Bringing the Dream home...

There are a couple of choices here.  I could have it shipped by road or have it motored home by water using a hired Captain or by myself. The road route is possible but requires major disassembly of the upper part of the boat and I am not there to help or oversee so I discounted that option.  A Captain would require payment for his time and expenses as well as all the expenses involved in running the boat.  So why not bring it home myself?  The time and distance I figured out to be about 30 days and 2000 miles. The vacation I had accrued would cover it and my current job was not as presence critical as it used to be.  So that was the decision.

The route options were few.  Here it is....!

 Click here for the detailed route, turn-by-turn in Google Earth

I laid the route out in detail using OpenCPN, a free charting software package which is absolutely superb and a labour of love for a number of enthusiasts.  All the nautical charts, both electronic and raster (like the paper chart) are all free from the USA's NOAA and are kept up-to-date on a frequent basis.  By comparison, all of the charts for Canada have to be bought from authorised suppliers and they are not cheap.

I also did some analysis on speed and fuel consumption when arriving at the time it would take.  Dream Weaver has two Caterpillar 3216 diesels.  At wide-open throttle they will produce 420HP each, push the boat at 24 knots and consume diesel fuel at a total rate of 44 gallons an hour. 

Cut back to a more leisurely pace and the fuel consumption drops way down as you can see from the graph that I made above. Speed is not plotted on the graph yet because I don't have all the data until we actually measure it en route but, during the brief sea trial, from memory 1200 rpm gave a speed of about 7 knots.  Figure it all out over 2000 miles and you can see there's a huge trade off in cost of fuel versus time taken to complete the journey!  Diesel fuel is about $3.50 a gallon in Fort Myers today.

I will be flying April 5th to finish work, launch and provision the boat.  Jon will join me there on Friday.  We plan to head out early Saturday, at high tide, to begin the journey back.  I expect the end of the first week will see us approaching Charleston, SC and the end of the second, Norfolk, VA.  Martin Conway will take over from Jon at Charleston and Jo will take over from martin in Norfolk.


I will be posting updates of progress or otherwise here for family and friends to follow.


Wish us luck!