After pushing to get to Charleston for Thanksgiving, including our first overnight passage since New York City to Cape May — we were rewarded with a fantastic four days there. We had some great food (including Magnolias, Cru Café, Hominy Grill, CO, Basil) and were, once again, unabashedly touristy, taking a horse-drawn carriage tour of the city and visiting Boone Hall, a nearby plantation. We also took care of some more mundane items: haircuts (just trims, really) for me, Soren, and Elsa, and some re-provisioning at the local Harris Teeter grocery store.

Here are some images from our time there:

Beautiful vernacular architecture.

Continue reading

…is how a fellow sailor we met described the Intracoastal Waterway (“ICW”). After our action-packed week visting family, friends, and historical sites in Washington, DC, it took about a week to get back into the groove aboard EXIT. There were days coming down the Chesapeake when we were the only boat that we could see which, along with the cold and rainy weather, contributed to a sense that we were late making our way south.

Reaching down Chesapeake Bay (by ourselves).

Continue reading

Now that we’ve arrived at our cousins’ house in Washington DC, we have sufficient bandwidth to upload a couple of videos from New York City:

• New York, New York!
• Street Dancing

We’re thrilled to no longer be in New Jersey, and EXIT is safely ensconced at Bert Jabin’s Yard in Annapolis having a short list of items attended to by Diversified Marine Services.

In the age of Teslas (and in the wake of the VW emissions test defeat-device scandal), diesel engines are beginning to seem like an anachronistic means of propulsion, but until marine hybrid-electric drives become mainstream, it’s what we’re stuck with. I want to make sure that this blog isn’t just a highlights reel and the past week was definitely one of the low points of the trip this far, a roller-coaster-like drop exacerbated by the fact that it came on the heels of a spectacular week in NYC and a cold, but otherwise great overnight passage down the coast of New Jersey.

Continue reading

We motored into New York on a gorgeous, sunny Sunday, down the East River and back up the Hudson. Soren set up another time-lapse video of the trip. (The GoPro ran out of batteries before we arrived at the 79th Street Boat Basin, but you can still see much of downtown, including the new One World Trade Center.)

Continue reading