I’m at Beaufort! It was only a sixteen nautical mile leg, which is the shortest leg of this journey so far. It was still very challenging. I hope this is it for the Intracoastal! Offshore from now on, baby.
With only three hours of travel to do, I was trying to make Beaufort in the morning so that I can have a full day to check out the sights. I also wanted to hit shower and laundry before they all closed. But that was not to be. I had harsh weather and pouring rain early in the morning. I had finally gotten myself on a normal cruising sleep schedule where I woke up at six, but with the rain, I slept in many more hours, putting me right back at my night-owl schedule.
Eventually, I dragged my sorry butt out of bed. I put on my heavyweight PVC foul weather gear and got out on the deck. It was about eleven in the morning. It was still pouring rain, but the wind had subsided to a ‘do-able’ gust. Besides, my PVC foulies were meant exactly for days like this. It was really ugly and it made me look like Madeline in her orphanage uniform. But they work really well. As long as they don’t have any holes in them, they never leak. Super-cool looking high-tech gear that yachties love to wear eventually leak– all of them.
It took me a few trips between the bow and cockpit to get off the seabed but I managed. Wind and current off the nose. Very skinny waters ahead. Fishing vessels coming by at a good clip. It was busy and stressful, just like yesterday. Guess what? Kept me happy, just like yesterday.
I’ve entered the land of canal houses. Rows and rows of folks’ proud retirement achievements. Unlike most suburban developments, each house is unique here. They all have different special, custom features for their hard-earned freedom towards their silver and golden years. They all have docks out front with boats moored to them or lifted off the water. But one house doesn’t have a dock. It has a Robinson Helicopter out on the ‘back’ yard, facing the water. This is the one that stands out. I wonder if the owner flies that thing off their yard?
I cleared Adams Creek and all of the sudden my navigation station is showing a speed over ground* of seven knots. Great! The out current carried me all the way to the anchorage at Beaufort. I see a sailing superyacht that I read about on Wikipedia a few weeks ago. Very cool. Her name is Kaizen, and she’s about hundred sixty feet long. On other docks, I see a good mix of offshore fishing vessels and recreational vessels. Unfortunately, the anchorage is full with eight boats. It wasn’t going to be easy finding a spot.
Under a cloudy and rainy sky, I managed to pick out a spot close to the town dinghy dock. It was in the middle of three other boats. Some of these boats are pointing in different directions. This happens sometimes if there are different currents at different parts of the anchorage, or if the boats have a vastly different configuration underneath the waterline**. The same out-current that made my trip so fast would give me trouble here. I anchored at the spot I thought I wanted to anchor, but with the boats all pointing in different directions, it was awfully close to an old sailboat. Its a bit of a chore to do it myself with wind and current, but I managed to pick up anchor and move a bit further away from the sailboat.
A gust of wind blows and my boat spins around the anchor. This isn’t good. There are a few other boats that just did this, but my neighbor’s does not. First, I move the boom back to centerline to minimize it generating any lift. Then I get my bungee cords out and synch down my mainsail and its cover. Okay, much steadier now. The boat’s movements around the anchor are a lot more predictable now. I’m a bit proud of myself — where I’m from, in the Chesapeake bay, anchoring is so easy. My friend Sebastian had warned me that after the Chesapeake bay, anchoring would be a lot more difficult. I learned something and I managed alright!
At this point, Dallace, my new crewmember joining me here was one hour drive away from Beaufort. I stayed on Sonora for about forty minutes to make sure I wasn’t going to collide with anyone. Then I braved the choppy conditions and got on my zodiac, and carefully moved the outboard from Sonora to the tender. There we go! I headed to to town docks just in time to see Dallace pull up in his truck. Normally this might seem so awkward meeting someone who would join my every day life for the next week or so, but I was just really happy to have a friend with me.
We had dinner together and chatted, but Dallace was tired and ready to pass out. He hadn’t gotten much sleep before his long drive from Indiana. So we took his luggage to Sonora, then cleared out his bunk, and got him situated. He fell asleep quickly while I went back ashore.
I found some empty bars and enjoyed a few drinks by myself. I actually don’t drink that often, and never found alcohol to be delicious. But having a cold one after days of being at sea always made beer taste great. At the last bar, the barkeep gave me all sorts of tips. Where I could find laundry and showers. I can’t wait for a hot shower. Unfortunately, its off-season in Beaufort and things close very early. It’ll have to wait.
We did some planning and studied up the forecast. We planned on staying here over the weekend so we can make Charleston in one shot. Alternatively, we could leave in two days and make for Cape fear. Either way, it feels really good arriving at my second port-of-call. I’m looking forward to running the errands tomorrow. If I get time, I’ll check out the Beaufort Maritime Museum***!
December 11th, 2022
My short stop plans did not happen. The forecast changed very quickly and we would be stuck here for a few more days. One evening, we got pounded by a nor’easter. A Nor’easter is a low pressure system that generally forms offshore in latitudes between Georgia and New Jersey, and moves North East. It gets stronger as it moves North, where it often creates blizzards and really strong winds. Fortunately, down in the South, the winds are a lot milder. Milder is a relative term. It was blowing over forty five knots offshore, and the barrier islands that separated us from the Atlantic reduced the winds to the mid thirties. Being on the intracoastal, I was relatively isolated from its effects. But now that I am stopped here in the outer banks, we got a little taste of what it is.
Basically, all the boats at anchor danced around their ground tackle. My boat, with her cutout full keel, repeatedly rotated wit the motion of a young child at their first ballet class. Every time the wind shifted, it would quickly pivot and pull on the anchor from a different direction. What was really scary was that other boats would be doing this too.
A big catamaran anchored uncomfortably close to me the day before the storm. In my rolling boat, I would stand up and look outside the portholes to make sure neither of our boats were dragging. When I wasn’t doing that, I watched my anchor alarm app while the winds howled through my boat’s rigging. None of the boats dragged and I was glad I invested in much better ground tackle for this trip. It really built up confidence in my boat’s anchoring abilities.
I watched the weather every 6 hours or so. The plan was to leave Sunday close to noon. It might let us make it to Jacksonville in one leg. A night or two was forecasted to have low winds and we may use a lot of the 35 hours worth of fuel that Sonora carries. But otherwise, wave height and wind direction are very doable. This is what waiting for a weather window was — waiting for all the planets to align. It helps if the prevailing conditions are conducive to this. And of course, the pilot charts show that winds from the North and North West. Although it was frustrating being stuck here for five days, I should count my blessings that my wait wasn’t measured in weeks.
After all, this was a nice, quiet place to wait. We spent the days at the Cru coffee shop where we’d get breakfast and basically set up camp to do some remote work. Since I didn’t have any full time commitments, I walked around and visited different attractions in between short work sessions. We even managed to visit the Maritime museums together, where we discovered that Blackbeard, the famous pirate, was killed in the Outer Banks. It was one of those moments that put me on a path that made me realize that the influence and history of the Caribbean pirates exceeded the Caribbean seas, reaching all the way to the Chesapeake Bay. After a day’s activities, we’d sometimes grab a shower, and then return to the newly crowded cabin of Sonora and sleep. I sort of missed having the cabin to myself, but it was also really neat having a new friend in the boat.
Beaufort is neat. Its an island with a string of houses, hotels, bars, restaurants and some shopping. There isn’t much to do here, but the whole place feels comfortable. Unfortunately, you have to get to Morehead City or elsewhere for a lot of things. Fortunately Dallace still has his truck here so we were able to drive around to do the errands. We didn’t have much left to do now. We have to get to Tractor Supply to refill the heater tank. I wanted to get more tiny zip ties to mouse the leech blocks on my reefing system. Dallace said he is a bit picky about what he eats, so we planned to do a short grocery run. That was it. Otherwise, we planned to spend the rest of this day getting the boat ready for our next leg. Sunday morning, we would deflate and fold the tender. That task is a bit of a chore, but it should be a lot easier with two people.
People here are really nice and hospitable. Someone local told me its ‘southern fake’ but it feels pretty genuine to me. But then again, I’m not spending any time really getting to know any person. This perspective would completely change in the months ahead, but at this time, it felt like peoples’ lives here were so different from mine.
Aside from the frustration of being stuck and not making progress, I had another reason that made me antsy to get moving. I was spending too much money here. I wanted to cook and eat out of the ships stores, not at restaurants. But its really difficult to get myself to do that, knowing the next few days, I’ll be stuck with canned food again.
Soon, we’d be in a world without any connection to my home life, save for a very low bandwidth of satellite communications. It would simply be me, Dallace, and Sonora, surrounded by a completely new environment, day and night. Being back aboard felt very different during our last night in Beaufort, knowing that soon, we’d be in a very alien place.
*Speed over ground is distinct from Speed through water. Speed through water shows the speed of the vessel relative to the water, similar to airspeed in aircraft. Speed over ground is the distance made good relative to the area around the boat.
**Sailboats all have a keel that provides hydrodynamic lift that is counter to the lift generated by sails, which is why sailboats are able to sail upwind. However, some have long, full keels, and others have more modern foil shape (a wing) at the hull. Different hull shapes interact differently with the currents, sometimes causing boats to point differently at anchorages.
***I am a huge fan of ship museums and boat related museums. I try to stop by one at every place I visit.