Can it get any better?

Many times throughout our first day underway we just looked at each other, smiled, and admitted how glad we were to be a part of this adventure, but I should back up and start at the beginning.

Todd and I arrived in the shuttle after midnight, and I went straight to bed and fell asleep shortly after.  Todd was still reading when I closed my eyes, but his eyes were at half mast, so I'm sure he was out shortly after I was.

Admiring the sunset from the bow the night before the launch.

I heard Chuck and Scott talking around 4 AM, just mumbles in the background of whatever dreamland I was in.  I didn't want to wake up.  My head hurt, and I felt slightly hung over, probably due to dehydration.  Even so, as I became conscious and began to understand some of what they were saying, I had to get up when I heard enough to determine they were plotting a takeover by preparing the boat for launch without me.

I struggled awake and dragged on my clothes, being careful to not disturb Todd sleeping on the air mattress at the foot of my bed.  Scott and Chuck were already outside, deciding what had to be done to get underway.  The list included: unhook the water and power and configure the boat for running on its own power and water; put things away securely inside the boat; turn on and warm up the electronics; configure the station being used to drive the boat with binoculars, charts, etc.; start and warm up the engines, and others.  We didn't have a full list of what needed to be done understood among us, some of the items were obvious, others not so much, and we didn't know how long it would take to do all that needed to be done.  Much of it unknown, some of it unrealized, we dove in and attacked it.

The morning of the launch - beautiful!

We felt we were ready to go shortly after 5:30 AM.  We were standing around, looking at each other, and couldn't think of one more thing that needed to be done.  Chuck decided there was just one more requirement: we needed to be able to see where we were going.  His definition of enough light was to be able to see both sides of the channel.  That seemed a reasonable requirement.  I checked and saw that sunrise would be at 6:30 AM, and we figured that there would likely be enough light 20 to 30 minutes before that.

We ate breakfast, and I got Todd up around 6:00 AM and told him we would be getting underway shortly.  I was thinking we'd be pulling out in 10 minutes or so, but somehow the time slipped away, and it was 6:20 before I started the engines.  We warmed them up for what we thought was a reasonable time, everyone completed their pre-launch trips to the marina's restroom, and we slipped off the lines and pushed the boat off the dock around 6:30.

Chuck was a master driving the boat.  We started pointed the wrong way, away from the marina's channel to the canal.  At its widest, there there were roughly 4 boat lengths available to turn around in.  Chuck gently backed the boat near the middle of the available turning space, and then using mostly the engines turned the boat completely around with very little movement forward or backward, perhaps half a boat length total.  Once turned towards the canal, he shifted both engines forward and steered the boat through the very narrow marina channel.  Through the channel, Chuck turned the boat left into the canal, bumped up the throttles, and headed east.  The hardest part of the trip was over.  We were really underway, the journey started.

The journey begins.

The grin on my face wouldn't come off.  After months of planning, anticipation, talking and constantly thinking about this day, wondering if it would ever come, it was here, and it was glorious, better than I could have imagined.  There were still butterflies in my stomach.  I knew there was a long way to go with lots to learn along the way, but we'd overcome the invisible forces that held the boat in the marina until it was ready to make the trip, and finally the boat was moving closer to her new home.

We learned how to operate the electronics along the way.  We'd played with them before getting underway and glanced at the manuals, but the true understanding came with using them.  There are different chart plotters at each helm, both with dated charts, but the boat's GPS position is shown accurately on both, and the depiction of the canal and the navaids along the way were right on.  I used the Navionics+ application on my tablet as a backup, Chuck consulted his handheld GPS as needed to confirm what the boat's older systems were telling us, and there were other applications available on our phones to triple- and quadruple-check our course, speed, and movement over the ground.

As if the excitement of just being underway wasn't enough, the anticipation of discovery was high.  Todd remarked at one point that the canal we were traveling though could have been a scene from Jurassic Park.  The canal is teeming with wildlife that we rarely see, and we were excited to find what lay around the next bend, along the banks we traveled between, and in the water ahead of us.  We saw many birds of many varieties, alligators floating like logs in the water alongside the boat, a few other boaters, fisherman, sailboats, and air boaters.

Next, the started great but ends badly.