So this subject gets quite ridiculous and trying to explain how we get to and from the boat thats 3 states away, is confusing even to me. So we didn’t plan on buying a boat in FL. It’s like dating the girl of your dreams long distance. She’s a B to get to, but SO totally worth it when you see her. Our plan is to slowly move her up closer to NC so she’s only a few hour drive away. So, heres what we’ve been doing so far. Like I said before, if this is something you’re considering, you have to be passionate about it because it’s easy to make excuses as to why it just won’t work or isn’t worth it.
Again, we are lucky that my husband is an airline pilot, so we fly standby just about everywhere we go. This means, however, we need to be flexible in our dates. Sometimes we plan on leaving, let’s say on a Sunday, but we check flights and they are super full. We then need to shift gears and look at the next day, etc. Also, we have to know going in, that we may not get seats together (Capt and I) and I have to ride out the flight w/a squirmy, hungry lap child and 5 year old next to me.
Ok, so that’s just the flight to get to the city we left our boat in. Now, how to we get to the marina?? We’ve been getting some pretty cheap rental cars lately, which is great if we plan to stay in the same marina for our trip. Otherwise, we sometimes Uber to/from the airport. This gets complicated when you are planning a trip to move the boat. First, you’ll need to provision. That’s pretty hard to due Ubering around town. But then what do you do with a rental if you’re not coming back? This is where you do the annoying “car shuffle”. Fly to airport, rent car to drive to boat, use rental to provision before trip, and either leave the car at that marina and return via Uber from the city you end at or do the reverse……drop the rental off back at the airport you arrived in and Uber back to the boat before your trip begins. Once at your new destination, you would just Uber to the airport. Regardless, the car shuffle sucks a big one. BUT worth it in our opinion to be able to use the rental car to provision the day before/day of our trip.
Now, what will change once we get closer (driving distance). We will drive our car to the Boat, travel for a few days, then Capt Steve usually Ubers back to our original Marina and drives our car back to where we ended on our boating adventure. Surprisingly, we’ve never had more than 1- 1 1/2 hour drive by car, to get back to where we ended. Traveling 8 knots by sea takes awhile.
What’s funny is, I never realized how confusing and how much work this all seems until spelling it out. I even tried to proof read this post and could barely make sense of it enough to do so, lol. Like I said at the beginning. You HAVE to want this.