pincky → intro → the plan

Changing Plans

Magnolia

The original plan had been to sail a newly purchased Tradewind 33 across the Atlantic from New York City to Ireland during summer 2007 and we spent a lot of time and energy on trying to get ready in the short time we had available.

However as time went on we realised that it was very important to do a shakedown cruise. There were two main reasons for this, the first and more obvious was that it would give us the chance to get to know the boat and become more familar with what would be involved in such a long trip. The second and perhaps more important was that we had started to think that we hadn't enough time to get the boat ready to head off across the Atlantic.

Finally we also discovered that if we shipped the boat to the east coast it would not arrive there until after the 4th of July. We thought that this would be too late in the season to start, but we had already more or less decided that we would try and sail from Milwuakee to New York City through the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal and leave the Atlantic for another year.

Now that we had an objective, it was time to look at the the timing and see how reasonable our new plan was!