Northbound Delivery on “Mrs Lane”
Hello Friends: So if you keep up with my (often infrequent) blog posts, you know that I’m up in New England for the summer with my full-time gig onboard Motor Yacht “Carpe Diem” having a Time of it bopping around Long Island Sound and the Islands with my fingers crossed to see Maine 🙂 again this year but ‘stand-by to stand-by’ as it goes.
So let me back it up to May 24 when we did a consecutive delivery leading up to Carpe Diem’s northbound trip: this one being on Motor yacht “Mrs. Lane”…
Mrs. Lane is a 65ft Outer Reef Captained by my friend James Mitche of Mobile Marine Services. Captain James joined me last year onboard my northbound delivery of Carpe Diem, and since then invited me last fall to jump on as delivery crew onboard M/Y “Mrs. Lane” southbound from Norfolk VA to Palm Beach FL.
You can read about our Southbound trip here.
James and I had run together twice already, and figured we might as well keep up the good work, only this time to bring a third crew, that being Jeremy. If Carpe Diem’s departure was aligning with Mrs. Lane’s northbound schedule we might have caravanned up the coast! How cool!! But Carpe Diem wasn’t quite ready to leave her tropical paradise by then.
So James rings me and we jump onboard in Palm Beach and prepare for a next-morning early departure. From Palm Beach it is a 60 hour trip at sea to reach Beaufort NC.
What I can tell you about being far out to sea is that it’s just about the best place to be or worst place to be depending on your circumstances. For us, we were BLISSED OUT with S-WEEEEEET SEA conditions pretty much the entire 3 days…
the kind of days that make you happy to be alive, loving what you do, and wondering if you ever belonged any where else…
Mrs. Lane is a slow and steady 8 knot boat (for land peeps that means 8 miles per hour for 500 miles, yeehaw). Lucky for us we were riding the gulf stream with a nice push from the northbound current.
Also lucky for us is the fact that as much as we like to ride that northbound gulf stream current, so do the pelagic fish! And out there, we had a blast catching some nice Mahi-mahi.
Besides sunrises, sunsets, and catching fish, all there really is to do is to take turns cooking, chiiling/napping, engine-room checking, or being “on watch” (a rotation of typically every 4 hours).
Once we reached Beaufort we stopped over to fuel and to rest overnight. Jeremy off-boarded as he had business to attend to, while Captain James and I pushed onward toward Coinjock.
In one long day, we made it through the 150 nautical mile winding Intracoastal Waterway, and pulled in for 9pm just as the last of the sunlight was tucking behind the trees: and in time for the famous Coinjock PRIME RIB! Success!
My last day on the delivery was the 40nm trek up the final part of the Intercoastal river to Norfolk, VA. Seemingly easy, but with a 5pm flight to catch, fuel guy not arriving until 8am and bridge opening delays the pressure was on…
But We arrived with no time to spare, I bid James a safe passage to Stratford, and just as the flight was boarding did I run up to the gangway, bags in hand, and squeeze onto my boarding flight 😉