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Former OPA director offers tales of voyage as he sets sail

OCEAN PINES–Former Ocean Pines Association Director Dan Stachurski provided a brief travel log of what would qualify as a bucket list item he is in the process of checking off this year:
On Dec. 6, I departed from Crisfield, Maryland’s Somers Cove Marina to cross the Chesapeake Bay and overnight in Deltaville, Va.  Bad weather made for an interesting crossing of the Bay and kept me and my first mate, Deborah Shockley, in port in Deltaville for two nights.  From there, we continued down the Bay to Norfolk and picked up the Virginia Cut of the Inter Coastal Waterway (ICW for short). 
We had started late in the year—most boat migrants head south in September or early October — and we paid for the delay with several extended stops to avoid bad weather and some very interesting cruising down the ICW in winds that, at times, were gusting as high as 30-35 miles per hour or more while temperatures at night were down to the high 20’s.  
It was something to wake up in the morning and have to scrape the frost off the cockpit in order to get moving for the day.  But the weather finally began to warm up after we crossed into South Carolina and we finally could enjoy not wearing long underwear.  We spent Christmas in Charleston, S.C., in their very pleasant Maritime Center, located in the heart of old Charleston. 
Christmas day saw the director of the Center hosting a pot luck dinner that turned up about 20 sailors who were enjoying the holiday in the marina, including a couple who had sailed their catamaran across the Atlantic from England as well as a very salty, bearded fellow on his way back to his slip in Key West. 
We stayed in the ICW all the way down to Hilton Head, then “went outside” into the Atlantic to sail past the state of Georgia because the ICW in that state has the reputation for being shallow and very serpentine (about 240 miles of ICW cruising in order to get through the slightly over 100 mile width of coastal Georgia).   We came back inshore just north of Jacksonville and completed our journey to Fort Pierce, Florida, in the ICW.
We arrived in our new home slip on Jan. 8, having sailed or motored 1,120 miles in 32 days.  It is impossible to describe this trip without writing a book.  Suffice it to say that I am very happy to have done it, but I wouldn’t do this particular journey again.  It’s to sea with me—Freeport, Bahama, is only 85 miles from my current marina home in Ft. Pierce, and I understand that the government of Cuba is encouraging sailors to come visit (with the permission of the U.S. government). 
I’ll be off again in the near future – it’s a totally different life cruising on a small sailboat, but one that I find most appealing.  Don’t kid yourself with romantic pictures – this is hard work.  I lost 16 pounds on the trip down the ICW. I saw things I’d never see from any other perspective, and I expect those sorts of moments to continue as I continue to cruise.