We left Nevada on October 21st. I had never seen the Grand Canyon but Doug has. He got to spend two weeks flying around it when he was in the Army Guard. President Clinton was there and they provided support and even got to be Marine 2 when Marine 1 had issues. So he really got to see the canyon in a way that most people don’t get to experience. So we made a quick pitstop on the southern rim and spent a couple of hours. Pretty cool, we would like to spend a week there sometime after I am really retired, exploring.

We made a somewhat mad dash across the country to Jacksonville. It was not too bad but we spent around 10 – 12 hours a day driving and did it in 3 days. We needed to be at the Jacksonville airport to pick up Logan on the 25th.

The boat was still in Fort Lauderdale so we put all of our stuff into storage and drove down there. It took us a couple of days to go through the boat and to work on a few things before we felt like it was ready to go. Did the grocery shopping, put everything away and at 6 in the morning on 10/28 we took off.

That was fun! Not. We had to call three different bridges to open so we got some practice on the radio and the last bridge we just had to let them know we were outbound. That bridge opened every half hour. And of course, it all went to hell after that. We just passed under that last bridge and the high temp alarm on the engine went off. Turns out the raw water intake was fouled. Once we got that cleared we were able to continue.

Since our day was interrupted, we only sailed about 100 nautical miles, but it was decent sailing. We put in at Palm Beach and continued to go through stuff that we had discovered needed checking as we sailed. We are heading out on Halloween to hopefully get all the way to our slip in St. Augustine.