5.28 – Tuesday

Even though we just got in, it looks like the rest of the week will be good weather for another offshore hop. Today was all passage prep: check the weather, clean up the boat, package up all that fish and get it in the freezer, stow the groceries, do laundry, get a quick blog post up.

There are schools of tiny fish swimming around the boat, I can’t get anywhere near them with the underwater camera but they are staying right on the surface.

5.29 – Wednesday

We pulled up the anchor by 7.30am and headed to Ft Pierce City Marina to fill up diesel and water. We managed to avoid filling up diesel the entire time we were in the Bahamas – it costs about 1.5 – 2x as much there. Then Kyle took us out to the inlet. We wanted to get a few things done with the internet before we lost signal, so we traded time at the helm while we downloaded those last grib files and uploaded those last social media posts.

The inlet was awful. Complete chaos, a strong outgoing current with an opposing wind kicked up a steep, irregular swell. It might be the worst swell we’ve ever been in, but it was temporary: as we got beyond the breakwater the swell smoothed out. Finally it got calm enough for us to turn, put up the sails, and then head north! We were doing 3-4 kt under sail, so we kept the motors on. This fit the forecast and our plan – the wind will fill in once we get further north. By noon we had the starboard engine shut down and were motorsailing.

There were a lot of flying fish, and I was doing nothing else at the helm so I sat there with my zoom lens trying to capture some for about half an hour before my arms got too tired. They’re still nearly impossible to shoot, they pop in and out of the water so fast.

I also saw a large turtle just lazing on the surface! I ran inside to get the camera, but by the time I came back she had dove. I’d like to think it was a momma loggerhead, on her way south after leaving a big nest of ping-pong-ball eggs on Folly Beach.

We had the fishing lines out all day but the water was full of seaweed and it kept getting caught in the lures. I was about ready to pull them all in, I was sick of pulling in lines for seaweed only to have them catch another piece of seaweed as soon as I let them out again. One of the reels broke last trip, so now we have two hand lines and one fishing pole. I rolled up one handline and didn’t bother to put it out again.

I started my 6pm shift at the helm and Kyle went into the cabin to make mahi tacos for dinner. Just as he finished up cooking, a hand line snapped.

“Where is the wine box!?” When we bought fishing gear Kyle was just messing around with handlines, so we never bought Cuban yo-yos for them. We’ve been using a cardboard wine box to wrap the lines around, and naturally that’s been disastrous as everything is always wet. We looked for yo-yos in Ft Pierce but everything was sold out.

“Get me something to wrap this in!” We stuck with the tried and true: Kyle grabbed a box of wine we just bought at Aldi, ripped the bag out of it, and I started wrapping fishing line around it.

This one was a fighter! And the handline made it a little more intense. I had to brace myself against the transom arch, facing the front of the boat, and pull the line in, one wrap at a time. Meanwhile Kyle was running around getting me gloves, the camera, etc.

I pulled aboard a nice mahi! A few inches smaller than the other two big ones we caught, still a considerable amount of meat.

As soon as we were sure the fish was dead, we headed inside to continue with our dinner. This is where I learned I can’t go from killing a mahi-mahi to eating mahi tacos 30 seconds later. I could barely get them down. After that I couldn’t even watch Kyle clean the fish, I kept my gaze away from the cockpit until everything was cleaned up.

When the mahi had bit, Kyle had throttled back the engine, and it was right about then that the wind filled in, so we turned off the engine and were sailing for real.

5.30 – Thursday

At midnight I woke up for my shift and found Kyle doing 9 kts – he’d found the Gulf Stream and it was ripping! We were doing 5 kts through the water, so we had a 4 kt boost from the current. He said he’d had a perfect, easy shift – the best night shift he’d ever had.

“It was the music, wasn’t it?!”
“It was 80% the music. Who knew!? Oh…I guess you did.”

I did. He usually listens to podcasts, I love upbeat music to keep me going at night. We’ve also found running through the occasion yoga sun salutation helps as well.

So he had a perfect shift, he was keeping an eye on a few sailboats headed the same direction as us. Before he even made it to bed, one of the sailboats tacked. I realized their lights were getting bigger and bigger – they cut across our bow less than a mile away, which is incredibly close at night when it’s hard to tell which direction they’re going.

The night was dark and cloudless, perfect for viewing stars and the Milky Way. By sunrise, the wind had shifted. We were doing 7+ knots through the water, 10 kts over ground, which was way faster than we needed to be going so we put a reef in. The seas were also starting to grow.

We elected not to throw the fishing lines in the water if someone was napping, because at this point, we need sleep more than we need fish. Sometime around noon we passed the latitude marking the FL/GA border, so we officially made it north of Florida by June 1^st!

During my afternoon shift, I saw a small patch of water that had a ton of breaking waves. What?! I kept staring and then I realized it was a pod of dolphins, leaping out of the water as they moved towards us! They just came to check us out and they were gone as fast as they came.

We’ve been steadily averaging 8ish knots. We planned on getting to Charleston around Friday night / Saturday morning, but at our current pace we can make it all the way to Morehead City by Saturday morning. Of course we will slow down when we leave the Gulf Stream, but we’re still way ahead of schedule!

This evening, I started to have flashbacks to the last time we were offshore heading to Charleston and ended up in a gale. I’m sure this anxiety was much worse because I hardly slept at all so far (and it wasn’t until now that I realize I’ve never really slept on offshore passages, but since they’ve all been single-night hops it’s been easy to catch up on sleep).

5.31 – Friday

During my midnight-3am shift, we hit 9 kts speed through the water with whitecaps everywhere, so we definitely had more sail out than we needed. The main still had a single reef, we rolled up the genoa. The seas were growing, it’s hard to tell in the dark but I noted 4-6 ft in the logbook.

I was on a collision course with a boat, and the best way to avoid them was to gybe, so I got Kyle up for the second time during my shift (sorry Kyle!). After we gybed, I couldn’t steer us back on course. I had a panic attack when we got stuck beam-to the big waves. I barely managed to turn on the port engine and put us back on course. Kyle, recognizing that I was in no shape to stand night watch, took the helm until daylight. I spent the night trying to sleep, but the big motion and big noises made it difficult.

Around 6am I planted my butt at the helm, panicked a few times when we hit a big wave sideways and it felt like the boat was going to fall over, but I held it together enough to convince Kyle to go to bed. At that time I’d say we were in 6-10 ft seas. It’s absolutely impossible to accurately show the swell in a photo, even the videos I took don’t do it justice. They were mostly giant rollers coming from the aft quarter, lifting us up so we’d surge forward and surf, then slide down the back side of the wave. The motion and noise is so much different inside the boat vs. sitting at the helm.

The boat does not care. This girl will push through the seas and she handles it all marvelously. As rough as it was, we were still engines-off sailing through the high wind and big swell. Mid morning the swell was back down to 4-6 ft. The autopilot heading range was about 30 degrees, some of the waves would turn us quite a bit! The strong wind decreased enough to roll the genoa back out.

At this point, between the sea state and my mental state, we needed to find an inlet and anchor. Southport was our nearest inlet, or beyond that was Morehead City but we couldn’t make that inlet today.

In my afternoon shift I started looking at inlet charts, tide timing and our estimated arrival times. If we didn’t keep up our speed, the sun would set while we were entering the inlet and we’d have to try to come in and anchor after dark. I did some math, we’d need to average 7 kts all the way in, we’d hit the inlet right at slack tide and anchor just after the sun set in the last whispers of daylight – it was our best case scenario. We turned on the engines to ensure we kept our speed up.

I didn’t want to think about the alternative – if we couldn’t make it in the inlet, we’d be spending another night at sea. Heave-to near the Southport inlet and wait for morning? Go back out to sea and try to make it to Morehead?

We were both feeling pretty good about our approach to the Southport inlet (Cape Fear). The waves were still pretty big, so it was dependent on the swell – we were turning a lot as the waves picked us up and put us down, so would we be able to hold our course in the narrow inlet? We wouldn’t know until we got there. Would the waves grow steeper as the water got shallower, or would they die down? My anxious mind wouldn’t let go of the “what ifs.”

We arrived at the first inlet buoys at exactly the right time, so tide and daylight would be on our side. The problem was that it looked like we had a wall of water in front of us – rain? A storm? Would the wind pick up? How bad was this going to get?!

There was a line of clouds, based on the (boat) radar I thought it might be just over the edge of the shore, but it must have been moving towards us quickly because we were still a ways out when it hit us. We had furled the genoa, but we still couldn’t do anything about the main because it was too rough to let someone go up on deck safely (at least, that was my understanding – Kyle later told me that we could have dropped the halyard at any point and it wouldn’t have been pretty, but the main would have fallen on its own).

The wind hit, it whipped around us. The Coast Guard issued a marine warning on the radio, but it was for Murrell’s Inlet SC. We got cell service again and I tried  to pull up the radar, it looked like that cloudline was the only band of bad weather we’d have. I didn’t tell Kyle that I saw we were also right in the middle of a NOAA special marine warning, because it looked like we were through the worst of it.

He told me that as soon as the wind calmed down again, we had to get the main down – we couldn’t have that much sail up. The wind got calm enough, we pulled down the main. And…that was it. The wind never picked up again, by that time the swell had reduced, and we were about to make it inland.

We anchored in the Cape Fear River. There was zero protection, but it was the closest anchorage to the inlet and we didn’t have enough daylight to go any further. The ActiveCaptain reviews said the anchorage had great holding even through 30 kt winds, which means if the swell didn’t keep us up, I could finally sleep. We were both so exhausted.

There was another band of storms on the radar, so we didn’t go to bed until they passed. We couldn’t have, the lightning was almost constant and the thunder was directly overhead. Around 11pm we went to sleep and slept like the dead for about 10 hours straight.

6.1 – Saturday

We need to take a couple days off and recover and catch up on sleep, but we’re anchored in the middle of a huge body of water with no protection. We started up the engines around 10am and moved 4 hours north through the ICW to Wrightsville Beach. It’s the weekend, so boaters are out in droves.

If you look closely you can see a green marker floating in this photo – and if you didn’t see it right away, you’re in good company because several boats almost didn’t see it either.

En route, we texted our Southport friends to see if they wanted to meet up with us. They hurried through their chores in order to meet up with us midafternoon. After we anchored, we got ready to go out. Since we’d been running the engines, we had hot water! I took the best shower I’ve had in weeks. With clean hair, a clean body, a fresh haircut (for Kyle), we got into the dinghy and drove in.

Shari and Evie took us to three breweries. It was wonderful – what a great way to unwind after another difficult passage.

We had a photoshoot session with their new pup Ellie, who absolutely hams it up for the camera.

For the rest of our trip, we’ll be on the ICW!

Postcript: we’re still feeling out our weather limits. The max forecast for this trip was 20-25 kts of wind (gusts low 30s) and 4-6 ft following seas. We already know that’s way too big to head straight into, but since this was downwind the whole way, we figured it would be fine. And it probably would have been, if that’s what actually happened! However, I never want to see another 10 ft wave again, and I really need to solve the no-sleeping problem before we can do another multi-night passage. I now have a very good idea of what an acceptable weather forecast looks like for future offshore hops. Kyle’s opinion of this passage was that it wasn’t particularly fun, but even the biggest waves were fine. And, as is always true, Hobbes handles all situations with aplomb, the boat can tolerate much more than I can – she’s the perfect offshore sailing catamaran. It’s hard to admit my own weaknesses here, I want to be a strong sailor who isn’t afraid of anything, but the truth is that my comfort has limits and being outside those limits is a scary place. Every trip like this increases those limits, even if I decide I never want to see these conditions again.