Only hours after I wrote the last post, briefly updating everyone with our current plans, the plan changed drastically.

On Tuesday night we stopped by the marina office to let them know we were headed out. We’ve been here for nearly a year, so the manager came out to say his goodbyes as well. He also told us that the ICW is closed north of Georgetown due to Florence flooding. That requires major changes to our plans! We’ve been in such a time crunch that we decided to take the zero-preparations-required route: the intracoastal waterway (ICW). Now we’re going to have to go offshore, which is…fine, but we’ll need some time to prepare. Instead of leaving Wednesday, we’re going to spend the day putting up the sails, stowing the dinghy, and planning the route.

Honestly, it’s really nice to have one day of being at home (yesterday was my last day of work!), we’ve been so busy that I’ve hardly had a time to think, much less process all the goodbyes I said yesterday, and the culmination of my career.

However, this brings some new stresses to contend with. Our offshore hop will definitely have to be overnight, and I’ve only done one overnight offshore trip before and it didn’t end well. That being said, I know we’re ready to do this, and we’re capable, and the weather is forecast to be very light so it should be a gentle trip. We’re definitely jumping in feet first though, we’ve been at the dock for nearly a year, so for our first trip to be overnight and offshore feels like a big deal. It’s fine though, right? It’s fine.

Wednesday morning we were up bright and early because that’s when the winds are calm, and we need it to be dead calm to put the genoa back on.

Fortunately, it was calm all morning, so after the genoa we tackled the main. We can attach the main to the battcars without fully raising it, but since we’ve never installed a sail like this before we wanted to practice raising it at the dock so we were assured it was installed correctly. That’s not the kind of problem I want to fix offshore. Both were good to go, the only thing we did wrong was have the genoa clew facing the wrong direction, and that was a 30-second fix.

We also drank ALL the water because it’s still over 100°F with the heat index, and there was no breeze. Is it really October?

In the afternoon we moved on to the dinghy. It was tied down on the deck and deflated for hurricane Florence, so I pumped it back up and we attached the spinnaker halyard to lift if off the deck and drop it into the water. Then we moved it back to the davits, raised it, and secured it with about five too many safety lines.

Kyle tied the kayaks onto the side decks again.

Since we’re still here, we took one last trip to West Marine for a light bulb, and popped in to the Harris Teeter next door for buy-2-get-3-free cases of ginger ale (it’s basically our passage beer – no alcohol, and ginger supposedly calms queasiness). Oh, and some real beer, for after the passage.

After that we cleaned out our vehicles (we’re leaving them here at the marina for now) and then looked at our offshore route. We’re going to jump from Charleston to Southport, about a 24-hr run. We’ll leave Charleston around noon so that we arrive in Southport around noon on a slack or incoming tide, so we aren’t fighting the current to get into the inlet. The winds are going to be very light, we expect to motor or motorsail the whole way.

Finally, Wednesday night, we had the renaming ceremony for Hobbes. No time like last minute! We planned on doing it Saturday but we didn’t organize in time and no one could make it. Instead, we pleaded for Neptune’s mercy with just the two of us, then waxed our new boat name to protect it from the salt water!

Stress levels? Mid-range. I know we’re capable, there isn’t any one thing I can pinpoint that’s making me nervous, but we’re venturing off into unknown territory. It’s just Kyle, me, the boat, and Mother Nature out there. I’m confident, but I had a bad experience, so I’m wary.

We’ve got this. All that’s left to do is…GO!