Now in North Carolina

We departed Fernandina, Florida on Wednesday the 13th of April. We had a good weather window for about 66 hours and it would take us about 50 hours to reach the Southport marina. We knew we could duck into either Charleston or Georgetown if need be.

When we were going out the St. Mary's inlet we saw "Margareta" IP445 with Bill and Margaret heading out also. We met them at Long Island in the Bahamas in January. They are from North Carolina and keep there boat at Northwest Creek Marina. I hailed them on the radio and Bill told me they were going to go in at Charleston. We decided to set up radio contact every three hours for the overnight passage.

Margareta stayed closer to shore and we did the rhumb line route so we were about 20 miles further out to sea. During the night Margareta kept getting further ahead of us. Bill said that they had a two knot current helping with their speed. The first night passage was relatively mild and we had to motor sail most of the way. Margareta passed the Charleston inlet around 6 AM so they decided to continue further up to Georgetown. We passed the inlet around 9 AM. We were right on our scheduled time. We didn't want to get up to the Cape Fear river before daylight the next morning.

The second night out the seas got really sloppy for about 6 hours and it cut our speed way down. We had 2-3 foot waves on the bow. I had checked the weather forecast and it showed that the wind and waves were supposed to back to the southeast later in the day. Sure enough it did and we were back up to our cruising speed with an estimated time to arrive at the Cape Fear river at 5 AM. Sunrise was at 6:48 AM that day so we had to heave to for about an hour and a half to wait for it to get light enough to see the channel buoys. The current was to be slack at 6:58 AM and then start ebbing which would be against. I wanted to get into the inlet as soon as we could. As it turned out the speed of the ebb was faster than us. By the time we got just past Bald Head Island we had a two knot current against us. Also the wind had picked up out of the southest to 15-20 knots.

We were able to reserve a slip at the Southport Marina for a few days. There was some really bad weather with predicted tornadoes heading our way. It did arrive on Saturday night and was as bad as they predicted.

We left Southport on Monday and just went up to Wrightsville Beach. We had a great current going with us and the 27 mile trip only took us a little over 3 hours. We stayed in Wrightsville Beach one night. We left at 6:30AM with a good current and was able to time it so we made all four of the bridge openings between Wrightsville Beach and Swansboro at our planned time. We stayed at Swansboro for one night. Margareta had caught up to us and were tied up at Caspers Marina next to us that night. The next morning we left Swansboro at 6:45 AM and made it up to Whitaker Pointe Marina by 1:30 PM. We stayed there for six nights until we could get in at Deaton's Boat Yard for service. We will stay here until the service items are taken care of and then head up the Neuse River to the Northwest Creek Marina. We will be staying there for an extended period of time. We are going to go up to Hampton, VA to pick up our Expedition and bring it back so we will have ground transportation.

All in all it was a good sailing winter. We saw and experienced a lot of new things and met some wonderful people. It is going to be nice to just sit still for awhile though. I am looking forward to sleeping in and not having to get up at 6:00 AM to listen to the weather every morning. Hey, maybe I will stay up past 9:00 PM now.