June 09-10, 2000 -- And Away We Go!

At 0930 GMT, we weighed anchor. We had extremely light winds heading out; we were measuring approximately 2 knots of wind. This was a good sign! At 1134 GMT, Mike did his customary flipper call. He even did it high tech! He used the loud hailer. At 1200 GMT, Joye hailed us on VHF. They had also decided to head out. We set up a radio check in with them until we were out of VHF range. Shortly after that, we passed through an area of severe radio noise, that took almost an hour to clear up. When it did, we checked in on the Cruisheimer's net. At 1300, we checked in with Joye. They were doing well, but were only going about 3 knots. They are trying to sail. We set the next check in for 1700 or so. At 1715, we could hear Joye calling us, but they couldn't hear us! Arcturus in Beaufort heard us and was able to hear Joye as well, so they did a quick relay for us. That ended our checkin with Joye. At 1733, Greensleeves hailed us. Dillon and Elizabeth are headed out of Beaufort, going to Ocean City, MD. We should be in visual range of each other some time around Cape Lookout. At 1840, we checked in with Greensleeves again. They told us that they do a check in at 2345 GMT and 1200 GMT on 8134 with friends. We decided to listen in, in case we were out of VHF range by then. At 1928, we saw a catamaran that was more or less paralleling our course. We tried to raise them, but received an answer from Skyus instead. They are headed for the Cape Lookout Bight where they will hole up for a while. We looked at this on the chart and it looks, like a great spot to stop saving a lot of time instead of going all the way into Beaufort NC. At 2135, we were talking with Greensleeves again, and our outside helm radio stopped transmitting. We swapped radios with the one in the aft stateroom and once again we had communications. We wonder if that was the reason that Joye couldn't hear us earlier. At 2230, we were getting close to being out of VHF range with Greensleeves. We set up a contact schedule of contact every 2 hours starting at 0000 on the SSB on 4045. On June 10 at 0225, Mike saw a shooting star. At 0616, I was being driven nuts! I had been seeing something for quite a while that wasn't moving, but had a solid white light. There were no buoys on the chart, and I couldn't figure out what it was. The light was to strong to use the night vision and make it out, and the regular binoculars were useless as well. I talked with Dillon who mentioned that his GPS had identified it as a miscellaneous navigation buoy. That was a relief! At 0743, I heard a "grunk" sound. We hit something. After a quick check through the boat, everything appeared to be fine, and no water was coming in. Our prop(s) had make sushi out of some poor fish. At approximately 0900, a sport fish was underway using its spotlight. After being night blinded by the idiot, I hailed him to let him know that we were out here and that he really shouldn't run us over. I also told him that it was illegal to run with your spot on all the time. He then proceeded to jack light the boat, and me for about 5 minutes before apologizing and speeding off. Consequently, I didn't see a smaller sport fish ahead of me, and I got with in two miles of him He hailed us and let us know to expect many more sport fishes and commercial fishing boats to come out of Oregon inlet in the next hour. We kept a close eye out for the next 2 hours! At 1224, we were having a hard time steering a straight course. We were approximately 3 hours past Oregon inlet at the time. Things calmed down a bit later, we figured we were being subjected to some pretty strong tidal flows. At 1245, Mike checked the hydraulic oil on the steering system. It wasn't far enough down to explain the problems we were experiencing, but he added some just in case. At 1712, we sighted dolphins off of Virginia Beach. They saw us and made a bee line for the boat. At 2035 GMT on June 10, we dropped anchor in Willoughby Bay in Norfolk, VA. We covered 280 miles in 35 hours with an average speed of 8 knots