Trips of Discovery

Make the best of your journey, make some memories.

Tagged: Planning for ICW Trip

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Smith Island, its famous cakes and all

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes – SBFL*4 – PLANNED – “Smith [Island] has no municipal building, no jail–indeed, no government,” wrote Allan C. Fisher, Jr., in his 1973 book, America’s Inland Waterway. The book is one of two information resources of the National Geographic that I am using for planning a journey and comparing how it was then versus how it is now in selected spots of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). I want to see how much, if any, the passing decades have changed these locales. You can reach Smith Island, as with all of my locations that I write about, by boat, of course, or by land, first going to Crisfield, Maryland, then...

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Before crossing the Maryland line

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes – SBFL* 2 – PLANNED – My Slow Boat to Florida (SBFL) Intracoastal Waterway trip was inspired by National Geographic authors Dorothea and Stuart E. Jones. (See SBFL) In their 1958 National Geographic article, they describe how they sailed down the Chesapeake Bay from Annapolis and stopped in Solomons, Maryland, and then crossed the state line over to Virginia. My second source of inspiration, Allan C. Fisher, covered a bit more territory above Solomons in the Chesapeake Bay in his 1973 book, America’s Inland Waterway, published also by National Geographic. While I intend to follow the path of both authors in this 2019 boating season, I also plan to do a...

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In search of green waters

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes – *SBFL 1 – PLANNED – Here in the midst of winter in the upper Chesapeake Bay, with nighttime temperatures dropping down as far as 14 degrees Fahrenheit, I started planning my first stop of the Slow Boat to Florida (a.k.a. SBFL) round-trip journey. (See my blog post: SBFL – Slow Boat to Florida.) I estimate I will do 30 or more stops by the time I come back home to SBFL 0, perhaps after 6 months or so. Ambitious — maybe or maybe not, we’ll see. One of my two inspirations for this journey is a 1958 National Geographic essay titled, “Slow Boat to Florida,” by the late Dorothea...