Tom Kotula put his engineering career on hold last year. The Cleveland State University graduate and then-rowing team member was wafting between two goals: doing volunteer work and fulfilling a dream of taking a rowboat beyond the lakes and rivers of Ohio.

The ambitious 26-year-old managed to merge both incongruous aspirations.

After a lifetime spent around construction sites with his father, Kotula decided Habitat for Humanity would be the ideal organization for him, and he'd travel between project sites -- while raising awareness for the nonprofit -- by rowing 2,300 miles in a modified sailboat from Cleveland to Key West.

"I really wanted to help people who were willing to help themselves, and Habitat for Humanity does just that," Kotula said after arriving in Key West Friday, with his brother Dan, 19, college buddy Jon Hauserman, 22, and other friends who embarked on the trip in June.

In a welcoming ceremony Saturday, they were greeted at the Schooner Wharf Bar by Conch Republic Navy member, Key West City Manager and Ohio native Jim Scholl, and family and friends who this week joined them in working on Habitat for Humanity homes.

Residents are expected to move into Bayside Landing on Big Coppitt Key by late January or early February, Habitat Executive Director Bob Calhoun said.

"When I first read about Tom and his friends and this trip, I thought what a great time of your life to take on an adventure like that and to have the grit to stay with it," Calhoun said.

The crew, which stopped to work on at least a dozen Habitat projects along the way, faced storms, waterspouts and fatigue along their route from the Great Lakes through the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Intracoastal Waterway and Atlantic Ocean.

Kotula on Tuesday tried to find the words to sum up his six-month adventure.

"The people," he said. "I met so many great people along the way. It was amazing -- incredible, really -- how people will lend a hand. People who don't even know you."

Like the family in Cleveland who offered the crew their Key West house to stay in while here.

Perhaps the people he'll remember most, however, is a family in Garrison, N.Y.

"We were just chatting with these people in a boat up there about the yacht club where we could dock; turns out they were going to the same place and were waiting for us when we got there," Kotula said, explaining the invitation to stay with them followed. "The wife told us to bring laundry, not to worry about dinner and offered us a place for the night. As we're getting in the car, the son-in-law says to her, 'Did you tell them where they're going yet?'"

Their home was a stone castle on a mountain overlooking the Hudson River and U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

"I couldn't believe it," Hauserman said.

There were other such random acts of kindness along the way that Kotula said will forever mark the trip, including a group that fixed the hull of his rowboat, named Not for Sail, that was punctured by a rock while in the Erie Canal.

"I thought the trip was done," Kotula said. "Within 30 minutes there were people helping us. We got the boat back under way in a little over a day. I went from thinking it was over to watching these people save the trip in 30 minutes."

alinhardt@keysnews.com