Challenging passage
Sunday 14th June 2020 – Beaufort NC
Q1, We left Florida at slack tide 11.00 am with full tanks and a forecast that said we should be able to sail most of the way, light winds on day 2 so some motor sailing but pretty much OK. There was a warning of a cold front and low-pressure zone arriving in NC on Sunday afternoon/evening but nothing too nasty and anyway we would be tucked up in the sheltered anchorage at cape Lookout by then.
We also had a plot of the northbound Florida Current so we could make the best of the 2-3 kn flow. Day one was great, a nice wind a little more north than forecast but still ok. The FC is a long way offshore here so we angled out to meet it and found it after about 4 hours. It’s fantastic to see the speed jump from 6–8 kn to 10 -11 and the boat still comfortable and neither the boat or the crew stressed.
Q2 Day 2 dawned with a lovely sunrise but a steadily reducing wind, by midday the 10 kn we’d been promised lost a one somewhere and it became flat calm – cue Yanni, our trusty Yanmar Diesel and await the return of the wind. Somewhere off northern Florida we lost the current, the latest track showed we were right in the middle but we weren’t and a long slow day ensued trying to find it again. The wind didn’t come back either.
Q3 overnight still no wind but some crazy squalls with tons of rain but little or no wind, we’d lost time with the current but still expected to get in sometime after midnight.
Q4 only just over 50 miles to run out of almost 500 and all hell broke loose. The radar displays rain and storms and the first one was big with driving rain, a sudden drop in temperature and 25kn+ of wind out of the North – the direction we needed to travel. We got an updated forecast and it still said the wind would go NE 10-15 kn for a short while then go East 10 kn. Yeh Right! In no time the sustained wind speed was 25kn with a lot more in the squalls and all from the North. The radar showed a long unbroken line of heavy rain, a sure sign of a front moving in fast so we reduced sail to make life comfortable and settled in for the night. This was the point when the boat hit a particularly steep wave, all 20 tons tried to fly, failed and slammed back into the sea submerging the whole deck in foaming water, sending gear flying everywhere and popping the glass out of the very rugged brass barometer.
So near yet so far, the seas became like a bad day in the English Channel and like the Channel on a bad day, it was cold wet and miserable. I decided a safe night was called for and reduced sail to a minimum. By dawn instead of waking at anchor after a good sleep we had had made 20 miles further with little sleep. We were however closer to the shore and protected by Cape Lookout so at 10.am two bedraggled sailors and their trusty, toughty, and totally unphased boat entered the channel into Beaufort and swapped the anchorage at the Cape for a marina berth.
Once again you may be left wondering why we do it. Well firstly, it was not typical, dramatic but not unsafe. We just resigned ourselves to another night out and, reduced sail and tacked back and forth on the most comfortable, wel maybe least uncomfortable point of sail that sadly gets you nowhere. We still had two even safer options left, to heave to and let it pass or turn and run downwind back to Southport 40 miles to the south, neither were necessary. But mainly we do it for the challenge, for the adventure and simply because we love the life. For me it’s easy, I truly believe I was born to be here but for Terry she needs absolute faith in the skipper because she’s not in her natural element. I don’t know quite what I did to deserve that faith but it brings us even closer. Nobody chooses to do passages like that but just look where it gets you and even a bad day at sea is better than a good day at the office.
Oh, and the glass survived, I’ll stick it back on later when all the other jobs are done, that barometer has done over 20 thousand miles with us and it deserves some loyalty.