Christmas Greetings to our friends and family!

Many of our friends and family will have kept up with our activities since we retired by reading the every-so-often posts from this blog.

For those who haven’t here’s a brief update as to what we have done over the past year.

We had a lovely Christmas in Tulsa, with all the family, and then packed up the car and moved aboard Lady on January 5th.  Three weeks later we had accomplished all the final preparations; we started cruising on Charlie’s 61st birthday, January 27th, and left Houston, bound for Belle Pass, Louisiana.

The weather was cold as we moved across the gulf.  We cruised east and south along the Florida coast and by mid-February when we visited Naples, the weather began to warm up, and by the time we reached the Dry Tortugas we were in shorts.  Key West and Boot Key Harbor had a lot of “gravity” and it became had to reach escape velocity from such lovely places.

As the sun moved north, so did we, stopping at Miami, Port Canaveral, and St Mary’s, Georgia in March where Sandra and Johnnie Smith, friends from Talahassee joined us for a weekend. April stops included Savannah and Charleston where Tulsa friends MaryJane and Gary Lindaman visited us for a few days while they were on vacation. We continued to North Carolina and into the ICW to avoid Cape Hatteras.

We reached the Chesapeake Bay by the end of April, and had a lovely month cruising that famous area, visiting Onancock, Tangier Island, Oxford and Annapolis in May.  Our son Mike and his wife, Stephanie traveled from Baltimore to join us in Annapolis for Mother’s Day, and we sailed over to St. Michael’s and Stephanie’s parents Elaine and James Maugham cruised with us for a few days on the western shore of the Chesapeake.

Most of June was spent in Baltimore.  We took a slip for a month; our location was very convenient for Mike and Stephanie.  Son IV and his wife Olivia came from Oklahoma on vacation, and we all had a great time together.  I took a short trip to the UK to visit my mother while Charlie took a trip to Oklahoma to do our taxes. 

By the third week in June we were ready for more.  We left Baltimore and headed north through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, out to the ocean via Delaware Bay, with a stop in Cape May where we met Elaine and James again for dinner, before heading north and seeing New York City from the water.

Late June and early July we explored Long Island Sound, visiting some lovely anchorages on the north shore of Long Island, and spending July 4th at Sag Harbor.  We then visited southern New England, including Mystic, Block Island and Newport before heading further north through the Cape Cod Canal where we stopped at Provincetown and saw whales as we headed to Marblehead, on our way to Maine.

We spent about a month in Maine, getting as far east as Mount Desert Island.  The weather there was surprisingly cool – I had to buy a fleece jacket in Bar Harbor on August 8th!  We met up with Tulsa friends Steve White and Linda Weber and Don and Margaret McCarthy in the Booth Bay area and had a couple of lovely days together.  We were also to meet up with a number of new friends made while cruising – it was particularly great to see Craig and Debbie Roser from Charmed and Corning and Tita Townsend from Blessed Spirit.  There were a number of foggy days.  The few days the sun did appear were splendid.  We only snagged lobster buoys twice, and managed to consume lots of those lovely crustaceans!

All too soon it was time to head south again.  The trip south was a lot faster than the trip north, and we were able to spend the Labor Day holiday weekend at Martha’s Vineyard.  We re-visited Block Island, and spent a few days in Montauk, Long Island waiting for tropical storm Hannah to pass. 

Offshore from there back to Cape May, another stop in Annapolis for sail repair and other maintenance, and then a north wind quickly blew us down the Chesapeake, through the Alligator-Pungo river ICW to Beaufort, more strong north winds took us quickly from Beaufort, North Carolina to Brunswick Georgia, where we had made arrangements to have Lady hauled for bottom paint, and hull polish while we headed home for a couple of months.

I visited England twice in October and November to help my mother with cataract surgery, and had everybody home for Thanksgiving, before packing up once more.  We re-launched Lady December 4th and are presently in Florida having an arch and solar panels installed.

We will head for the Bahamas for the winter, and look forward to meeting cruising friends, having visitors from land, and enjoying the lack of ice and snow! 

Merry Christmas!
 

Jenny and Charlie

Comments

[john Pilkington]

Dear Jenny & Charlie

Nancy and I wanted to wish you a very Merry Christmas on the high sea's and a Happy New Year. We would love to meet you in the Bahamas sometine this winter, let us know when it would be a good time to spend a week of fun in the sun with you guy's.