I flew down to Miami today to begin (finalize actually) preparations for the trip home. Robert Brown, a delivery captain strongly recommended by Alecia Bittner (he helped Dan bring their boat "Far Niente" to Baltimore) will be joining me tomorrow. We will make a run to Publix to by provisions and then we'll start out - probably Saturday morning.
The route, which again you can follow by clicking on the "Click Here" button to the right of this column, will start with an offshore sail from Coconut Grove to Morehead City/Beaufort, NC. It should take ~3 days if we get reasonable winds (predicted 10-15 from the east) and a boost from the Gulf Stream (as much as 3 knots if we are luck). Its about 600 miles and at 8 - 9 knots should take 66-75 hours..but we'll see.
Then its up the ICW to Norfolk, then up the Chesapeake to Baltimore...I'm lookig forward to seeing some of the places we passed on the way down, but hopefully with much warmer weather..again, we'll see.
I'll try to take lots of pictures of the sights along the way and relate interesting features of the trip.
To start, I'll tell you about my flight down this morning...things were going along well when with about 45 minutes to go before landing in Ft Lauderdale there was a call "is there a Doctor on Board". 4 of us answered the call. Turns out there was a lady near the front of the plane how was unconscious. She had a thready pulsae, looked ashen, was unresponsive..we dragged her to the front of the plane, lied here down, took her pressure and it was about 65 systolic. breath sounds were difficult to hear. She had a broncoscopy a week ago (her sister traveling with her gave that history) and so we worried about a pneumothorax. We listened for breath sounds again and convinced outselves there were sounds on both sides. Ampng the docs were an interventional cardiologist, a general surgeon, a urologist and me. The surgeon put an IV in and we started running fluids. her legs were elevated, she was given oxygen by mask (I was really impressed how equipped the plane was...we could have done surgery if we felt like it)....she started coming around...the cardiologist yelled for the pilot to land the plane immediately...luckily he responded that the nearest airport was Ft Lauderdale, now about 1/2 hour away...by this time she was groggy but responsive and so we sat her up, seat belted her in and the cardiologist and surgeon sat next to her.
We landed without further incident, paramedics came aboard and took her off and the rest of us passengers deplaned. The stewardi were effusive with their thanks and gave us drink tickets (one each!) and a few bags of peanuts...hey...it was Southwest....On the way out I saw her in a wheelchair, talking to the paramedics and she looked fine.
Ended up being a nice way to start the trip home
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