Breeze On

The front arrived yesterday and brought plenty of wind and rain. Early in the morning, before the rain arrived, we did two loads of laundry in Homer Smith’s modern and free machines. What a treat! We also took a brief walk into town, then stayed on board the rest of the day. Since we are plugged into shore power, our little electric heater kept us warm throughout the night as the temperature dropped. This morning it was 39° outside and 60° inside. After baking cookies in the propane oven the temperature inside the cabin went even higher. It looks as if our first weather window to go further N will be this weekend. Fortunately, we don’t mind waiting in Beaufort and the Homer Smith Marina.  Our little electric heater. 

Our overnight trip from Southport to Beaufort was uneventful. We arrived at Homer Smiths Docks and Marina at 9:30 yesterday morning after motoring 16 hours. Once again, the wind was too light and too far behind us to keep the sails filled. After getting settled in our slip we walked to the office to check in and then to a coffee shop down the road. That took all the energy we had so we stayed on board the rest of the day and we each had a long nap.  Today we borrowed Homer Smith’s courtesy car and ran a few errands. One of the errands was buying a small Swiss Army knife to replace the one George lost months ago somewhere on the boat. It may turn up someday…or not.  After taking nice, long, hot showers in Homer Smith’s beautiful facilities we walked into town for a late lunch/early dinner. We got back to the boat right after it started to rain and now it is really coming down. We are expecting rain and wind the rest of today and all of tomorrow.        ...

We have had a nice visit in Southport, NC and are now preparing to leave on the next leg of our trip home. When we left Lucaya on Monday the weather forecast said we would have relatively mild temperatures with one cold snap and winds that would allow us to get home relatively quickly. That has all changed. Now the forecast calls for several days of cold weather and several days of winds from the N. We could choose to ignore any weather windows that come our way and avoid going any further N until the weather is consistently warmer, but that doesn’t fit our natures. We both hate to pass up weather windows. So, we plan to leave Southport this evening and sail overnight to Beaufort, NC, waiting there for the next weather window.  Last night the outside temperature dropped to 40° but we stayed warm under our blankets with the help of our little portable electric heater. When we woke up this morning the temperature in the cabin was 63°. Not too bad. The low tonight is forecast to be 48...

At noon today we arrived in Southport, NC after traveling 496 nautical miles in 57 hours. Our average speed was 8.7 knots. The Gulf Stream gave us quite a boost—our average speed yesterday was 10.1 knots! We were able to sail for just 3 1/2 of those 57 hours but that is more than we expected. Now we are ready for some rest.                     Last night’s sunset.  The sun was a bright red color.                     Dredging in the Cape Fear River. The bucket on the crane is dumping the spoils onto a barge.                     The view from our slip. You can see the dredging operation in the distance. 

Planning this trip from the Bahamas to the US has seemed especially challenging. Of course it is entirely possible we have forgotten how much we agonized over the timing of other trips. We delayed our departure until today in order to avoid squalls in the Gulf Stream. Even so the forecasts suggested that we still may encounter occasional squalls here and there. George spent the past few days running weather routing models for numerous times of day. What if we left at noon instead of 9AM? How about 1PM? 6AM? 5AM? 4AM? 3AM? Abandon leaving today altogether? In the end we chose leaving the marina at 2:30AM and so far, so good. We expected to pass close to squalls off coast of Fort Pierce, FL and that is exactly what happened. Delaying our departure until today meant we have had very little wind do we may be motoring all the way. We expect to arrive in Georgetown, SC but may change those plans, depending on the weather.                    ...

We are still running weather models and talking to Chris Parker (our weather forecaster) trying to determine when we are leaving Lucaya and what our destination will be. Right now it looks as if we will be leaving Lucaya on Monday morning and going to either North Carolina or South Carolina. We have had to delay our departure in order to avoid the thunderstorms that are forecast to be in the Gulf Stream. Unfortunately, the delay means we will have to motor most of the way.  While we are waiting George has worked on a few boat projects and I did laundry in the marina’s laundry facility. We walked 1.5 miles to the grocery store and what a nice store it was! We ate at the restaurant here on the property and plan to try another restaurant that we passed while walking to the store. Tomorrow I will be preparing the food we will eat while we are offshore.  This is a screenshot from a Predict Wind weather routing run. On the right you can see the forecast models from which you can cho...