Departure Is Imminent – Fall 2019

Update as of 9.22.19:  With the recent parade of tropical storms and other disturbances, we are still waiting for that perfect departure day.  If the current offshore forecast holds we should be underway this week.  Check our Facebook page for real-time updates.

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With Labor Day Weekend behind us, we are now officially in prep mode for our migration south.  We’ve had a wonderful but seemingly fleeting summer enjoying our time with friends and family in the northeast and midwest.  While we had a terrific time basing OLOH in the Hudson Valley in New York, we were unable to get out to the Long Island Sound and beyond as originally planned… so we’ll just have to plan to do it again.

Right now we’re focused on checking off the remaining boxes on our summer punch-list before departure, taking care of projects that are more easily handled close to our land-based home and the resources we have available to us there.  We’ll be reporting on what we’ve been working on in the future, but interior finishing work on OLOH and refinishing work on One Love are the primary focuses right now for the Admiral.  The Captain is going through all of OLOH’s systems, tightening every hose clamp he can find and making sure everything is ship-shape for our travels.  A diver will thoroughly inspect OLOH’s wet side and make sure everything is as it should be below the waterline.

Our approach to the trip south is going to be different this time around.  Our plan is to eventually make it back to Florida and ultimately the Florida Keys, but rather than tackle the entire journey at once, we plan to break it up into at least three major phases, enabling us to relocate OLOH at a pace that will allow us to return to New York by land or air to enjoy most of the fall in the northeast.  We’re not on a schedule other than trying to avoid cold temps while being strategic about the remainder of the storm season, so it should be much more relaxed than our trip north in the spring which, while thoroughly enjoyable, had us moving at a fairly constant pace for a solid month.

The Plan – Phase One

Click on the pins for details on each travel day 

We expect to start our way down the Hudson River by the third week in September, taking a leisurely first two days to get to the New York City area and stage for our trip down the New Jersey coast.  We hope to be able to plan it with the weather so our third travel day will have perfect conditions for a twelve-hour run to Cape May, NJ.  We used to always break this leg up by stopping at Atlantic City but we tried the long haul back in the spring and it went very well.  We tend to favor travel days no longer than six to eight hours when possible but we felt the extra push for this stretch of the trip to be well worth it.

From Cape May we’ll mind the conditions for an easy 65 nautical mile run up the Delaware River and work our way about two-thirds through the Chesapeake and Delaware (C&D) Canal.  If you’re new to our blog, know that we travel at an average of around ten knots, so that works out to be around a six and a half hour day.  Perfect.

With our ultimate destination being Deltaville, Virginia, we have a few options on how to handle the Chesapeake part of the trip.  At our typical pace, we could break it up into two legs but will probably make it three to keep it super-leisurely.  A return to Herrington Harbor in North Beach, MD is high on our list of possible stops followed by a stay in Solomons, MD to visit with friends before pushing through to Deltaville.  We would very much like to return to St. Michaels, MD while we’re relatively nearby and may choose to do that if the weather is great and we’re willing to build in the extra days.  Separate from any such side trips, we’re looking at tackling approximately 440 nautical miles (506 statute miles) over seven days of travel.

We’ll be updating the blog regularly as we travel so be sure to subscribe on the top right of this page.  We’ll also be on Facebook every day of the trip with realtime updates so please be sure to like the M/Y OLOH Page and enjoy the ride with us!