Let's have some fun!

It did not escape our notice, or our family's, that after we had owned the boat for more than six months, we had not moved it away from the dock, except to travel between boat yards.

As part of our negotiation when buying the boat, our broker told us that he would give us at least two or three full days of underway training before he cut us loose with our new vessel. Unfortunately, every time we tried to schedule some training time on the boat, it turned out that he was busy, having a birthday party, had company from out of town, or it was too cold, too windy or too hot to accomplish that. Given the limited amount of time we had to commute between Minnesota and Florida for weeklong visits to the boat, we were making no progress. This lack of training and experience in driving the boat started to look serious.

Don't believe a lot of what the boat broker says.

Then we prevailed on Norm Miller, first an acquaintance, and then a friend, who owned a similar GH 47, Quiet Company, located about four slips away at Port 32 Marina.

Norman is friend agreed to take us out on our first trip underway to gain a little experience with the vessel, particularly leaving, and returning to the dock. Norm is relative big news in the great Harbor community as a longtime owner and at the time the current president of the great Harbor troller association. Who better to ask?

We had a fair amount of experience with cruising large catamaran sailboats, but hey, let's face it, they were charters and we own this boat. The exciting day came, and we left the dock without incident on a journey south on the St. John's River. The weather was a little gray and blustery, but our trip about 4 miles south was unadulterated fun, and an experience we had long anticipated. Reluctantly, we turned around and headed back to the marina. That's when I discovered that Norm was more anxious about my handling of the boat than I was. I actually felt bad for him. However, with only a moderate amount of white knuckling, we backed the boat into our slip without incident and went off to celebrate.

Thanks a million Norm!

The Nebo map of our voyage is included below. Nebo is an automatic tracking device installed in our boat with an indwelling GPS that records after the ignition switch is, turned on and continues to log the GPS coordinates of the boat until the ignition switch is turned off. Generally, it is very reliable and produces a remarkably accurate picture of the daily voyage. I will use this a lot in the remainder of this blog.