Home at last

After a wonderful Thanksgiving we packed up and spent "Black Friday" driving up to Beaufort, NC to complete the last leg of our trip home to Charleston. We picked up Jim Wilson, one of the other Sea Scout ship 510 mates in Mount Pleasant. The drive up was uneventful but the driving team of Elizabeth and Alexis put in a long day on the road, about 6 hours each way to drop us off.

We arrived just in time to grab a bite to eat, link up with Zach Nelson, load up the boat, top off the fuel and get underway - all before sunset.

We made it out of the harbor and into the channel just as the sun was setting and settled into our watch routine immediately. I use a Swedish watch which started with Zach and I taking the 7 pm to midnight watch, followed by Jim and David on the midnight to 4 am watch. The weather was not quite as expected, the forecasts I'd been seeing called for light winds and relatively calm seas. Instead we were fighting 15-20 knots of wind on the nose with seas of 8-10 feet. By midnight both Zach and Jim were seasick, David was not to escape unscathed and also had a short-lived bout of seasickness during the voyage. We slowed the boat from our planned 7 knots to about 5-1/2 knots to reduce the pounding and keep the boat a little dryer.  We were taking considerable spray in the cockpit, soaking everything and even getting some green water on the bow deck. The pounding continued as we passed frying pan shoals.

The pounding continued until Saturday mid-day when the wind eased to 10 knots shifted to our aft quarter, the seas calmed a little and with that our speed picked up about a knot and we were able to speed back up to about 7 1/2 knots. We took this opportunity to transfer 10 gallons of fuel from our cans to the main tank - the drip proof nozzle made it easy to get all the fuel in the tank and David at the helm was able to keep the deck dry for the whole fueling process.

The dunkings from the previous night had done in our bow navigation lights so we proceeded with only our white steaming light and stern lights. Fortunately we saw very little traffic throughout the evening.

The sunset was nearly exactly on our heading towards Charleston and left a beautiful red sky. A little later we were joined by a pod of dolphins which spent about 10 minutes playing alongside the boat. This was one of the high points of the trip, they were so much fun to watch that I found myself off course several times before they left us.

As the evening wore on the waves increased and we were rolling again, the approach from up the coast is deceptive, the first lights you see as you approach Charleston are the radio and television towers on the Isle of Palms. At about 2 am we sighted the channel markers and began our entrance. As we passed buoy 13 we were contacted by vessel traffic control and informed that a container ship would be entering in about 30 minutes - just when we were expecting to be in the narrowest part of the channel and passing the now submerged jettys at the harbor entrance. I had Zach keep an eye astern as I picked our way through the channel. Once inside the harbor we called the marina and they were waiting to help us dock just before 5 am.

After we were securely tied to the dock, the inbound container ship passed the marina, another prayer answered. As sea sickness subsided, hunger arrived and we all had some soup and hot chocolate to warm up.