Well after 5 years of endless work my boat partner and I finally got the boat finished enough to drive it from VA to Freeport, Grand Bahama where she now sits up against my dock in her new pilings. It took us about 3 weeks to make the trip and there were many trials and tribulations involved. It was made worse by the fact that we had not done any kind of shakeout run before leaving. We just dropped her back in the water and pretty much went for it.
It's not that we didn't want to do more testing, etc. but I just didn't have the vacation time. When analyzing these things after the fact you can always say coulda woulda shoulda, but that thinking assumes unlimited resources which in fact do not exist. We did what we could with what we had and it was damned near a superhuman effort by any standard. I was driving 24 hours around the clock on several days with only 4 hours between shifts. I'm proud to say that nobody on the trip could keep up with that pace. I was a man on a mission. Or in the minds of some, a crazy fool. Of course now that it's over, I have a 43' fishing yacht behind my house in the Bahamas. That is the bottom line.
So we were always doing repairs the whole time which is to say we were constantly finishing up work that should have been done before we even left. There was simply no time to do it the way we wanted to do it and it showed. But nothing could stop us and we just pressed on regardless to an eventual completion of the journey which in total was about 1100 miles.
Some of the way we took the intracoastal waterway (ICW) but that is hard work because you have to stay on top of the helm all the time, constantly steering whereas out in the ocean you can aim the autopilot and it will keep you going straight as long as you like. Of course in the sea you can be miles offshore which is not a good place to be if problems arise. Now to be fair, we had sea tow insurance so there was no real risk of being stranded. But the notion of being out there with one engine down was unsettling to some despite the fact that many boats never had more than one engine to begin with.
One cool thing we saw up north while at dock was catfish attracted to our under water camera lights giving us a nice aquarium view of some catfish on our 21.5" touch screen in the saloon.
Here's a pic of Third Wave at dock in Ft Pierce Fl on the way down. Yes the lettering is way too small but it is legal. We will get that enlarged as soon as we install the transom door (which is finished but sitting in my garage in TX). Again, the story here was rush rush rush, no time to finish anything all the way.
Until you make this kind of trip it is hard to really understand just how awesome the waters of SE Florida really are. All the water from VA down to Jacksonville the ocean was the color of toilet water in an outhouse. Visibility about 12". And shallow? You literally have to go out 50 miles or more in order to get into 100' of water up there. I suppose at some point it turns royal blue but you have to go way out. But off the east coast of florida, the water is beautiful only 2 miles offshore. And as you get below Ft. Pierce you don't have to go out far to be in 200+ feet of water.
We averaged only about 7-8 kts the whole way because we had one engine giving us trouble from nearly the very start. But once the water turned blue in Florida, things began to be relaxing. We got several days of nearly flat seas and we made the best of it.
