We made it in approximately 60 hours from start to finish. We left the harbor/marina at 0430, coffee in hand and feeling pretty good about ourselves. It was blowing around 10-15 kts from the East with some leftover swells, but not too bad. David is itching to get up the main and has asked me a couple of time to help him get it up, but I plead for him to let me finish my coffee. Finally, I relent and get up the main. It doesn’t look right (even in the dark), so I go put on the boom vang. It still doesn’t look good so David went up there and really yanks on the boom vang, but the sail still looks wrong. It turned out the boom was not attached to the mast, the pin had fallen out! David came back to the cockpit to report the problem. I remembered that after we arrived in West End during the clean up of the deck, I found a washer and thought “this is bad”, but didn’t investigate, bummer. David turned the boat around. We both think the show is over and we are going to be stuck in West End. Then we get our senses back and I go below to find a spare pin or bolt so we can improvise. I find some suitable replacements, get my head lamp on, clip in and go forward. While I am working, I just happen to look down, low and behold, I find the original pin! I am beyond excited! I put it in and we are saved! The voyage continues….
The wind never shifts throughout the day like forecasted, but it does build. The swells are pretty significant, but not too bad. We got into the stream and flew. Auto (pilot) got an 11.7kts for the all time speed record. The shifts we agreed upon were, Dana 7p-10p, 1a-4a, then get sleep whenever possible during the day. David was 10p-1a, 4a-7a, then whatever. Sam filled in when he could. Of course when my shift started at 0100, we are still flying, lightning was everywhere and thunderheads in front of us. I was a little nervous (ok a lot nervous). I had never driven in a storm before, at night, in 20kts of breeze. I imagined that when we got to the storm it was only going to get worse. I was correct. Auto is still driving, which was good and bad. Having it drive was good in the lightening because I wasn’t touching metal when/if we got struck. Having it in the storm was a bit scary when the puffs hit from crazy directions. Thank goodness for the boom preventer (it stops the boom from jibing/tacking when we don’t want it to). It starts pouring, the wind is blowing around 30kts, I am huddled in the cockpit just watching the numbers go up (speed, etc). I decided to take the wheel, not the best plan as it turns out. We get a huge puff and I steer a little too far down. The boom tried to come over and whack the boom stops. I drive up a bit to alleviate the problem. David comes rushing up, the rain has slackened. I turn Auto back on. The lightening is all around us. I asked David to hang out with me, I was really freaked. He helped calm me down and pick holes in the storms. We made it through and he went below to get more sleep.
The next day the wind shifted to the south as predicted, no wait, a few hours later shifted to NW. Minimal rain, minimal breeze and motor on. Easy day, sleep when you can, relax and wait for the miserable night. I even heated up some chili that I made prior to leaving. Hot meals are very comforting. Night came and everything was fine until my shift, of course. We get the radar going on XM weather and see that there are two very large storm systems going eastward south of Charleston. Hmm, that happened to be right where we were! We tracked the storm every 10 minutes. Things were not looking good. We were scheduled to arrive to Charleston at dawn, but this storm looked very scary. We ended up skirting the two storms and got drizzled on and cold. Then the fog set in. We waited outside of Charleston fearful of ships coming out in the fog for about 30 minutes. We talked to our friend Mike (a pilot) who said go NOW (he was monitoring the radar too). We also needed marina directions so we called up JoAnn for help. She got us in touch with her boss, who gave us brilliant directions.
We got into Wapoo Creek and there was one bridge we had to get opened prior to getting to our marina. Of course, it opened at 11:30, that meant we had to wait for 30 minutes in the now pouring rain with very dark skies ahead. We waited and waited, finally we went through. We arrived at the marina, got dry and had a lot of rum.
Our good friend JoAnn let us camp at her place for a few days and lent us her car. We explored a little and ate/drank a lot. It was good to be back home in the U.S. of A.
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