Tiffany Rose has landed

[Dave Dawe]

After 309 days, 952 engine hours and 4,240 miles Tiffany Rose has completed her voyage from Lake Ontario to the Florida Keys and back. We had a truly magnificant time and highly recommend the experience. This '91 Catalina 34 with the Universal M35 performed incredibly well. It wasn't until 41 miles from home that she sprung a leak in the heat exchanger and we had to be towed into a marina in Wilson NY! Our Rocna anchor never dragged once and we watched many boats drag by us in some hefty blows.  We are on the boat for another week until we get our house back on Aug 1.
Now we are busy cleaning off the saltwater corrosion and wondering what the next adventure will be...

Dave
blog  http://shirleydavechristopher.blogspot.com/

[wind dancer]

It sounds like a great trip!  I am surprised by the engine hours. . . why so many?  That's nearly 100% motoring looking at the overall miles.  I understand that over half the trip was on the ICW,  I'm just curious, it's not a dig or anything.  We average about 50% engine usage in the islands up here due to light summer winds, currents, etc.

[Dave Dawe]

Great question! The hours are higher than I anticipated as well. But in retrospect it makes more sense now. The ICW is very much a motor sailing section, which is a large part or the trip. Also, from Lake Ontario through the Erie canal and Hudson River to NY City it is pretty much all motoring. Outside on the ocean to Cape May NJ we motor sailed because the safe weather window was more important to us than waiting for a good sailing couple of days. We could sail up most of the Delaware. Chesapeake Bay was good although we motor sailed a lot because we had destinations to get to, and were running away from the cold weather. Coming back north we were constantly outrunning large thunderstorms and had the motor on more than we wanted to. Our best sailing was from Biscayne Bay south to Marathon. The other part of running the engine was that we did not have solar or wind generation capabilities and so ran the engine very often for power and hot water. We had a small Honda 1000 generator on board and used that to supplement, but when we were anchored we actually put on quite a few engine hours that way. So for much of the winter we didn't travel too far but still added up the engine hours. And then of course there was the loss in speed and efficiency coming north until I had the bottom cleaned in North Carolina which gave us a whole knot back!

[Ron Hill]

Dave is correct : The trip down the ICW to Florida is a MOTOR BOAT ride!!  You are trying to get to a specific marina or anchorage on a daily basis.  To do that you turn on the engine.  Every so often you get lucky (wide enough and favorable winds) and are able roll out the geny
Also when we did that back in 1996, I didn't have a "Honda" and had to run the engine 30/45 minutes every AM and PM to keep the batteries up - if we didn't motor.  We did have a small solar panel. 
Enough said.