Bushwacker begins Great Loop Adventure!

[Bushwacker]

Dream Seeker & crew departed on the 6000 mile Great Loop trip last Monday 4/15. My wife Admiral Arden, who is a much more creative writer than I, has started a blog documenting our adventure which will hopefully contain numerous pictures. If you go to https://dreamseeker.blog/about/, there is a spot where you can enter your email address so it will send you a note whenever there is a new entry.

We arrived at Palm Coast Marina in Jacksonville Beach about noon yesterday, just a couple of hours before the latest cold front arrived with a nasty squall line and predicted gale force winds! Arden’s daughter Valerie and her husband live just a few miles away and may spend the weekend aboard, after taking us to their home to do laundry and do some shopping and provisioning.

Arden and I spent a year looking at boats from NC to Marathon in the Keys, starting with older boats in the 35-40’ range. My good friend/neighbor and Best Man Jef, who I’ve known for ~25 years, developed CoreCell foam and is a composites expert and also a yacht broker, served as our buyers broker. After looking at about a dozen boats in our initial price range which all turned out to be project boats, he suggested that we would probably end up with a better value if we raised our target price a bit and looked at something a little newer. We made an offer on a number 13, a 2000 vintage boat in New Bern, SC, with a single Cummins 225, but it flunked it’s sea trial due to a bad fuel lift pump!

I had heard about Art DeFever, who appeared to be the Carl Moesly of the long range cruising world! His series of very well-designed trawlers appeared to be the “SeaCraft” of trawlers, so we started looking at DeFevers. Jef found [U][U]Dream Seeker in a yard in Stuart and described it as having “good bones” The 49’ Raised Pilot House model https://www.passagemaker.com/cruiser...r-defever-49-2 had just gone on the market and had everything we wanted except air conditioning, but he said if we could buy it cheap enough that we could afford to add AC, he felt it would be a good buy. Long story short, we did! Although I would have like to have more time fixing stuff, we decided that if we waited till I fixed everything, we’d never leave! And most folks doing this trip are 10-15 years younger, so we figured we’d better do it now while we still can! So off we go!