Mike and Beth's Adventures

Amy Marie is going to ride this contraption from one drainage to another! This is the "Big Chute Railway", a one of a kind gadget to transport your vessel and keep two ecosystems separate. I should have known something unusual was up when we passed this waterside cabin. Here is the rail car ready to receive some boats If you look carefully, you will see the bow is on the wooden floor and the rear of the boat is suspended in a nylon strap cradle. Large boats are lifted with their running gear beyond the wooden floor.  Lifting straps are used to suspend the vessel as in a travel lift. Note that the front and rear follow different tracks.  The difference in height of the tracks is carefully set to allow the deck to remain horizontal as the car crosses the hill. Amy Marie is loaded into the rail car and just about ready to start it's journey. I am excited about this unusual experience, but I have to admit, the pucker factor was a bit high! Holy Smokes, what have we gotten our...

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Cruise Planning Tools We are currently doing the Loop and in the Chesapeake Bay Area.  With this page I will try to summarize the tools we use when planning our Great Loops travels.  I will update this with new tools and sources of information as they become available. Background Route planning and navigation is not mysterious if you have a process and have carefully selected the tools and resources required to make good decisions and execute carefully.  For my vessel, I have built my route planning and navigation process around the following tools. Navigation Hardware/Software Garmin 8612xsv Multi-Function Display (Chartplotter) Navionics application on both an Android and iPad tablet as well as my smartphone Aqua Map application on my iPad. Weather Sirius XM Weather subscription which requires a Garmin GXM54 satellite receiver connected to the MFD.  This allows me to receive real time weather information when cell phone coverage is not available. Navionics and...