Sometimes you travel the ICW at a slow and enjoy the ride. Sometimes you do it fast, a "delivery pace" because the schedule called “life” said fast was required.
The trip from points on the Bay, like Annapolis, to various warmer South Florida destinations is at least 1100 miles, more if you are headed to the west coast. In the fall, daylight limits the long days to maybe 10 hours. The sun angles in November, in particular, make the earliest and latest of those hours problematic.
Traveling inside, in the ICW generally means you don't worry about offshore weather. However, the run down the Bay and the crossing of the NC sounds do call for manageable weather.
In most sailboats, you are pushing to get 50 miles a day. In an eight-knot trawler, you can push it to maybe 80 miles. No wake zones and slop passes can limit a planing powerboat but 160 mile days are a possibility on some stretches.
On this trip, we did it in eight days of travel, averaging 142 miles a day. We waited on weather for two days. Run times were between seven and nine hours a day.
To read more about this trip, look for a story in the January issue of PropTalk.