Day 6: Beaufort to Southport

 It's been a long day. We were off the dock at 6:50 a.m., when there was just enough light to see our way off the dock and down the channel. This picture is misleading. My iPhone made it look bright, but it was almost pitch black when I took this.

Within minutes, we were in the ocean. One nice thing about the open sea is that the sunrises and sunsets are unobstructed and awe inspiring. 

We saw lots of dolphins today but were not able to catch them in pictures.

The waves were around three feet coming from our port side beam at a 5.5 second period. With our stabilizer, that's really not too bad, but something about the constant bobbing made me and Ann both feel a bit nauseous. I rarely get seasick, so this was a bit surprising for me. We spent 6.5 hours in the ocean, and stayed at 11 knots because bumping up to 12 knots more than doubled our fuel burn rate, and we had enough time to still arrive before sunset.

You can see our outside path today on the chart.

Tomorrow, we have another ocean day, and the conditions should be just about the same. The forecast calls for waves that are slightly higher, but more from behind us, so that probably evens out in terms of our discomfort level. 

Once we arrived in the Mansboro inlet near Wrightsville Beach, everything calmed down, and we immediately felt fine. We then had about 23 miles more to go, about half at no wake speed. The ICW was difficult. We arrived at the absolute low tide, and there were a couple of spots that were marked as trouble on our chart. We followed a track published by a captain named Bob called, appropriately called Bob's tracks. He travels the ICW with a team of captains several times per season and publishes tracks that we can use on our chart plotter and on my iPad to maneuver around shallow spots or places where there has been shoaling. One of these places took us outside of the regular channel. At that hour, with that tide, there is no way for a big boat to travel without Bob's tracks. In fact, about 20 minutes later we heard two boaters talking on the VHF radio. One of them had hit the bottom in that same spot.

After the narrow, shallow part of the ICW, we were happy to enter a large, open area. We passed a cool tugboat pulling a barge, as we approached our destination.

We pulled into the marina at Southport around 4:15 pm. The current in the marina was really strong, and I had trouble using the new remote, so I docked the old fashioned way using my wing station and had no trouble. I later spoke to the Dockmate rep, and we're going to change the settings a bit to give me more power when I need it.

Southport is a quaint little town, and we enjoyed a long walk after I washed down Empty Nest. We had a great view of our boat from the marina office building.

We ran into a family that was walking their dogs. One of them seemed to be named Avi, but it turns out that their son is into aviation, so he made this vest for the dog. I don't get it, but the owners thought it was hilarious that this is my name.

This is funny, but I got a better laugh at the name of a boat in our marina. This is a Hebrew word meaning "student".

We settled in after our walk for showers, dinner, and alternating TV stations between US Women's soccer and the World Series. Life is good.

We plan on sleeping in tomorrow for the first time. We will hang out until 8 or even 9 because the waves seem like they will settle down a bit as the day goes on, and we have a shorter day than today. The plan is to anchor out near Georgetown, SC to break up the trip to Charleston, which is too long for a single day trip at our cruising pace.

Just watched back to back home runs by the Yankees. Seems like they have decided to show up after all.