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Prologue
I've always wanted to go down the Intra-Coastal Waterway from Annapolis
to Florida on my own boat. It's been said that the trip is one of the
last attainable adventures in America. Sure, it's not in the same league
as climbing Mount Everest, but personal adventures don't have to be
to the top of the tallest mountain in the world. You just have to climb
a mountain that's tall from your personal vantage point. The ICW was
our kind of adventure; bound to be action packed, but not truly life-threatening.
The trip started out to be a Father & Sons bonding experience. Over the last five years we have had several family adventures. The biggest of these was the week-long charter of a 42' Catamaran for a cruise in the Chesapeake Bay. With Dad's 80th Birthday party a fading memory, if we wanted to do the ICW together, it shouldn't be something we put off for long.
The first obstacle was a boat. Nobody in the family had a boat big enough to sleep on, let alone drive 1,200 miles to Florida. Jon solved the problem by buying an old British flybridge sedan. Dirty, unused and neglected, the re-christened Griffin would be a perfect boat for our journey, once everything worked.
We got the boat almost exactly a year before our departure. It's easier to give a list of things that worked when we got her, than to outline all the repairs we made over the next 12 months to get her ready. Actually, thinking about it, there wasn't a single system or major part that didn't require some kind of work. It was a significant task, but it finally all came together at the last minute. We can empathize with the crews preparing for the Whitbread Race. You work like a maniac to get everything done prior to departure, and then the real work of the voyage starts.
At the last minute, business obligations kept two of the brothers from making the cruise. While disappointing, this was a blessing in disguise as the accommodations would have been very tight with everybody on board. Three is good, four is tight, and five would have been very crowded. The boat is only 31' long and only has one queen size bed with everyone else sleeping on the deck.
One brother, Chris, has become the great e-mail communicator. He asked us to keep in touch daily through e-mail so he could live the trip vicariously, and that was the spark that created the Griffin Updates.
The first update was sent to about 8 family members. We had a cellular phone with a PC Card modem hooked up to one of our two onboard laptop computers. We were surprised when we went back online to check our e-mail later, to find our update had been forwarded around and we were getting requests from friends and relatives to be added to the list.
The further we got into our adventures, the more people were added to the list, until we ended up with 60 people receiving our e-mail. There were further readers who followed our trip by fax and through passing around the Updates in my office. Having all this attention and instant feedback, added a very unique dimension to our trip. We highly recommend this to other adventurers.
After a couple of emergencies it seemed to some of our followers that we were lurching down the waterway from one crisis to the next. I guess, in a way, we were. We decided after a concerned call from a relative, to tone down the note of desperation in the Updates. We were never truly in peril, but it did make for a better story to be teetering on the edge every second.
The one thing we could have done to enhance the Updates would have been to take along a digital camera and attach photos to our e-mail. Now that would have been hot! We received this suggestion about 18 hours after we got back, but now we know for the future.
This little book, with photos included, is the complete story of the Coile Family trip down the ICW. We hope you enjoy it, and if you want to get on the distribution list for the further e-mail adventures of Griffin, just drop us a line. We can be reached at Griffin@Coile.com. Don't forget, we have to bring her home to Annapolis at the end of the winter, so the adventures are just beginning!
Warm regards,
The Griffin Crew