Our time in Charleston was awesome, but we were looking forward to continuing our progress south. The one thing we were NOT looking forward to was our dock departure. We were on one of the finger piers in the litter box with monohulls in front of and behind us, and two catamarans on the next pier over. We had about a 12 knot breeze blowing us aft, and with all the rain we’d had, we realized that the ebb set up a full hour and a half earlier than it was supposed to. We got Johnny and one of the other dock hands to come down, and some of our neighbors gave us a hand standing by with fenders deployed on their boats too. It took a few tries and some doing, but fortunately Johnny knows what he’s doing and was able to give good direction, and we made it out unscathed. It was definitely a good bit of boat handling skill on Chris’s part!
As we got farther from the dock, the breeze settled back and we joined a parade of boats making their way out to the open ocean. Dolphins came to send us off, and we got a fly-over from a squadron of pelicans.
I took the first watch once we were clear of the channel, and about half way through, The Howling (our autopilot) decided to pull a The Hunt for Red October-style “crazy Ivan” (to starboard, of course). I switched to manual steering and we tried resetting all the electronics a few times, but the heading displayed by the autopilot remained significantly off from our true heading. Over time, the autopilot’s heading returned to normal, but as soon as I re-engaged, it pulled another “crazy Ivan,” so I hand-steered for the rest of my watch. For the rest of the trip, The Howling remained an unreliable helmsman so we were particularly careful not to leave the helm unsupervised. When the autopilot is functioning normally offshore, we’ll sometimes sit under the dodger or duck below quickly (boats don’t appear out of nowhere out there like they do near shore), but we’re not willing to take the risk when it’s not behaving.
Just after 1600 when my watch ended, we were joined by three spotted dolphins. It was calm enough that I was able to make my way up to the bow to watch them as they danced and played in our bow wave. Occasionally they’d drop back to check out Chris and then race forward again to continue their play. They stayed with us for about a half hour, and I was absolutely mesmerized. I wish I’d had the GoPro out rather than just my phone, but I was so grateful for the experience.
Overnight, the sky was clear and the seas were calm – so calm that during Chris’s watch, he said it was hard to tell where the ocean ended and the sky began, as the mirror-calm water perfectly reflected the night sky. We both saw several shooting stars, and the only thing that had us slightly wary was the very active storm system sitting out over the Gulf Stream. The lighting was nearly constant, but the system stayed well offshore from us and probably was the reason we had very little wind and ended up motoring almost the entire way. Chris decided to drift along for a bit on his morning watch since we’d be arriving so early in the day, but even then we gave up after only an hour or two as the wind all but disappeared.
After last year’s wind against current situation leaving St. Mary’s Inlet I was nervous about our return, but with calm winds it was an easy entrance and we dropped the hook off Cumberland Island exactly 24 hours after leaving Charleston.