Our new boat!
The plan for after the Tybee was to drive to Pensacola to pick up our new boat then stay there for the night then drive back. As the week unfolded Brendan realized he had to be home for 8AM Tuesday morning. This meant staying overnight would not be an option.
Of course we had to celebrate in Tybee after finishing, somehow we didn't end up getting to bed until around 4AM. Luckily, we were smart enough to get the boat almost all set to go before we started celebrating. We woke up Saturday morning at 8:36 and ran to the awards ceremony. Here we found out the final standings. We placed 16th out of 24 overall and 10th of 17 in the Nacra 20 class. We are quite happy with this performance for our first Tybee, especially since our goal was simply to finish.
Afterwards, we made a few last minute preparations to the trailer and reorganized the truck a bit. We finally got on the road around 11:30 and drove straight to Pensacola through some nasty T-storms. Perhaps the worst part of this drive was the irony of it all, driving back to FL after having worked so hard to get out!
We arrived at Key Sailing and met up with the new owners of our 20 and handed over the reigns. This was a very sad moment for us as we loved that gray boat. Luckily the new owners are great guys and we are sure they will treat it well. The boat will be in New Orleans but will spend plenty of time in the Pensacola area being sailed.
Next we received our new boat, a 2009 Nacra F18 Infusion. Capt. Kirk Newkirk gave us a great deal on it! Despite being a major pain in the butt, he is a great guy.
From there we drove 3-4 hours into Alabama until we realized we were just too tired to go on. We pulled into a rest area and slept between some 18 wheelers for a few hours.
Once we woke up, we hit the road again, next stop was Trey Brown's house in Greenville, SC to pick up a couple trailer boxes. After that stop we had to stop at Trey's old house in Raleigh to pick up one more box!
With all the stops we ended up rolling into RI about 6:30AM after a solid 2.5 days in the car!
Nothing like sailing 500+ miles and then being cramped in a car for that long!
Upon arriving back to RI, Brendon dealt with some school stuff and then went racing on Swan 42 that night. I slept for a few hours and then passed on the chance to go racing with Brendan as I was too eager to rig the Infusion.
One important word of advice for anyone considering this long of a road trip is to have some company that you can goof around with. If you can't have fun then it's going to be one miserable trip! For all of those that don't understand what I mean... take a look at the following picture:
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