We’ve been sticking to the ICW, mostly because there aren’t many inlets, but also because it’s harder to fight the cold weather offshore. However, the fastest way to get back to warmer climes is to do some offshore hops.

We arrived in Wrightsville Beach on Monday. The offshore forecast for the Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving was complete calm – no wind, flat seas. Obviously not sailing weather, but if we’re going to be motoring down the ICW anyway, what’s the difference? So we made our plans to go out the Wrightsville inlet at daybreak and enter Charleston about 30 hours later.

Initially, we had very slow rolling one foot waves, and somehow during the night even those flattened out into a ridiculously calm ocean. During Kyle’s night shift, he touched the Gulf Stream and the water temp rose from 58°F to 72°F, so when I got up for my shift I had a little bit of counter current to deal with but the air was so warm!

I was on deck for the sunrise shift and it was 360° of phenomenal color reflected on glassy water.

I took about a hundred photos and I’m really struggling to not overshare here, but since this is something not many people will see – a sunrise over calm seas – maybe an overshare is okay!

We arrived at the Charleston inlet just in time for peak outgoing tide, so instead of doing 6 knots, we were doing 2 knots and fighting a massive current for a couple hours. I don’t think it’s possible to arrive in Charleston and NOT be fighting the current.

We had pulled in to Charleston because there were strong southwest winds forecast. After we anchored we sat down and looked at the forecast. It looked like we could wait out the SW winds and head back out into the ocean the next morning, staying in Charleston for about 12 hours. Neither of us were stoked about the forecast, the seas looked a little steep, but we’d be able to sail. It was going to be cold, but it’s cold whether we’re inshore or offshore. We decided to do it.

We definitely needed fuel before we headed out again, so we were going to stop by the city marina for diesel. As we motored over, I hailed them on the radio and they told me the megadock was completely full. We were able to anchor across the channel from the marina, then dinghy back and forth with jerry cans. On our last trip we took advantage of their hot showers, the first real shower I’ve had since we left a week ago! It was also the first time we stepped on dry land since we left.

We got up at quarter to five on Thanksgiving day and put on all our layers and did our pre-departure prep. We were both dragging our feet. My gut was telling me “don’t do this!” but I was trying not to be negative. We slowly realized that neither of us was ready to go. We haven’t had a day off since last week, we were so exhausted. I hadn’t gotten a nap the previous day due to our refueling fiasco, and the prospect of standing watch for another night was a little daunting. We went back to bed. There are about 10 reasons why this was the best decision ever, but here’s the best example: when Kyle’s alarm went off at 6:30am he sent his dad a text to let him know we were staying put. I can’t stop laughing at how bad it is – if you needed proof of how tired we were, it’s right here!

So we ended up staying in Charleston on Thanksgiving day. We weren’t planning on being there, so we hadn’t let our friends know that we’d be in town. They’re such good friends that they probably wouldn’t mind us crashing their Thanksgiving, but since we’d have to be chauffeured around, and if they wanted us to contribute food they’d have to bring us to the grocery store….well, we opted to make a Thanksgiving dinner on board (I mean, canned chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy. Totally counts).

We got up at 4:45am on Black Friday and pulled up the anchor. We don’t normally travel while it’s dark but Charleston harbor is huge and deep. It feels huge until you’ve got a cargo ship bearing down on you. The first one passed by just before we entered the main channel and we followed it out the inlet. At one point I asked Kyle to take the helm for a second while I ran inside for something, I assured him there was nothing going on. When I got back to the helm we had this conversation:

“I like how you think meeting a 900 ft cargo ship is ‘nothing going on.’ “
“What?! What are you talking about?”
Me: looks ahead
“Huh. I didn’t see that.”

In my defense, it was dark and I thought I was looking at the cargo ship that had already passed us. The captain was very courteous, giving us lots of room and even slowing down so we didn’t get hit by a big wake. We still moved out of the channel in order to give them adequate space.

As we entered the ocean the seas were obnoxiously steep, as forecast, but within hours the period had increased enough to make them my favorite big gentle rollers. We had enough wind to roll out a sail but not enough to shut down the engines. I was still tired, I took a glorious nap. For some reason, today was the coldest day since we left, I know this because this is the first time since then that I’ve wanted to get out the hand warmers. I stuffed hand warmers in between sock layers and kept my toes toasty.

A pod of dolphins came and played around us for quite a while! This is my favorite photo, I took it because of the dolphin surfacing just off the bow, but as I snapped it another dolphin leapt out of the water ahead! Then when I was looking back through photos later I realized there was a third fin poking out of the water!

Most of the photos I took are blurry, I didn’t realize until I looked at them later. Sorry, I did the photography bad! I’m still posting these so you can get an idea of how much fun these dolphins were having.

I thought for sure we’d run into this guy, he jumped SO close to the bow but there didn’t seem to be any impact.

Mid afternoon we rolled the sail back in as the wind died. The worst part about our offshore hops right now is that we have 14 hours of darkness – it gets dark at 5 and the sun doesn’t rise until 7. Night shifts were pretty rough, despite taking a day off we still weren’t caught up on sleep, but it was an uneventful night besides dodging a couple buoys. It’s just so boring. Lots of time to think. My brilliant idea on this watch was that driving a car is like 1-dimensional navigation, because you have to stay on the line (the road), but driving a boat is 2D navigation, so when flying cars become a thing and we’re moving around in a 3D space, we’ll probably be more experienced than most people. Groundbreaking! Or not…

We entered the inlet soon after sunrise on an incoming tide and gratefully dropped anchor around 9:30am. We’re in Florida!

Weirdly, both of these offshore hops were supposed to be about 30 hours long, but we anchored at 3pm and 9:30am respectively – that’s the effect of currents and favorable winds!

We lazed around for the rest of the day, napping and watching TV. It’s finally warm enough that I’ve shed all my extra layers, it feels amazing to be wearing normal clothes again. We ate our last vegetable today, we haven’t been shopping since we left so it’d be awesome to find some groceries, but the docks here still haven’t recovered from hurricane Matthew a few years ago so I’m not sure we’ll be able to go ashore. The important part is that we’re in Florida, the land of beautiful warm weather, and it feels so good!