After a day of recuperation and laundry in Wrightsville Beach, we headed south again, this time on the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) even though we intended to go offshore to Charleston. If we'd gone back out the Masonboro inlet we'd have to swing wide to bypass the Frying Pan shoals, so we motored down the cut, between rows of elegant beach houses. Some of the docks were still wrecks, broken-down collages of planks and pilings, but in general most of the hurricane damage we'd noted on our trip through last year had been repaired. After fueling up in Southport, we headed out the Cape Fear inlet and pointed our bow toward Charleston.
The NOAA forecast was for northeast winds: 10 knots during the day, 10-15 at night, and 15 building to 20 the following day. We motored away from Cape Fear in less than 5 knots with a light swell; at about 10 p.m. that night the wind came on like someone had flipped a switch, and at daybreak we arrived at the channel into Charleston propelled by 20-25 knots. On average, I suppose, you could say the forecast was perfect. (Just as on average, Windom's crew each has one breast and one testicle.)
We could have continued on the outside to Beaufort SC or even further with the daylight we had, but the conditions were awfully rough and expected to get worse. The following seas slalomed us around like a Disney ride, and we were making 6-7 knots reefed hard. 30-knot gusts promised more weather to come, as did NOAA, whose forecast called for an offshore gale. "Seas 10 to 14 feet," announced the mechanical voice, "except 28 feet in the Gulf Stream." I don't think so! We'd bounced around long enough.
We kept the sails up all the way into Charleston, taking them down just before turning left into the ICW. We loved our visit to this city last year, but the harbor's not very protected. Definitely not a place we wanted to hang out with bad weather coming, so we motored about 25 miles down the ICW before anchoring in a tight little creek. Actually, Britt did the motoring; I hadn't been able to sleep during the passage and had been up for 24 hours straight, so I napped until noon, when he woke me to help with the anchoring, then had a quick lunch before going back to bed. We arose for a little dinner and "Prairie Home Companion," then slept through the night, the wind whistling through the rigging.
We laid over a day in our solitary spot in Tom Point Creek. Britt's old eye injury, that he got while installing the autopilot last January, and had treated again in May, started bothering him again. His eye tends to put out warning signs whenever it gets dry, and he's been using eyedrops before bedtime, but he suspects that the stresses and long hours of our recent passages contributed to this last flare-up. We put medication in his eye, and a patch over it, but since the slightest movement of his facial muscles sent agonizing bolts of lightning through his bad eye, he spent the day with both eyes closed, popping painkillers and listening to the shortwave radio.
It wasn't a good traveling day anyway. Frigid gusts pummeled us from the north, the grey sky drizzled rain on and off, and if it had been any colder it would have been drizzling snow. In fact, we heard on the radio that it had snowed a little at Wrightsville Beach, our most recent stop. With our new heater perking away, we were nice and toasty warm -- except when I went out to check the chafe gear on our anchor rodes. Brrr!
In general we are extremely satisfied with our new Webasto heater. The joys of sitting comfortably in the boat when it's under 40°F outside, and being able to take a hot shower two days after last running the engine, make up for the torture of installation. With time, we may even be able to forget the huge dent it made in our savings.
The system works a lot like a house furnace, with a thermostat we set to our desired temperature. We turn it down overnight or if we're going to be away from the boat. If the engine is running, a heat exchanger uses the engine heat rather than running the furnace. It's kept us cozy over the past week of subfreezing nights and chilly days, but if we ever wanted to do something really dopey like winter over in Alaska, we'd want to install one or two more blowers. The furnace puts out enough heat for five blowers, but we only installed three.
As it is now, the system uses a bit more power than we expected. When the furnace and the blowers are all running, it uses about 9 amps, the same as our watermaker, and far less than any of our real power-hungry systems such as the refrigerator or the windlass. But we run the watermaker only an hour or two each day that we use it; the fridge only runs about an hour a day (and half that in this cold water!), the windlass a few minutes. The furnace switches on and off to meet the demand of the thermostat, but on average it is running about one-third of the time, or 8 hours a day. 8 hours times 9 amps is a great deal of power, particularly since we are overdue to equalize our batteries (it is a major pain, the fault of our charger rather than that of our batteries) and we are not seeing the 510 amp-hour capacity we ought to have. Since our usual procedure is to run our batteries only down to half-full before recharging, we have been dealing with the extra drain not by running the engine more frequently (ick!) but by allowing the batteries to discharge further. After two days of idleness and heavy power use (and moderate wind charging) we were down to 11.65V, far less than our usual "floor" of 12.15-12.20, but our systems didn't show any noticeable degradation from the lower voltage, so we figure it's ok to run things down every so often.
When the sun came out again, we continued south on the ICW. Britt's eye was still recovering, so he surfaced only long enough to pull the anchors and then retreated below. I was glad for the help, because with the wind and strong current, I doubt I could have singlehandedly lifted two anchors in a narrow creek. The drive to Beaufort passed uneventfully except for one trawler which, in slowing down to pass us without a wake, created enough turbulence to fool their depthsounder into thinking they were in three feet of water rather than twenty-three. As they passed us a scant 2 inches away (ok, probably that's exaggeration, more like a foot, but it sure looked like they were trying to raft with us in midstream) I called them on the VHF. "Um, Lady Constance, I don't think the channel's quite that narrow." The guy took another look at his depthsounder, then apologized and slowly moved away.
On the way south last year, we spent more than a week in Charleston; by the time we left, we were ready to put some miles under our keel, so we bypassed Beaufort. This time, we stopped for a few days, anchoring just off the town dock. It's a lovely town. Live oaks, dripping with Spanish moss, frame elegant antebellum mansions in what has come to be called the "Beaufort Style": mostly Greek Revival, southwest facing to catch the sea breezes, up on high foundations to escape the occasional hurricane storm surge. We took a day to stroll the streets with a guide map from the Chamber of Commerce, identifying each of the notable mansions by name and date. The little downtown area is indubitably quaint, although walking along it I had a sudden flashback to Rockland, Maine. Maybe we've just been in so many small towns that they all begin to look alike. (Admittedly, there are no saw palmetto trees in Maine.)
We've sure covered a lot of ground by making offshore hops. Last year, we left Annapolis on October 25th and meandered our way down to Charleston in about a month; this year, it took us less than a week. But the difference isn't just the ICW vs. offshore. We spent a lot of time being tourists last year, and a lot of time socializing with other boaters. This year we started a little late, so all the cruisers we know are already down in Florida, and we've been moving too fast to get to know anyone new so far this trip. And it's been too cold to want to do much tourism. Even through we're catching up with our timing from last year (on this date last year we were in Fernandina Beach, 4 ICW days or one overnight passage from here), it's been record-breakingly cold. So we've been moving faster, but not having as much fun. We're still pushing hard to get into Florida, but soon we'll be able to slow down and socialize a little.