About this website

Hello, my name is Rob Feeney and this website is about my experience moving to Florida and buying a sailboat… then selling it and buying another boat… then cruising from Jacksonville FL to downeast Maine.

I did the trip in the spring and summer of 2017. I’ve been wanting to document the trip in some way since I completed it almost three years ago. I had several false starts and the mechanics of creating a website have been more difficult than I anticipated. But here it is at last.

I started working on this attempt last summer, then lost interest and it’s languished since then. In the early days of the internet I followed a newsgroup called rec.boats.building. One of the frequent contributors had a signature on his posts that went, “The problem with good ideas is that they soon degenerate into a lot of hard work.” Ain’t it the truth!

I had grand plans for this website, but now I’ve decided to clean up what I’ve got and go ahead and publish it as is. It’s basically a photo album with captions, some of them quite verbose.

I’ve developed the site on a Mac Mini with a big monitor. I don’t know how it will function on small screens. I tried it on my iPhone SE (tiny screen) and couldn’t see the main menu at the top at all.

I do expect to add content going forward, and I’ll use this section to summarize it. So if you view the site and are interested in returning, you can return to this section and see what’s new.

I wanted the site to have an option to add comments, and be able to respond to the comments. Sadly, I choose a static website instead of a blog. I didn’t learn till after adding most of the content that the static site templates did not offer any comment or feedback functions. Damn! There must be some way around this, but I don’t have the patience or gumption to figure it out, so if you have feedback, email me at fairladytheboat@gmail.com. If you happen to know SquareSpace and would like to help me with the site, be in touch!

A couple more things: all photographs were taken with an iPhone SE. And, as I was working on the site recently, I was in the “Norfolk to Cape May” section and through some errant mouse click I changed the format for that section from stacked to tile. I’ve spent hours trying to change it back, and I’ve given up. I hope to correct this in my lifetime; till then I’m afraid you have to live with it. Rob— May 2020