22 Oct 13

Up early, followed by a quick breakfast at the hotel. We had to run back to the boat to take a few headsail measurements that I had forgotten to do earlier. Then, we drove to Raleigh-Durham to get our late afternoon flight back to Houston. Daughter Ashley picked us up at the airport and we had a late dinner with her and son Dan. Then home to bed - aaaaaahhhhhh!  ZZZZZZ. 

Adventure recap: We left Kemah, TX on 2 Feb 2013. Since then, we travelled 2289.2 nautical miles, most of it along the ICW. We covered the coast-lines of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and part of North Carolina. During that time - a total of 293 days, we spent 210 nights in marinas, 68 nights either at anchor or on a mooring ball, 3 nights at sea and 12 nights in a boatyard (in Key West, recovering from the lightning strike); we also left the boat at marinas twice, to return to Houston, for a total of 50 days. This represents a much higher percentage of nights in marinas than I anticipated when we left, but just goes to show you that we are not yet as divorced from the comforts of the city as we might have hoped.

We also put about 400 hours on the engine; simple math will show you that we did not cover very many miles under sail alone. Hopefully, we can improve on all these metrics next year when we carry on up the east coast.

No more posts are anticipated until we return to the boat in Feb 2014.