Planning to bring the catamaran back to the Great Lakes

When we purchased the cat we knew we were buying a year too early. But at the time it seemed like a good price and it might be nice to have the boat a little longer to get to know it better. We did sail/travel about 1400 nautical miles with it last year but I don't really feel like we used it much or got to know it other then over the few days we traveled from the Bahamas to the Chesapeake Bay and then winterizing it last year. Much of which I've probably forgotten since. Note the jury is still out on how the winterization went.. We will find out next month when it goes in the water.

As we talked about how we wanted to use the boat this year we seem to have narrowed it down to two options: 1. Bring the boat back to the Great Lakes or 2. Leave it in the Chesapeake for the summer using it maybe a couple weeks and a long weekend or two then take it back to the Bahamas for the winter where we may hopefully make time to use it a week or two a month. Oddly enough option 2 is Amy's least favorite option as winter is her skating season and she really does not have much time to go jetting off to the Bahamas which would mean I would be down there by myself trying to recruit our retired friends to come hang out with me on the boat. So we decided option one is probably the best and started researching how long the trip really is and what that might look like with a large catamaran.

The scale of the distance bar on the map is a bit off

Our plan is to bring it up along the East Coast of the US and though/around Canada bringing it into the Lakes via the St Lawrence. There are two reasons we are selecting this route. 1. It's a trip we want to do and hoped to do with the tug. 2. We won't have to take the mast down or worry about bridge clearances. When I called a couple places along the Hudson River they said they did not have the capability to take a mast our size down mainly due to the beam of the boat and how far their cranes can safely reach out. The other problem is even if we get it down I'm guessing we would still be somewhere around 16-17 feet high with the mast somehow laying across the roof of the boat which would rule out our ability to navigate the length of the Erie Canal. We might have been able to ship the mast but that idea did not appeal to us as we would still have to find someone to put it back up. From what we can tell we think the trip from the Chesapeake to a dock in Lake Erie will be in the range of 3000 miles. Some of the books recommended planning for 45 travel days and suggested it as minimally a 90 day trip ensuring time to see some sights and wait out various weather events. Unfortunately we have a senior in high school graduating this year and he is not really thrilled about the idea of being away from his girl friend and missing all the graduation parties this summer while traveling on the boat with his parents. So what do we do?

We think we have the semblance of a plan. We will hopefully have the boat in the water in June and mostly ready to travel. We plan to do a week or so trip with Max in early June over to Mt Vernon to visit George Washington's old stomping grounds as a shake down cruise. Max has plans in mid June at which time we hope to move the boat up to New York where it will sit for the next month or so as my/Max's trap team will compete at the State event and then Nationals a couple of weeks later. Once this event is over we may move the boat again up to Maine or the Halifax area. Once there we may leave the boat for another 2-3 weeks to allow Max to enjoy the last of his summer at home before he heads off to college. Once we drop him off at school we will then head back to the boat at the end of August and start looking for weather windows that will allow us to bring it rest of the way around to the St. Lawrence. Once we get it there it should be fairly straightforward to get back to Lake Erie. Unfortunately this will not be the kind of trip allowing us to smell many roses along the way but hopefully we can do a slower more enjoyable version of the trip on the way out of the Great Lakes next year when its time to move the boat down to St. Lucia for the start of our circumnavigation in 2028.

I think it will be a fun trip, I hope we get to see some whales along the way, I'm sure it will help us get to know how to sail the boat better, but I'm sad that we will have to skip some things along the way and we will probably have to dash the hopes of visiting Newfoundland this time. But hopefully we can make time to do that stuff next year when we bring the boat back out.

For now I'm off to try and secure a winter storage location at a place that can actually pull a boat with a 26ft beam out of the water in the Great Lakes. I've got a couple leads but so far no one has actually committed to the project.