Offshore sailing makes me nervous. Unlike being on Long Island Sound, there’s not always a convenient, nearby spot to duck into. Once you’re out there, you’re out there. We always choose our weather windows carefully, but I have a healthy respect for the elements and never take the time offshore lightly.
Our sail to Charleston was beautiful and relatively benign, but that’s not to say it was without its challenges. We left with a light breeze and 1-2′ seas with occasional 3’s. The wind, once again, didn’t want to cooperate and was on the nose for most of the day before it went so light that between it and the current, we were down to less than 2kts. We rolled up the jib and fired up the iron genny and motorsailed until about 1am.
We ended up about 30 miles offshore, and I was surprised at the number of center consoles fishing way out there. But by mid-afternoon, we left them all behind and we had a few hours go by without land or another vessel in sight. It was the first time I’ve been out of sight of land and humanity for so long, and it was a pretty awesome – in the true sense of the word – experience. I wish I could capture or describe the color of the water out there. It was a stunning, clear aqua/green and I’ve never seen anything like it. The photos I took don’t begin to do it justice.
We took three hour watches, and I had the 11-2 and 5-8s, so I got both sunset and sunrise at the helm. I wish I could handle a four hour watch, but my attention starts to flag after three. Our battery combiner issue still isn’t fixed, so we’re hand-steering all the time. While I prefer to hand steer most of the time, it gets tiring on long passages since it requires a lot of focus. With ocean and wind-driven waves from different directions, and a fading breeze, steering was hard and the going slow. Eventually I started to find a rhythm, though. The sunset was pretty, a ¾ moon had already risen, and I watched the space station turn orange and set. It was an absolutely gorgeous night, and during my last watch when the moon had set, I had an hour of the most intense starry skies I’ve ever seen.
I motored through the 5-8, but a breeze filled in during my off watch and at 1am, I shut down the engine. I love the peace that sets in once the engine is off. The wind went north during my 11-2, and for the first time, I had to make sail adjustments single-handed (with the help of autopilot, which we can use long enough for that). Eventually it clocked far enough that I needed to gybe, and Chris came up to help. We gybed back on his watch, and it was just uncomfortable. The wind came up into the teens and the seas had gotten sloppy, and Jack was upset by the big waves and things falling over – I had to help him down from a couple places he managed to get himself stuck.
I was nervous to take the helm for my last watch – I didn’t know if I could handle the conditions – but it was also unfair to ask Chris to do a 6 hour watch in the cold. We had 2-4′ following seas and the wind had started settling but was still gusting up. From 5-6:30 or so steering was tough, and my arms were exhausted. Trying to hold a course in a following sea is not my strong suit, but it was good practice (or perhaps a trial by fire). Sunrise was beautiful, and I felt a sense of accomplishment for pushing through and handling a new challenge. We saw dolphins right after Chris got up, and it was nice to see birds again (we noticed after a while that we’d stopped seeing birds out where we were).
We’re at Charleston Harbor Resort and Marina, and there’s a pretty strong current running through, so we waited for slack tide to come into our slip. In the meantime, we anchored up off the USS Yorktown and got Silent Sky back into shape.
So far, all of our offshore passages have challenged me in some way. With just the two of us out here, I don’t have the option to pass on the things that make me uncomfortable (or sometimes downright scared), and I feel like I’m becoming both a better sailor and a better person for it.
