The Plan:
To bring Kintala up to ocean readiness truck her back up to Chicago, and sail through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway, around Nova Scotia, down the East Coast and to...who knows?
Update: So this is how cruising goes. You have a plan, because you need a plan, but only to have one from which to deviate. We changed our plan to depart from Chicago and the St. Lawrence Seaway because the weather window was too tight and the sailing too challenging for newbies. We decided to ship the boat to Annapolis and leave for Southern climes after the boat show. It was one of the wiser decisions we made and the lesson is surely to be flexible in your plans or they will hurt you for sure.
2014 Update: We've decided that if we had it to do again, we would have shipped the boat all the way to Florida and started in warm weather. It would have actually cost less than it did to do the ICW down to here and we would have enjoyed it much more.
July 2014 Update from Florida: We've decided that, in fact, we did it the right way to begin with. The costs of purchasing and outfitting a boat in Florida are so unbelievably much higher than many other places in the US that we would have gone completely bankrupt if we had bought the boat here or shipped the boat here to do the initial work on it. Find the cheapest place to do your own work and ship the boat there.
December 2018 Update from St. Louis: So once again, this is how cruising goes. Cruising costs a lot more than we thought it would. It costs a lot more than we planned. So when a job fell in Tj's lap that paid an obscene amount of money for very little work, we couldn't say no. So Kintala is up for sale. We'll take a two or three-year hiatus from cruising to build up the savings account again, and then hopefully set out again on a more age-appropriate trawler. Stay tuned!
Update: So this is how cruising goes. You have a plan, because you need a plan, but only to have one from which to deviate. We changed our plan to depart from Chicago and the St. Lawrence Seaway because the weather window was too tight and the sailing too challenging for newbies. We decided to ship the boat to Annapolis and leave for Southern climes after the boat show. It was one of the wiser decisions we made and the lesson is surely to be flexible in your plans or they will hurt you for sure.
2014 Update: We've decided that if we had it to do again, we would have shipped the boat all the way to Florida and started in warm weather. It would have actually cost less than it did to do the ICW down to here and we would have enjoyed it much more.
July 2014 Update from Florida: We've decided that, in fact, we did it the right way to begin with. The costs of purchasing and outfitting a boat in Florida are so unbelievably much higher than many other places in the US that we would have gone completely bankrupt if we had bought the boat here or shipped the boat here to do the initial work on it. Find the cheapest place to do your own work and ship the boat there.
December 2018 Update from St. Louis: So once again, this is how cruising goes. Cruising costs a lot more than we thought it would. It costs a lot more than we planned. So when a job fell in Tj's lap that paid an obscene amount of money for very little work, we couldn't say no. So Kintala is up for sale. We'll take a two or three-year hiatus from cruising to build up the savings account again, and then hopefully set out again on a more age-appropriate trawler. Stay tuned!
September 22, 2021 Update from St. Louis: After selling Kintala we have purchased a trawler and our hope is that we can try to live a half-time cruising lifestyle with half on the boat going down the river system, around Florida to visit grandkids and to the Bahamas and then back up the river for hurricane season and to see the St. Louis grandkids. As they say, though, cruising plans are written in sand at low tide...
November 4, 2022 Update from New Bern, NC: First Light is launched at Duck Creek Marina in New Bern, NC and the following day we moved it down to Oriental Harbor Marina in Oriental, NC where she'll stay until we leave in April to do the northern half of the Great Loop.
April 2023 Update from Oriental, NC: The plan is to do the final small projects on First Light, leaving Oriental by the end of April to head north to do the northern half of the great Loop and put the boat in the Alton Marina in Alton, IL so that we can use it regularly. The trip should take 7-8 months.
