We are still making plans for our big adventure. John will stop working on March 1, 2001. He will start preparing Finn, adding safety equipment, checking out all of the systems, doing all of the yearly maintenance, selling our truck, and somehow getting our mail under control.

Jennifer will stop working April 2. Our marina fees for next year are due April 15, so of course our plan is to not pay those fees and leave before that date.

We have done a lot of planning for this trip. We purchased and studied charts and guidebooks for the whole East Coast and the Bahamas. However, our plans are necessarily vague. Perhaps flexible is a better word. One of the most beautiful aspects of an extended sailing adventure is that you do not have to rush. In theory, Jennifer and I could sail all the way down to the lower Chesapeake and back in a standard two-week vacation. However, we would have to sail about 10 hours a day almost every day. The danger comes in trying to do that regardless of the weather. With plenty of time, we can safely choose where we feel like going and when we feel like sailing, all the time being respectful of the weather.

So here are our plans. We are going to leave New Jersey around April 15. We will head south from New York to Atlantic City and thence to Cape May. We will sail around the New Jersey peninsula and head up the Delaware River to the Chesapeake and Delaware canal to the north end of the Chesapeake Bay. We will probably gunk hole around the Chesapeake until Memorial Day.

With the warming weather we will reverse our route and head back to New Jersey at Liberty Landing Marina. There we will re-visit family, friends and work colleagues. About mid-June, we will head up New York City's East River, though Hell's Gate, and into the Long Island Sound. We will take our time and make our way up to Rhode Island to visit our grandchildren, Patrick and Jacqueline.

From there we will continue north and visit Boston and try to make it to Maine. We will probably turn around at the end of July and then retrace our steps through Boston, Rhode Island (Rhode Island = grandchildren), Long Island Sound, and back to New Jersey. Again, more visiting with family, friends and colleagues.

At the end of August, we should be heading back down the Jersey Coast and into the Chesapeake Bay again. We will probably hang around there until hurricane season ends, sometime in November. Then we will probably try to sail harder (more miles, more days) to make our way south from Norfolk, through the Dismal Swamp and its canals and locks, through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. 

From Florida, we plan to make the short, 50-mile sail over to the Bahamas. Our goal is to spend Christmas in the Bahamas. There are over 300 islands in the Bahamas and we will probably visit many of them.

Finally, we will turn around and make our way back to NJ and our jobs at AT&T arriving in April of 2002.