Coast Guard warnings and travel booking

Here’s a link to Coast Guard news about hurricane Dorian. Some of this directly concerns conditions in the ICW. In short, look out for missing navigation markers, markers off station, shoaling, and whole host of navigation issues. It’s warnings like these that help me feel good about rescheduling my ICW adventures to the spring.

My lovely wife and I have made a lot of progress with our trip planning. We’ve booked time into some hard to get into campgrounds. It’ll be nice to have a place to land when we get down south. Sure beats scrambling at the end of the day. We avoid that bad feeling when the day is getting on and all the campgrounds have full signs on them. Getting decent reservations can be tough during peak seasons. Many campgrounds are booked a year ahead of time.

We’ll be using our L. L. Bean Alpine 6 tent this year. For some of the areas we like to camp, getting a tent site is easier than an RV site. Being able to generate our own electricity with solar opens up more sites and provides a good comfort level.

We also have the boat. We can stay in a marina or even out on anchor. That’s the amphibian advantage. There is the option to stay on land or on the sea. My lovely wife and I have been making a list of good boat launch places. Launching the boat isn’t the problem so much as finding a secure place to park the tow vehicle. Just about every boat ramp has its own rules and restrictions, so research is a must. Of course, on-line information is no guarantee for what conditions on the ground will really be like. One time a state web site warned that the parking ticket machine at a boat ramp only took one dollar bills. I scrambled to get a pile of ones, only to discover they actually had a credit card reader newly installed. One dollar bills didn’t even work with the new machine.

You’ve got to be flexible when traveling. Adapting to reality is more useful than complaining that things are not as advertised.

-Sixbears