Ahoy, all. Those of you that have followed our blog for our long cruises will note that we do not purely sail hardly at all, and I estimate we motor-sail perhaps 40-50% of the time for an often marginal gain in speed (albeit a big gain in self-esteem at having a sailboat with sails up). The other times, it is pure motoring.

So, while losing our ability to occasionally turn the engine off and enjoy the purity of sailing, moving to a power boat will remove our deeper draft and high mast clearance requirements. For the next several years, to be sure, we will greatly benefit from a power boat for our cruising, so we have the Catalina 36 for sale and have already purchased a PDQ 34 power catamaran.

The photo shows a sister ship, since we do not have good photos of the exterior of our boat yet. 

I retire at the end of Dec 2014 and we will bring the boat across to our west coast FL home dock in early Jan. About 1 Apr, we will set out for another grand adventure. 

We have a rough schedule planned around statistical weather patterns so we expect to get to the lower Chesapeake early May, then heading up the Hudson around 1 Jun. We plan to take the Erie and Oswego canals, cross the lake to the Rideau canal to Ottawa, then down the Ottawa River to Montreal, out the entire St. Lawrence Seaway, and then explore the Canadian Maritime provinces before hitting Maine around mid-August. At the end of Sep, we will be putting the boat in storage up there for the winter and getting back to our home in FL. 

The next spring, around mid-May, we will resume our cruise through New England, go back up the Hudson, Erie/Oswego canals, and then cross the lake to do the Trent-Severn waterway into the Georgian Bay. From there it will be the North Channel, Lake Michigan, Chicago, and down the rivers to Mobile and then across the Gulf to home. 

You can follow along via our blog as shown in the signature.