It’s hard to believe that a year and a half has gone by since we last stepped foot aboard Crimson Kathyrn! The boat has been patiently waiting for us to drive back down to Florida, clean her up and splash her back in the water. We sure never dreamed it would take this long to get back out on the water. Who knew?
April 10th 2020 was the final day of preparing C.K. for what we hoped would be our usual 6 months hurricane season rest. We had left the Bahamas early because of covid and headed back to Reynolds Park Marina where we would store the boat. We spent our last few days in Florida removing all food items and making sure the boat was well put away, just in case we were gone for longer than 6 months. As it turns out, it was certainly worth the extra effort.
As the days dragged on and we got closer to the 2022 sailing season, Mark and I began looking at options for getting down to Florida. I had booked an airbnb for the month of November (I did this back in June) to make sure we had a place to stay if we were able to return to Florida. By the end of the summer, it was still unclear if the border would reopen to land travel and whether mixed vaccinated people (that’s me) would be allowed to cross. By the beginning of September, I canceled our Airbnb – things weren’t looking great at that point. Friends of ours had decided to fly down and ship their car. We looked into this but by the time we started this process, lots of car transports were full.
Finally in the middle of October the good news came – border reopening Nov. 8 and mixed vaccinated folks are good to go!!! There was a bit of celebrating in our house that day! I quickly booked another Airbnb for the week of Nov. 10 – 17 and our plan was taking shape!.
So here we are – in one week we’ll be driving down to Florida. Our goal is to leave Kingston around 3pm on Nov. 9 and drive straight down to Green Cove Springs (just south of Jacksonville). It’s about a 19 hour drive – long but doable. We’ll spend that first week getting the boat water ready and launched so we can move aboard by the end of our Airbnb week. This season we’ve decided to stay in Florida for Christmas (just in case Covid rules change again) and the girls are flying down to join us for a week over Christmas. We will definitely miss our family celebrations but are planning some video chats over the holidays! At the start of the new year we’ll be off to the Bahamas!!! Sailing season 2022 will be underway! Yippy!
Crimson Kathryn and her crew 