- 53.5 miles
- 6 hours 7 minutes
- 8.7 mph average speed
- 5-8 mph winds
The departure date for our Great Loop trip has finally arrived! This a little over 3 years since Kevin purchased Perfect Match and we started learning about and planning for our adventure. Along the way, we had become members of the AGLCA and had attended several of their Rendezvous. During our first Rendezvous in Norfolk in 2019, we had the pleasure of meeting Darci and Steve Smith who quickly became our AGLCA BFF’s! We met them again at two additional Rendezvous and communicated with them via text, email, phone and zoom and hoped to one day travel the Loop together. As they live in California, finding the perfect boat has been a challenge for them and as we neared what we thought would be the start of our Loop, they were still searching for that perfect boat. They were going to be on the East Coast around the time that we were planning to start our trip so we all thought it would be great fun for them to join us for 3-4 days on our boat. That 3-4 day trip quickly turned into a wonderful 12 day trip that I’m sure will be a major highlight of our Loop adventure once completed! I think all of our family and friends thought we were crazy spending so much time together on a boat but it really worked out great and we were all sad when the time came that they needed to leave to pursue other plans. They made the trip with us from our home port of St. Petersburg all the way to Key West. It was especially nice for Ellen, still feeling rather inexperienced, to have them on board with us as we started our Loop. It was particularly nice since on day 3 of our trip Ellen tested positive for Covid. As we were masked up 24/7 and sleeping on our enclosed flybridge, Darci and Steve took over the galley and prepared wonderful meals for us – and washed the dishes! Darci is now an Instant Pot fan. Steve was extremely helpful to Kevin with several boat projects along the way while we were docked and they both became expert crab pot spotters! Amazingly, even though we had been in such close quarters before my positive test, no one else ended up getting sick and Ellen was not very sick. It was a bit of a challenge trying to isolate from 3 other people on a 40 foot boat but we all made it work! Darci and Steve are wonderful travel companions and are welcome on our boat anytime!
The weather and cruising conditions on our first day could not have been any nicer! We all had a great time spotting all of the dolphin along the way and scurrying to the aft deck to capture videos of them swimming and jumping in our wake.
We arrived in Venice around 4:00PM and had a nice walk on the beach before having dinner at the Crow’s Nest Tavern. The next day, we were off on bikes to explore Venice. One of Darci and Steve’s hobbies when they travel is finding microbreweries to visit and recording their favorite craft beers on their website “Judge Brewdy”. We biked about 6 miles to 3 Bridges Brewing Company, Venice’s first brewery.
