This morning we said good bye to our friends aboard Good Goose, the boat we have been traveling with since North Carolina. The crew started out as Roark, a good natured, intelligent computer programmer from Vermont, and his new girlfriend Sherri, who he had just picked up from the airport when we met them. Sherri stayed for about 3 weeks, braving incredible days of cold wind and long miles motoring through swamps and marshes on the ICW. She thought she was going to be sailing in tropical sunshine, so what she ended up enduring was admirable!! Then Roark’s mother Claudette came for Christmas, followed by Roark’s daughter Aishling and her fun friend Morgan. We have loved all the members of the changing crew aboard Good Goose and have really appreciated getting to know all of them. We’ve shared some good times and some challenging times, and through it all we have watched out for each other, traveled amazingly well together, shared food and beers and probably too much wine! Our boats rafted up together for weeks on end, and I think that even our boats will miss each other, as they were a bit like sister boats, both being the same size and style of boat. It was so wonderful to make such good friends, and we are looking forward to meeting up with Roark again back in Vermont, or next fall in the Bahamas!
Traveling together made figuring out all the details of navigating so much easier. Sharing the planning of deciding where to anchor, sail trim and boat details, warning each other of shallow areas, etc. made our trip so much richer. We thank Roark for his great companionship! We have met a lot of great people on our trip, but I don’t think we could have traveled so well for weeks with any of them like we did with Good Goose. (although we know he was just putting up with us so he could use our big powerful dinghy!)

Some of the highlights of our time together included eating oysters in the middle of a great expanse of marshlands, surviving gale winds and storms, enjoying a marvelous Italian dinner on Christmas, sailing our spinnakers together on sunny days, and last but not least, on one of our last nights together, we spun fire on our dinghy and introduced Roark to fire spinning!
Here are some photos of our Good Goose friends: