This is the story of the good ship, Wind Angel, and her brave crew. We set off for a 3 day cruise, kinda like the famous Minow. While we weren’t permanently stranded, we did have our adventures. Read on.

The best laid plans of men and mice do go astray. I purchased Wind Angel (formerly named, "Jacks or better") in April and immediately put her on the hard to get some work done. They came back with an estimate of over $3000 to do the work. I balked at that and just had them do about half of the work. I figured I could get the rest done later. They actually completed the work a few days before I was scheduled to arrive. That was a pleasant surprise. But I digress.
 
 

The Crew

I needed to get the boat from Ft. Pierce, FL to St. Simons Island, GA. I rounded up a ragtag bunch of sailors from among friends and friends’ friends. There were 4 of us going on this cruise. Gary and I were the sailors and we latched on to a couple of fishermen, Phil and Stan, that wanted to come along. We had hoped to keep the food costs down by bringing fishermen. Gary and I work at the same office and tinker with computers for a living. Phil is an executive at Bell South and Stan is the president and owner of a plumbing business. It turns out that everyone got to help on this trip. Phil and Stan are shown on the bottom right. Gary and I (Captain Blye, as Phil began calling me, I'll never understand why, however) are in the top two pictures.
 
 

The Plans

I had originally planned to drive to Brunswick, rent a car and drop it off in Ft. Pierce. Such a great idea. It wasn’t until I started trying to make reservations that I found out that there was only one rental car agency that had offices in both locations, Enterprise and that they didn’t do one-way rentals. None of the limo services I contacted were interested, besides I suspect they would have charged an arm and a leg. We had too much gear to charter a plane, so I started looking for options. To make a long story short, I flew to Orlando (from Atlanta), picked up a car, drove to Ft. Pierce, got the boat partly provisioned, drove to GA, and drove back. This story starts on May 10, 2001.
 
 

I departed Atlanta after work on Thursday, picked up the car in Orlando and arrived in Ft. Pierce at about 10:30 PM. On the way, I stopped at a Mickey D’s for a quick bite. For some reason the key won’t come out of the ignition. This is a new Lincoln Continental, so I figured it had some sort of lock I didn’t know how to work. After screwing with it for about 5 minutes, I got it out. On to Ft. Pierce.

The boat was in a slip at the marina next to the yard and looked like it was ready to go. They had put it in a slip, bow first and the finger pier was only a few feet long, so access to the boat was over the bow sprit. Kind of awkward.

The next morning, Friday, I ran around frantically getting provisions. I spent about $200 on "stuff" none of it edible. It was a hot day and I developed a mild case of heat exhaustion, which resulted in a minor problem, the runs. That happens when I get overheated. So here I am looking at a 300+ mile road trip and can’t imagine getting more than 30 seconds from the head. Not a good start. Off to the drugstore between episodes for a fix of Kaopectate and Immodium AD. I took the drugs and sat on the boat for a while until it looked like things had settled down. About 3:30 PM I decided to chance it and headed north. All’s well on the western front. Somewhere in north Florida I found a Chinese Buffet and replaced some of the nutrients I’d lost earlier.

On to Darien, GA, where Phil has a getaway home, that was being remodeled. We tossed out our (Phil, Stan and I) sleeping bags and air mattresses on the floor and crashed for the night. Phil and Stan had driven down from Atlanta that day. Gary had driven down also that day and was on Jeckyll with his wife staying on their boat.

We met up with Gary in Brunswick the next morning and took off for Ft. Pierce. The trunk was so full that we couldn't get the lid closed. The first casualty of the day was Gary's jacket. Apparently it was on top of the pile of stuff, up against the trunk light. The light never went out and the lens and Gary's jacket fused together. We arrived just before lunchtime started checking out the boat. After a while I realized that we needed to get out of there and get provisions. I had to have the car back by 5:30 PM since the rental office closed and would not be open on Sunday. We made it back with time to spare. As we were passing provisions across the bow for later stowage, one of the locals asked where we were off to. When we replied, "St. Simons Island", he remarked, "Only Georgia? I figured with all the supplies you had a trip to the Bahamas planned." Guess we did have a lot. That didn't mean we had it all. We forgot a few things, and had to hike up to a local store a couple of times for supplies. Also the fishermen had to grab a cab and go somewhere, perhaps to get licenses or bait, I forget what.

We cooked up a meal and went to bed.

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