11/15/99 | Beaufort to Wrightsville Beach

in the wake of floyd

For the past several days we've been motoring down a narrow channel just behind the barrier islands which separate the rest of North Carolina from the Atlantic Ocean. (We managed about an hour and a half of sailing on Monday, when the wind was just right, but mostly it's been motoring or motorsailing.) The most obvious evidence of September's Hurricane Floyd, which made landfall just south of here at Cape Fear, is in the private docks in front of the waterfront homes here. Many of the docks have boards ripped up here and there, or sections which have collapsed into the water; some have been reduced to pilings.

Despite the constant threat of hurricanes, there are houses all over these barrier islands and on the ICW "coast". We can see why -- it's really very pretty, with a view over the dunes to the ocean beyond. In between the developments there are still many wild areas, though, and we went through a few lovely stretches that showed no signs of civilization. (Then we went by an absurd castle-like mansion, pink with gray dolphins painted on it, and a fake lighthouse out front. I guess it's all part of the scenery.)

time and tide

As we've moved south, the tidal range has increased from the practically nonexistent tides north of Albemarle Sound to over three feet. (Apparently they reach a peak in Georgia, with a tidal range of nine feet!) Along with these tides come currents, and dealing with them has been...interesting.

When the tide comes in from the ocean through an inlet and hits the ICW, some of it goes right (north) and some of it goes left (south), flowing away from the inlet. So on the ICW, we get currents depending on not only the state of the tide, but also on whether we are "uptide" or "downtide" from the nearest inlet. We found ourselves approaching one inlet at 4.5 knots according to our GPS. As we passed it, we could feel the boat being shoved inland and swirled around, and then suddenly the GPS read 7 knots!

Of course the currents are constantly changing as the tide rises and falls, and there are interactions among the many inlets which make the current much more complex. The only general rule we've found is that the current is against us when we need to make time, and with us when we need to slow down.

We have to control our speed because lots of bridges have restricted opening times and narrow approach channels. For example, the Surf City Bridge at mile 260 opens only on the hour. When we calculated[*] that we'd get there at 10:20, we slowed way down so that we wouldn't have to idle around waiting for too long. The wind was just aft of the beam and we had a favorable current, so we put up the mainsail and turned off the motor, figuring we'd just amble toward the bridge. This worked pretty well, and we arrived at the bridge ten minutes before the 11:00 opening. Even stalling for those ten minutes was pretty tough, though, because both wind and current were pushing us into the bridge. By putting the engine into reverse, I found that I could hold our position fore-and-aft, but then I didn't have enough steerage to be able to avoid being swept into the shallows on either side of the channel. So I had to alternate between forward and reverse, down the channel and sideways, crabbing this way and that way until the bridge finally opened and we could go through.

size matters

Some people go a little faster, some a little slower, but there's pretty much a group of cruisers moving along with us, and naturally we've gotten to know some of them. In Beaufort we traded charts and shareware with Bryan and Mike on Nightwinds. They are former powerboaters, who were used to the spaciousness of a motoryacht, so when they bought a sailboat to cruise in, they went big. Their 63-foot Cheoy Lee motorsailor has a mast too big to fit through the ICW, so they are going south along the outside in short hops, stopping at the towns with good inlets. Everything on that boat is huge, from the cleats to the anchors, and they have a dishwasher, a trash compactor, and not one but two walk-in showers. On the other end of the spectrum, we have shared a few anchorages since Beaufort with Paul, Lise, and their 15-year old son Ian on Effie, which is 35 feet -- five feet shorter than Windom. They make do with block ice for refrigeration. We can't imagine how three people can cope with less space than we two have. I bet Bryan and Mike wonder how we manage to cope with "only" 40 feet!

our secret anchorage

We've been using two resources as "cruising guides" along the ICW -- Skipper Bob's anchorage (and bridge) guide, which we bought in Annapolis, and Tom Dove's ICW anchorage guide which can be found on the web at http://www.toad.net/~tdove/icw.html. Today, though, we traveled in company with Effie, and they were in touch with their friends on Sea Scape ahead, who scouted out an "unmarked" anchorage just past Wrightsville Beach. The chart showed this little cut had a big shoal at the entrance, but that by sticking close to the southern shore we'd be in at least 7 feet. Well, sticking close was an understatement -- we almost had to ground ourselves onto the sea grass of the island to the right in order to stay in deep water. In fact, we went to shoreward of several crab pots, which seems counterintuitive! But we picked our way through, resulting in a nice quiet anchorage for our three boats alone, while the Wrightsville Beach anchorage was crowded and busy.