Just as the last vestiges of land dropped below the horizon, night fell. There were a few clouds, no moon, and a million stars.

It’s fairly suburban where we live so I hardly ever see the stars anymore. The glow of the Florida coast stayed with us nearly all night as well. Kyle took the first watch, then handed the helm over to me around 12:30. We had agreed to 2 ½ hour watches so I was on deck until 3. I know that nothing happens quickly on a sailboat, and theoretically you should only need to pop your head out once every 15 minutes, look around, and call it good, but I enjoyed sitting at the helm watching everything all the time. Kyle had to dodge a cruise ship or two, but my shift was completely boring. Just a couple cruise ships that weren’t coming anywhere near us. It sounds like Jeff had a more interesting shift, he had a rain shower, then he saw a rocket launch – probably somewhere near Cape Canaveral, but we’re not sure what it was. Kyle had checked the Cape Canaveral schedule and there weren’t any launches listed.

I had a good 5 hour nap and woke up to fresh coffee – Kyle made some right before he woke me up for my shift. By morning, we had completely lost sight of land. Sunday seas were already flatter, just as predicted. Later in the day we turned on an engine and started motorsailing. Even though the seas were flatter it was still pretty difficult to move around – I was surprised by that. It was a really boring day, and I hear that’s what sailing is all about.

Jeff said he normally sees dolphins around here but we didn’t see any. They are supposed to be good luck. We did see quite a few flying fish, they really fly! They are cool to watch but nearly impossible to get a photo or video of.

We were still having trouble holding our course, trying to sail so close to the wind, and the jib kept luffing so we took it down.

Shifts kind of fell apart last night. I was on the helm around 8pm, just hanging out and enjoying myself, so I decided to hang out until midnight, then let Kyle and Jeff take over until 5am, which would allow me to sleep for most of the night. The main was moving around quite a bit, Jeff came outside to smoke and I asked if we could do anything about it and he said we might as well take it down. No more motorsailing, only motoring. Disappointing! There was some really cool bioluminescence in our wake, I sat for a long time watching the water push off the hull and explode with light – they look like aquatic fireflies. They are jellies, we splashed a couple up onto the starboard pulpit and they stuck there glowing all night. Otherwise, a boring shift again, then sleep. When Kyle crawled into bed next to me it was 5:30 (later he claimed “I was killing it with my podcasts”), then Jeff took watch after him, so I got to sleep in as long as I wanted.

Today the sea was completely flat. I was so bored that I started reading the magazines I had brought.

Late this afternoon, the sky got dark and Jeff was pointing out features of the clouds and what that meant. According to him, a flat bottomed cloud has a huge downdraft of wind in the center of the cloud and sends wind straight out, so you will always get wind on the nose from a cloud like that. Then he pointed out to rounded edges of clouds, showing high wind shear. We were headed right into a dark cloud that had crazy looking wind shear.

The wind picked up to 20-25 knots, but the seas were completely flat and we got a glorious rain that cleaned up all the salt off the boat. I was happy with that, because we were probably 8 hours out from Charleston so I thought we could pull into the harbor with a clean boat.

After that rain storm went through, we had some dolphins come up and play in our bow wake! I think I got some good video footage, hopefully there isn’t too much water on the lens to obscure the shot. It was so crazy, sitting up on the bow, bouncing up and down through the waves with dolphins an arms-length away. Absolutely surreal. The clouds started getting dark. We just had to make it through one last storm before we come in to the harbor.

That next storm though – that’s when things got bad. It got dark, and it got scary. Read on to find out how our easy trip took a crazy turn.