A long weekend in Knoxville complete with dinner on board. The luxury of a grill suggested a wonderful steak dinner and Cliff picked up some great red wine at a local store. Then there is the clean up — easily done in our roomy galley. Cliff is a good sport! And lastly, the morning view from our mooring location on the Tellico Lake. A wonderful excursion.
Here’s the pile of resources we’ve gathered to plan our trip. Everything from navigation charts to folksy books about what to see and do along the way. The rivers portion of our journey will be something entirely new for us. The item in the photo that looks like a thermometer is actually a device that allows you to measure distances along a meandering route — and there’s plenty of that ahead of us. I’m also scouring cookbooks with ideas on how to provision and recipes that will be easy to accomplish on board with limited cooking paraphenalia. This stack should keep us pretty occupied for the next several months I think!
The trip will take us down the Tennessee River to the Tenn Tombigbee Waterway and then to the Tombigbee/Black Warrior River to the Mobile River to the port of Mobile on the Gulf of Mexico. From there we’ll head into the gulf to enter the Intracoastal which we’ll take down the west coast of Florida. Once we get to Marco Island, we’ll head out into the gulf again straight to Marathon. Stops along the way to be determined! Stay tuned…. So, change of plans. Now we will go from Charleston to Marathon along east coast of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida through the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). See March 2015 posts for more info!
Dot.Calm in Knoxville, TN
We are poised to start on an adventure that we’ve talked about, dreamed about, made blue-sky plans about, and have finally taken steps to really do it. The purchase of DotCalm, a 52 ft. BlueWater yacht was the start. It is located in Knoxville, TN at the moment — her home for the past 7 years. She is a very under-used craft. Engines have a total of 200 hours — which is what we put on our fishing boat in the Keys almost every year! We are currently planning to embark on a 1,600 mile cruise from Knoxville to Marathon at the end of September.* Between now and then, we’ll take a long weekend to scope out what we’ll need to bring on board to make the trip as enjoyable and comfortable as possible. We are poring over charts, navigation guides and “cooking on board” books. Stay tuned!
*Life, alas, got in the way of this plan in terms of timing. And some very strong advice changed our float plan, too. Take a look at the updated plan in another post on the blog to cruise from Charleston to Marathon via the Intracoastal Waterway along the eastern shores of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.