On Mon, 4 Sep 2006 21:22:07 -0400, "Glenn Ashmore"
wrote:

Get a copy of "Gentlemen's Guide to Passages South" by Bruce Van Sant. It
takes a lot of patients to get much further south than Georgetown.
VanSant's book explains how to work the weather for the most comfortable
transits.

It's a good book which I read a lot. Van Sant kind of assumes that
you have some reasonable way of getting to the Bahamas however as a
starting point, and I'm not sure a 23 ft trailer sailor is the right
boat for that.

Not knowing exactly how much experience you have with the boat, and
with sailing in offshore conditions, I'd recommend some tune up
cruises closer to coastal Florida. On the east coast the gulf stream
is always out there as the big X factor, and boats a lot bigger than
23 feet have gotten in trouble there. For that reason I'd start with
the west coast which offers some very decent cruising opportunities.
Try a run south in the gulf of mexico from St Pete Beach down to the
Boca Grande or Sanibel Island area. There are many fine harbors and
beaches along the way and it has a very tropical feel to it.

Don't ignore safety equipment. A liferaft, EPIRB, man overboard
strobe, and a waterproof handheld VHF should be considered a bare
minimum above and beyond USCG requirements. A good radar reflector
should also be on your must have list.