After we took Britt's dad to the airport, we returned to Windom and prepared for our passage back to the US. Rather than just taking the short hop to Florida, we planned to head for Beaufort NC, which would save us weeks of slogging up the ICW. We'd been having great winds all week in the Abacos, and the weatherfaxes suggested that things would continue this way for a few days. Three other boats we knew had left over the past few days. It sounded good to us, so we spent our last bit of Bahamian currency, moved the bicycles back into the aft cabin, hoisted the outboard to the rail and stowed the dinghy on deck, and lifted anchor at 3:45 in the afternoon.
We had a great sail...for half an hour. Shortly before we went through the Loggerhead Channel (for about the umpteenth time, it seemed!) a squall came through and the wind died in its wake. Oh well, we needed to charge things up anyway, since we'd be sailing for the next four days, right?
As we motored into the flat Atlantic, to our surprise and delight a pod of dolphins joined us. At first they played along the side curve of our hull, where our bow wave foamed the water into a wake. Three of them then darted forward and rode directly ahead of our bow. It appeared that at any moment we'd run right over them, but with seemingly no effort at all they simply glided in the blue, their mottled white flanks flashing. Every so often one would breach to breathe, jumping into the air just barely in front of the steel rod supporting our anchor platform -- which is, interestingly enough, called a "dolphin striker"!
Our plan was to angle northwest, riding the Antilles Current to the Gulf Stream before turning north and then northeast. No sooner did we set our course than we discovered that the current was against us, not with us. A counter-current ran near the islands, so to get out of it we headed more to the north.
Then we got the evening weatherfaxes -- and they showed two days of calm! No way did we want to spend our entire passage motoring, so after some mournful deliberation we decided to turn west again and parallel the coast to Walker's Cay, the northernmost island of the Bahamas. With the countercurrent bashing away at our speed, we'd be anchored there by mid-morning. At least we'd be able to catch up on our sleep before starting out again.
I was on watch around one in the morning when the wind started to come up from the south, a nice 10-12 knots which encouraged me to put up the sails. Our speed wasn't too great, but since it didn't really matter when we arrived at Walker's, provided it was between dawn and dusk, I happily cut the motor and enjoyed the quiet noises of the night, the sails creaking, the gentle whoosh of our wake. The bioluminescent specks in the disturbed water shimmered like a tiny meteor shower. When the half-moon rose it was an orange slice directly behind us, colored by the smoke in the air until it moved high enough to shine its usual pure silver.
The wind stayed with us through the night, and as the morning weatherfaxes showed it would continue (completely at odds with the faxes from 12 hours previous) we went back to Plan A. Of course, three hours after we made the decision to keep on going, the wind died! But we were already committed. Now all we had to do was find the Gulf Stream.
Easier said than done. The contrary current was with us a long time. We motored, and read, and reeled in lots of seaweed on our fishing lures. We finally started picking up a favorable current about half an hour after sunset, the same time the wind showed up again. (This would prove to be a recurring pattern: daytime calms, nighttime winds.) With the wind directly behind us and nearly flat seas, we sailed wing and wing, one sail on each side. As the wind gradually clocked, we altered course to keep it behind us, until we were sailing more or less due north.
By just before midnight the current had faded out. We had thought it was the edge of the Gulf Stream, but it must have been the Antilles Current, so we weren't far enough west yet. Britt had rigged a preventer for the main which was held fast by the portside winch; I did a careful singlehanded jibe, releasing it bit by bit with my left hand, while bringing in the mainsheet with my right. I set the sails and headed west, still looking for that fabled river of current. The ocean stayed amazingly flat, with only a small swell, and we moved smoothly at a good pace. Still, in a day plus eight hours, we'd only gone 169 miles over the ground, thanks to the foul currents and the gentle winds.
We started to find a fair current on Britt's night watch, and by sunrise we were right where the chart showed the little dotted "average" Gulf Stream, around 70 miles offshore just a bit north of Cape Canaveral, and getting a 2+ knot boost. We had intended to turn and head more northerly once we hit the stream, but we ended up following a course more dictated by the wind: first northwest, then north, then northeast as the wind clocked around and the windspeed dropped.
By late morning the wind was from the northwest. Ordinarily any northerly component in the wind whips the Gulf Stream into huge waves, but the 6-8 knot breeze we had was too mild to have much effect. There was a light swell from the southwest, but otherwise no waves to speak of. We sailed close-hauled at 4 knots, but because of the current our speed over ground was 6.6, plenty good! We were being forced out of the stream, though, so when the wind eventually died completely, we motored back toward the northwest and watched the GPS speed go up.
And boy, did it go up! Our GPS speed climbed steadily, first in the 7's, then in the 8's, then in the 9's, and then into double digits. In the evening the wind filled in again from the southwest, and by midnight it had built to 20-25 knots. With reefed sails, we made 6.5-7.5 knots through the water and an astonishing 10 to 11 knots over the ground. The best we saw was 12 knots over the ground. This was especially surprising to us because everything we'd read about the Gulf Stream suggested that its force diminished significantly north of south Florida, and we were expecting only about 1.5 knots of current. Eventually we angled northeast to follow the coastline, while the Gulf Stream made a sharper bend to the east, so we never saw those high speeds again.
With the wind consistently over 20 knots, the seas began to build. The light swell became rollers the size of semitrucks, and every once in a while one would break. Up to this point the seas had been so quiet that, as Britt joked, "we've been in anchorages worse than this." The waves never got scary-big, though, and neither of us got seasick in the least, which was a relief.
Getting into the Stream also put us into the more-traveled coastal zone. We'd only seen two ships so far, both near Walker's Cay, but now we started to see many more lights. I actually find it less nerve-wracking to encounter ships at night, because I can judge their direction and speed better from their lights than I can from their sometimes hazy distant shapes during the day. I saw the lights of one other sailboat, and chatted with them briefly in the middle of the night; we saw them off and on throughout the rest of our passage, and they reached Beaufort just a half-hour or so ahead of us.
This was our third night out, and we were pretty sleep-deprived by this point. We didn't keep formal watches -- each of us would go try to sleep as long as possible before coming out and relieving the other -- but neither of us managed more than two or three consecutive hours of sleep. Sleeping on a moving sailboat is just plain weird. Even when it's as gentle as it had been for our first few days, the motion of the boat seems to move gravity around one's body. As I lay in bed, I'd feel my knees get heavy as the boat rolled, then they'd feel light as the gravity moved to my left side, then around to my feet and back up to my knees. Meanwhile, the rigging creaks, the mast hums, and as the boat rocks from a wave, the sails collapse and then refill with a crack guaranteed to wake the dead-tired.
We haven't yet prepared the boat for major offshore work, so we don't have lee cloths to hold us in bed. We'd been mostly going downwind, though, and our berth is large enough that with some judicious shoring-up by pillows and bedclothes, we could wedge ourselves into comfortable positions. But eventually we faced up to the fact that our normal "bedroom" is just not a very good sea berth. It's right next to the mast, which does a great job of transmitting rigging noises into the would-be sleeper's ear, and it's in the forward part of the boat, where the motion seems worse.
We'd read that due to the distance that ship lights are visible, the curve of the horizon, and the typical speed of shipping, 20 minutes was the maximum safe time between visual horizon checks for ship lights. So when on watch, we allowed ourselves 15 minutes between checks -- time we'd spend working with the chart, reading, making tea, or napping. (One ship went from a loom on the horizon to relatively close in those 15 minutes, kind of scary although there was never any danger of collision.) Britt catnapped on whichever settee in the main cabin was "downhill" and found he got better sleep there than in our room. I napped a few times in the cockpit, then moved a few things out of the aft cabin and curled up there next to the bicycles. Once we discovered these better sleeping places, we spent our off-watches there as well. I think for our next passage we'll move the bikes and other "garage" stuff into our cabin, and sleep in our newfound sea berths.
In the morning the windspeed dropped a little, but the waves kept coming, and we rolled heavily every so often when a wave caught us just right. It was frustrating, because the sails would lose their shape when we slewed back and forth, and our speed would drop until they filled again. Then we spotted the other sailboat ahead of us, and I noted through binoculars that they had only their main out. So we tried rolling up our jib -- and wow, what a difference. We tracked much better and rolled a lot less. But since our main is relatively tall and thin, our speed suffered, so we experimented with various combinations and amounts of main and jib. We can see the benefit of having a staysail. Caliber makes an optional removable "convertable cutter rig", but unfortunately Windom wasn't outfitted with this rig. Maybe we'll add it in the future.
Speed was important at this point, because we'd been listening to the weather (we could pick up NOAA weather radio again) and a cold front was predicted to move through the area the next afternoon. Cold fronts mean strong north winds, not good for traveling north, and especially not good for boats in the Gulf Stream, where the wind opposing the current can generate huge waves. We considered alternate destinations, but Charleston by now was nearly due west of us, which would have been difficult in the southwest wind, and if we headed for Cape Fear we'd get there sometime after midnight. Entering the inlet would have been scary, and we would then have to negotiate quite a bit of ICW to find an anchorage -- not a very appealing prospect in the dark. In addition, thunderstorms were forecast for that evening in the Cape Fear area, and that was just one complication too many. On the other hand, as long as we could maintain a reasonable speed, we would hit Beaufort around noon the next day.
That evening the sky darkened well before sunset with the arrival of storm clouds. Their gusts made the winds fluky, so we motorsailed with a reefed main as the wind howled and the rain pelted the deck. Lightning flashed all around us, which is a little scarier when you're sitting under a big metal stick. Bob steered while we stayed warm and dry below, only poking our heads out every 15 minutes. It wasn't bad at all -- Britt even slept through the worst of it, while I recorded a gust of 46 knots and saw almost constant lightning. NOAA announced a tornado warning for Cape Fear, which was being hit by what sounded like even worse storms, so we were glad we hadn't chosen to go in there.
Shortly after midnight the wind became more constant and we turned off the engine again, sailing north toward Onslow Bay and Cape Lookout. As the wind shifted around toward the west and then northwest we altered course eastward, but we'd gotten far enough north that by the time the north winds started building, we were well out of the Gulf Stream. Just north of us, the North Carolina coast curved almost directly east to form Cape Lookout, so the fetch was relatively small and the waves were choppy rather than big.
We were able to sail northeast for a while into the north wind, but the wind continued to shift to the northeast and strengthen, so at 9 am we took down the jib and turned on the engine. Motorsailing into the chop was not exactly fun, nor was it particularly fast. We stayed below as long as we could, but once inside the entrance channel we had to be a little more watchful and steer more attentively. We bundled up and huddled behind the dodger in foul-weather gear while bucketfuls of water splashed across the deck. At quarter of three, exactly one hour less than four days (95 hours) and 621 miles (about 130 longer than the direct course, due to our meandering looking for current and trying to sail no matter the wind) after leaving Marsh Harbour, we anchored at Beaufort.
Then we slept for 16 hours.