“A sailor’s plans are written in sand at low tide”. That could not have been more true for our trip south. We could see a good weather window coming up to go around Hatteras and we had some friends on another Amel heading for that same weather window. Annapolis to the entrance of the Chesapeake is a fair distance so our plan was to head about half way down and drop anchor for a nap and then keep going and head straight out the next day. Our goal was to time it so that we would coincide with our friends, who were already down at the bottom.
The first day went exactly as planned and we dropped anchor very early in the morning to sleep for a bit. Then at around midday we picked up anchor again and continued down the bay. It was brisk and we were zooming along at 8-9kts. It was setting up to be a fast trip to Beaufort…and then we discovered our radar wasn’t working. This was a new one. Diagnosing it was proving difficult and the more we thought about it, the less comfortable we were with heading offshore and around Hatteras with no radar. We rely quite heavily on radar, especially at night, when other boats might not have AIS or there is the potential for shoaling markers to be unlit or in a different location to where the charts say they are. As we got towards the mouth of the Chesapeake and still hadn’t succeeded in fixing it, we made the decision to turn into Phoebus anchorage and with that, we missed our weather window.
The next day was another mast climbing day. After trundling up to check the radar out and not finding anything wrong with it Kevin tried taking out the fuse at the nav station and putting it back in again. Lo and behold, this did the trick. It would’ve been a fairly simple thing to do underway if we had thought of it but hindsight is 20/20 i guess.
Now we were awaiting our next weather window to head south. Surprisingly it wasn’t an exceptionally long wait, considering how late we had left to go around Hatteras. The general rule of thumb is to leave by Nov 1st because after that the weather windows become fewer and further between. We were over half way through November so our several day wait wasn’t too bad. We also had an Aussie sailboat arrive in our anchorage that we had been following and messaging with since the Bahamas and never actually met. After some provisioning we went over to their boat and discussed plans over some mulled wine. They had another Aussie boat that was going to start from a bit further north and catch up with us as we headed outside. This weather window was shaping up to be a motoring window. At this point we would take what we could get. All three boats were just ready to get south and warm up!
The trip was pretty uneventful for all of us and it was nice to be able to chat to each other while on night shift. We got into Cape Lookout anchorage in good time and settled down for the night with plans of leaving again to head much further south the next evening. All of us were very excited to no longer be freezing cold!
We were a bit faster than the two catamarans so they left early afternoon and our intention was to catch up to them after we were done with work for the day. The sun was setting when we left and we had a smooth departure. We left with good winds and it was shaping up to be a nice sail. About 3nm out of Cape Lookout I went down below to bed to get some rest before my first night shift and noticed some odd noises that I had never heard before. It sounded like it was something to do with the autopilot or rudder control. Worried about the possibility of something to do with our rudder letting loose overnight we made the difficult decision to turn around and head back into Cape Lookout to get some sleep and assess in the morning.
Opening up the autopilot the next day showed us that there was definitely something wrong. Lots of black and a fairly shredded belt. We didn’t have the parts we needed weren’t entirely sure what the original culprit was. We found a service center in Charleston that was licensed with Raymarine and they suggested we send off the autopilot from Beaufort first thing on Monday and we could pick it up, fully functional, in Charleston. We had a back up chain driven autopilot at the helm, and knew now that the problem wasn’t with the rudder so this seemed like a good plan. Into Beaufort we go….aaaaand the cold caught up with us again! Have I mentioned we were sick of the cold enough yet?
After sending off the autopilot we found ourselves stuck due to weather again and made more friends with people trying to get south and warm up. They had been just in front of us going around Hatteras but instead of going to Cape Lookout had gone straight into Beaufort. Their plan had been to stage in Beaufort to go offshore to the Eastern Caribbean, a plan we had already abandoned due to the constant fronts that were coming off the east coast of the States. They were also coming around to this idea and were starting to look at weather windows south to the Bahamas. Meanwhile the owner of the boat was stuck in the cold for his birthday, without his family, so we all went out to dinner to celebrate his birthday with him. Of course the next weather window turned out to be a motoring window again. We were hoping this wasn’t going to become a trend!
Our first stop on the way to Charleston was that calm Georgetown anchorage we had stayed in before. We needed to let a storm blow over and this was a spot we knew was well protected. Last time we had stayed here several thunderstorms had passed over but the anchorage had remained fairly calm. This time we were due for a bit of a heavy blow but we were banking on the thick mud keeping our anchor well stuck. The conditions in the anchorage were certainly more sporty than the previous time but we held well, albeit a little uncomfortable. The day after we dropped anchor, it was still pretty windy and we were mostly hunkered down below. At one point I poked my head up to take a look around and saw a Coast Guard vessel heading our way. We were the only boat around for miles so I popped back down and said to Kevin “I think we are about to get boarded!”. He looked out the window and sure enough, they were starting to do a circle around us, so he went up and waved at them. We couldn’t hear what they were yelling over all the wind so we switched to radio and they asked us how long we had been anchored there. They seemed a bit confused when we told them we had been there since the night before and told us they had received reports of a sailboat adrift. We said we hadn’t seen anything and they thanked us and sped away. A little while later they were back and doing circles around us at a bit of a distance, before eventually heading back to where they originally came from. There were absolutely no other sailboats anywhere nearby so we are pretty sure somebody must’ve come by in a little fishing boat near to shore or something and seen us moving around a lot in the heavy winds and thought we were adrift! A bit if a waste of the Coast Guard’s time but it made us feel rather well looked after.
After the storm had fully blown over the anchorage was glassy calm and it was time to keep heading south. The weather window was looking a little bigger this time and we decided to make hay while the sun shone and skip Charleston….next stop: Florida!
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