We were just a few hours out from Charleston Harbor, according to the chartplotter we were going to arrive around 9 or 10pm, almost exactly on schedule. Then the sky started to get unnaturally dark. We just had to make it through one more storm…but this wasn’t like the little rain showers we’d been through earlier.  This storm kicked our asses in the worst way.

The wind and waves picked up, right on our nose, as darkness fell around us. The waves started growing, we started slamming around between them, and water was routinely splashing up into the cockpit. The anemometer showed a gust of 37 knots before it died.

The chartplotter’s projected arrival time slowly ticked further and further into the wee hours of the morning as our pace slowed to a crawl. We were barely making a knot of headway into gale force winds. The warm water soaked us all, then the cold wind made us shiver. It looked like we’d be fighting this storm all night – we were only ten miles from the harbor, but it would take us ten hours to get there.

Water slammed the bridgedeck, making everything on the salon table jump into the air. This was my first ocean passage, we had planned out a calm trip, yet here we were just a few miles from home, entering one of the most terrifying situations I’ve ever been in.

Jeff planted me at the cockpit table next to the salon door. The seat cushions were soaked, so was I. It was too rough to even move around the cockpit. It was clear that if anyone went overboard there would be no recovery – the water was black and the waves were high. I pulled Kyle next to me and we huddled together, shivering. Jeff was very calm and tried to put us at ease, and the boat was handling the rough seas marvelously. I was confident in the captain and the boat, but I also knew that if just one thing went wrong we could have been in a very dangerous situation – if we’d lost an engine, if one of the props got tangled – I wasn’t sure what we could do.

Jeff gave us the news: he couldn’t hold our course at all. There was no way we could make it into the harbor.

He went inside to call SeaTow, BoatUS, Coast Guard, anyone who could give us information on this storm. He put the VHF on the weather station and I tried to plug my ears – I didn’t want to know – but I heard it all anyway. There was a gale warning, winds 35 knots gusting to 45, seas 10-13 ft. Things were supposed to get worse the next day. There was a small craft advisory until Thursday.

There was no way we were going to make it in to Charleston, so Jeff made the call: we were going to turn south until we could find an inlet that we could enter. It was around midnight.

The second we turned, I learned a very important lesson about catamarans. We turned downwind, now moving the same direction as the waves, and everything smoothed right out, no more rough bouncing against the swell. This also sent a lot more wind through the cockpit, and as we were all soaking wet and cold, I started shivering uncontrollably. I went inside and could barely pull my wet clothes off. I changed in to dry clothes and wrapped up in several blankets in bed and finally slept, that smooth downwind ride had changed everything. I left Jeff and Kyle to watch the helm all night – I was in no shape to help. I wish I could tell you I was braver, and not a pathetic mess. I wish I could tell you that I shared the burden of keeping watch that night, looking for a navigable port. But I was curled up in bed while Jeff and Kyle spent a cold, wet night fighting to stay awake, speeding along at 10+ knots.

Around 6am they tried to bring us in to Beaufort inlet, but it was still too rough, so we headed further south. I woke up as Kyle climbed into bed to try to warm up and recover.

A couple hours later we made it to the entrance to the Savannah inlet. It looked just as rough as Beaufort, I gave us a 50% chance of making it in – if we couldn’t make it in here, we’d have to go all the way down to Florida. Jeff pushed hard, holding our course through the inlet. He came so close to the red channel markers that I thought we’d hit them for sure, I had no idea why he was hugging the side of the channel so closely when we could barely hold a course at all, when suddenly a huge cargo ship passed our port side.

We made it in. It was several hours of slogging through strong winds and big waves, but eventually we made it behind the breakwater. Jeff could finally go get some sleep – I took over the helm in the safe, calm waters of the Intracoastal Waterway.

Now we’re chugging along through the ICW. We’ll head north for a few miles until we find a marina, then kiss the dry land and never leave it again. No, things aren’t that bad, but we’re all feeling pretty beaten up and worn down.

This brings a whole new set of logistical problems. We expected Hobbes to be delivered to Charleston by Monday, maybe Tuesday, and we planned to be back on work by Wednesday. Now, we’re near Savannah (not even the right state!), we can’t go offshore until the the gale calms down, or Kyle and I can take the rest of the week off and go up the ICW the rest of the trip. Either way, Jeff is leaving us – we won’t need him until our offshore window opens up, or if we go the ICW route we can deliver the boat ourselves.

What have we gotten ourselves into?

P.S.

I want to add a postscript to this story, mostly because I think my mom needs to hear this part, but also because armchair sailors have strong opinions of novices who find themselves in over their heads (although I should point out that I’m the novice, Kyle has plenty of sailing experience). We weren’t comfortable making an offshore passage in a boat that was brand new to us, that’s why we hired a captain with a wealth of experience. Jeff checked several weather services before we left and none of them showed any signs of bad weather, but we also had no way of checking weather en route. Having been on my boat through a gale, I can now tell you that she is far stronger than I am, and she handled it like a champ. We had both engines running and the autopilot steering and she just chugged along like it was no big deal, but we are underpowered against that kind of weather. Catamarans are known for their inability to head into the wind, and we saw that firsthand. If we hadn’t been on a schedule, if we didn’t have to be at work, hell, if I’d known how much things would smooth out the second we turned downwind, this trip would have looked a lot different. The point is, we learned a lot of good lessons on this trip, but some of them we learned the hard way.