Strider's big adventure.
The story of one Wisconsin sailboats journey on the 2016 Salty Dawg Rally to the BVI and cruise home. The trip will be a passage from Hampton Virginia to the British Virgin Islands in early November, a couple of months of cruising in the Virgin Islands and then the Bahamas, with a  return to Florida in early March after which the boat will be trucked back to Wisconsin. That is the plan anyway! 

To break things up for easier reading, the web logs of the trip are broken into the following 5 sections:
- The prep work and delivery of the boat to Hampton for the planned November 2 Rally start.
- The 1,400 NM crossing from Hampton to the BVI
- Cruising in the VI and other nearby Islands
- The 1,200 NM journey back to Florida through Puerto Rico and the Bahamas

I will turn on the tracker when the boat is moving (at least when I remember). This way people can check on our progress 24 hours a day.
If the above link does not work, you can paste the link below into your browser:
http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0RFks4qdjFQIsG9sBYlhE8a0qD3xBJRIW

This page saves the last 7 days of our location and will work for entire trip, and beyond.  I will try to turn it on every few days for a hour or so to keep the page current and to let the pirates know exactly where we are. You can avail yourself of the same detail!

We hope you enjoy the Logs!

To help myself take the boat apart cleanly (and hopefully a good deal faster) for the trip back to Wisconsin by truck, I made a list of the key steps to pack the boat. This maybe even more dull than the rest of the logs unless you want a check list for trucking a boat. Hopefully, someone planning a similar trip, or trucking their boat, will find some of this helpful. I have learned a great deal from reading about other folks experiences and wanted to provide something back to the community.

The first step in this trip was deciding how to get from Manitowoc out to Hampton Virginia for the start of the Salty Dawg rally. The choices were sail it out the great lakes, or truck it.  For a number of reasons, we decided to truck the boat east, and went with the fine folks at Great Lakes Trucking to do the job.

We wanted to get the boat out to Virginia with time to spare so any surprises, and there are always surprises, could be dealt with in a calm manner. With this in mind, we decided on a Sept 23 load date in Manitowoc, and have the boat arrive in Virginia on September 28th. Taking the boat apart and getting it ready for the truck involves a fair amount of work. To provide a checklist for anyone who is considering the same route, and to organize my efforts to ready the boat in the spring for the truck ride back, I have outlined the major steps here.