirds, eagles, and dolphins as we bypassed the big cities during some of our longest travel days. Our only other stop in Georgia was Kilkenny, arriving late after the long run from Cumberland.
South Carolina
Beaufort April 10 – 12
Edisto (Steamboat Creek anchorage) April 13
Charleston April 14-15
Georgetown April 16
Little River April 17
We entered South Carolina and holed up in Beaufort for a couple days as a storm came through. I had posted a picture on social media, and a friend texted me that her cousin lived on a boat in Beaufort SC. Further exchange revealed she was three boats down from us and 15 min later Ann was knocking on the side of the boat! Makes you wonder how many of these opportunities are missed because the series of coincidences leading to discovery just don’t line up, so you never know.
Once underway again, we enjoyed a peaceful night at anchor in Steamboat Creek, before pulling into Safe Harbor Charleston City Marina where we tied up on their Mega Dock, so named because it’s a super long face dock and can accommodate ginormous mega-yachts. But that makes it a very long walk to get to shore for Roxy. So long that the first time we took her off the boat when we first arrived, she made it about halfway and squatted right there on the dock – right in front of the cruise ship entrance. Roxy was totally unabashed, we were mortified, and the cruise ship crew posted there looked resigned. From then on, we carried a bottle of water with us to wash the dock down and frankly, Roxy didn’t even try to make it to shore.
It was here that we met up with our friends Dave and Sonia on Crew Lounge. We first met them in 2021 and intermittently crossed paths for segments of The Loop, stayed at their dock in Virginia last summer, and had seen them in the Bahamas as well. We traveled with them the rest of the way to Norfolk. After some long days of travel, the many evenings together playing cards, enjoying the occasional dinner together, and even a movie night made what would have been familiar routes and stops a lot more fun. Crew Lounge Dave is an Air Force Academy grad retired pilot, and Sonia a retired Air Force Reserve nurse, so there was always a lot of AF-Navy ribbing and comparing of military experiences.
Crew Lounge and See Level headed across Charleston Harbor early the next morning on a speed run to the Chesapeake Bay. The dolphins were out in force and after a brief stop in Georgetown we finished out the South Carolina leg cruising the peaceful Waccamaw River. This is one of the prettiest stretches of the ICW, with lush tree-lined banks in a lovely Spring-green. We passed through the very commercial Myrtle Beach area, traversed the infamous Rock Pile, and pulled in for the night just short of the South-North Carolina border.
North Carolina
Carolina Beach April 18
Swansboro April 19
Oriental April 20
Belhaven April 21-22
Coinjock April 23
Crossing into North Carolina we were on a roll, traveling every day with a long stretch of good weather. We introduced Crew Lounge to the Carolina Beach mooring balls and enjoyed a long evening walk on the beach. We passed through Camp Lejeune to get to Swansboro, where we could hear a live fire exercise going on somewhere on the base behind us.
We bypassed a planned stop in Beaufort NC because it was such good travel conditions that it seemed a shame to waste it on morning only travel, especially knowing the weather was about to change. Making the turn in the ICW at Beaufort, before us lay the Saturday Afternoon Recreational Fishing Fleet right in the channel. I counted at least 18 boats, most of them giving us the stink eye as we picked our way through them as if they were crabpots in the Albemarle.
The rest of the way to Oriental through the Adams Creek Cut and across a very calm Neusse River was easy. Now we just had to get across the Pamlico the next day before the front moved in. We didn’t quite make it. It started out nice and calm as we headed toward Belhaven, but about halfway across the Pamlico Sound the wind picked up right on the nose, the temperature dropped, and the rain began. We bounced our way up the Pungo River. By the time we got tied up, I was soaked. And that was when the rain stopped, of course.
We stayed over in Belhaven to let the front move through — the first day of rest since we had left Charleston (even longer for Crew Lounge) and it was welcome. We caught up on needed life-maintenance items (e.g. laundry), took the world’s slowest golf cart into town on errands, and met several new Loopers.
The next day would be long to get across the Albemarle Sound, so it was an early and cold (temps in the 40s!) start at first light. Our reward was a beautiful morning on the water as we made our way along the Pungo-Alligator Canal, up the Alligator River, and across the Albemarle Sound – calm the whole way. We arrived at Coinjock in the late afternoon, and had dinner at the restaurant there because that’s literally all there is in Coinjock.
Virginia
Norfolk (Waterside) April 24-25
Hampton April 26
Coming up the North River, we crossed into Virginia. We stopped at Atlantic Yacht Basin right before the Great Bridge Bridge and Lock to fuel up. As loyal readers will recall, we are quite familiar with AYB from various work done on the boat. We had an hour before the next bridge opening, and while fueling we got to chat with our friend Amy who has been there with her husband re-outfitting their sailboat. It was at the fuel dock we and we got to witness the Magic Of Crew Lounge Dave. He has a gift for connecting with people, and so many times we’ve seen that his boat is barely secure and he’s on the docks chatting up everyone. Give him 10 min and he knows the details of your boat, where you’ve been, and identified mutual acquaintances; ten more minutes and he knows your grandmother’s maiden name and the passwords to your social media accounts. So Kevin is the dockmaster at AYB when we pull up, and Crew Lounge has never been here. We know Keven from our time there, a nice but quiet guy, great line handler, very professional. He gets fuel flowing into our tanks and goes over to get Crew Lounge docked. A few monutes later CL Dave comes back with Kevin and is telling us about Kevin’s dad being a Naval Academy grad, and Kevin is animatedly telling stories about his own Army time and experiences. We’ve been encountering the guy for three years and never heard any of this, and after five minutes Crew Lounge Dave has him prattering on like a six year old who just had two donuts and a Coca-Cola for breakfast at Disneyland.
We stayed at Waterside in downtown Norfolk for a couple days waiting for the lower Chesapeake Bay to settle down from a storm passing through. We met several Loopers there, some just starting, one finishing, and everything in between. It was really cold and windy, so we all stayed on the boats. We celebrated Sonia’s birthday with dinner at Freemason Abbey.
We made the short trip to Hampton so Crew Lounge could be a little closer for their final hop back to their home in Kilmarnock. We could have easily made the distance to Little Creek, but the last hour would have been pretty rough and it gave us another day to hang out with our friends and let the Bay calm down. That evening some other Looper friends who Crew Lounge had traveled with extensively arrived unannounced after driving all the way from Massachusetts to surprise them. So we had a wonderful evening hanging out with them and catching up.
Little Creek VA
April 27 – May 26
The next day it was finally time to break up the band. We said good-bye to Sonia and Dave and headed 12 miles across the now-calmer Chesapeake Channel to Little Creek Marina, our usual haunt for extended stays, and were greeted by several of the regular we’ve known there for almost three years.
The first week plus was our Human and Canine Upkeep period – a series of finely choreographed doctors, dentists, optometrists, routine screening tests, and veterinarian appointments. Having rented a car for the week, in between appointments we ran a bunch of errands. The rest of the month was a ton of boat projects, mostly routine maintenance and upkeep – cleaning, polishing, fluid changes, remarking the anchor chain, repairing dinghy cushions, and re-pickling the watermaker to name a few of the big ones. One of the most welcome was getting the dinghy steering looked at. It had always been a little stiff, but had become progressively harder to the point that I felt like I was getting a major workout whenever I tried to maneuver while we were in the Bahamas. Now she handles like a dream – I can spin her around with one finger! We took a couple dinghy rides for the sheer joy of how easy it nowwas.
We reinstituted our Wednesday morning donuts from the donut truck at the nearby coffee house we like. A Navy friend we hadn’t seen in almost 10 years happened to be in town and visited. We hung out with Dave’s brother’s family some more, and son Scott and girlfriend Ashley drove down from Dover DE one weekend and stayed with us. The month actually flew by filled with work, social events, and appointments.
Our twice daily walks through the nearby neighborhood and along the beach reaffirmed how much we like the East Beach community. We even went to a few Open Houses. We arrived when the azaleas and snapdragons were in bloom, and by the time we were ready to leave the hydrangeas had begun their summer glory and the scent of jasmine could be detected all the way at the beach when the wind blew from the right direction.
But Memorial Day means the start of the oppressive Chesapeake summer, so we are headed north to cooler climes – namely Canada – to escape the heat. We plan to do the Erie Canal to Lake Ontario and the Thousand Islands, a part of the Loop that we missed two summers ago, and then will return to the Chesapeake via Lake Champlain and the Upper Hudson River when things cool down in October. We had our speed run up the coast and a welcome month of staying put. But now it’s time to get moving before the hull bottom gathers too much growth.
Final Thoughts
We’ve now completed much of what we dreamed of doing when we started on this boat life adventure in 2021. From the beginning we had said living on a boat and cruising extensively would be a three to five year adventure, and we’re now in year four. With a new grandchild, we are feeling the pull of family and desire to spend more time with him (and his parents) in Australia. And while we are both healthy and really in better physical shape in many ways (okay, with the help of some metal in someone’s wrist), we recognize we aren’t getting any younger and there are still a lot of things we want to do and places to see while we still can.
While there are many great towns and places we enjoyed visiting again, it was starting to feel more like simply retracing our steps because that’s easy, and we both prefer challenges. When we think about ‘revisiting’ anything, we want it to be the many friends we’ve made in this chapter of our lives, our previous ones, and family. Making this trip north with Dave and Sonia is what kept it fresh and fun. It’s not the places, it’s the people that go with the places — from good friends with whom to rehash shared experiences and create new ones, to family that you can just hang with while doing activities of daily living, to good natured bridge tenders who lack filters. That’s what keeps the familiar fresh for us. And so we find that ‘life after boat’ has become a hot topic for us during this last couple months, with more ‘re’ words describing our conversations such as review and reassessment
I started this blog post with the definition of the prefix Re-, but I don’t think it captures all the positive potential the two letters can have. There’s a whole other dimension of doing something again but bringing a new perspective to it because one has had new experiences between the takes. Which is what we talk about with regards to returning to Life After Boat; we won’t be looking to remake our 2021 lives (and not just because 2021 was still kind of sucky from COVID), but rather to advance the plot. That’s the exciting part for us when we ponder all the possibilities. We’re not looking to ‘move on’ from that boat, but rather to move forward, bringing all that we’ve learned and experienced as factors in our decisions when we truly come to those forks in the river.
In the meantime, we are looking forward to our summer cruising plans. It will be repeating some segments of our Loop, but others parts will be more reconnaissance.
Pops’ Stats Corner*
- No of Days: 54
- Travel Days: 21 (of 25 between Stuart FL and Little Creek VA)
- Miles Traveled: 1048.7 (911.9 nm)
- Klassic Donut Wednesdays: 4
*Pops is the family’s affectionate name for Dave’s dad. He had a mind for sports statistics, earning him the nickname Numbers from the coaches of several Stillwater teams with whom he worked. This regular section of the blog is in his honor, because it’s the kind of thing he would love.
🩷 following along on your adventures. Have a great summer. I hope our paths cross again soon.
What an adventure! Just love reading about your amazing travels!
Agreed, if this Re-ality I want to visit “ality” more often!
Roxy is rocking that lifestyle, happy doggo style. Enjoying her friends the manatees, dolphins and eagles, etc
Grandchildren are a powerful draw!!! Here on vacation and WhatsApp calling regularly.
Much love, WanderMores
Depending on your schedule, we should be in NC by the time you srart heading south. Completion date is still mid-Sep.
Yay! Will be passing through there early December most likely.
The adventure continues! Thanks for sharing your wonderful stories and photos on the ICW. We just got home from NC/Wilmington area and I thought of you passing under those bridges. Safe travels and enjoy the coolness of the north!