‘Winter on America’s East Coast is not to be trifled with’

REAL LIFE

owards the end of autumn 2018, I was trying to move , my Pearson 39-2, south from Salem, Massachusetts to Jacksonville, Florida. Things had not gone well. Two weeks after leaving, I had only covered 130 of the nearly 1,000-mile passage, getting as far as New London, Connecticut. A never-ending series of nasty fronts had made it impractical to do more than port-hop, and during the few good weather windows I’d had work commitments that required internet and a non-pitching desk. Winter on America’s East Coast is not to be trifled with –there’s a good reason insurance companies want boats out of the water by the end of October – and it was getting colder by the day. So, by the time my friend Pat joined me for the remainder of the passage, I was feeling the pressure to get to Norfolk, Virginia, where we could enter the Intracoastal Waterway and avoid the offshore