May 17-18, 2000 -- To Charleston

We woke up in the morning, to a bright beautiful morning. It was definitely the day to leave. Mike and I went through the boat, making sure that everything was prepped for us to leave. At 1500 GMT (11:00 AM EDT), we raised the anchor and followed S/V Timonee out of the anchorage. Going out the inlet, we experienced wind against tide. It was a pretty bumpy trip, and had we not been following Timonee, we probably would have turned around and waited another day or three. But, since they were following them, and they didn't seem to be having a problem, we figured we would tough it out. Miraculously enough, almost as soon as we made our turn north, the ride got more comfortable. We had 10 knots of wind on our beam. We put out a partially furled jib and full main (so we did not run off and leave Timonee) and continued to motor at 1000 rpm. We were making about 7 to 7.5 knots, speed over ground. After we found that we were comfortable with the motion of the boat, I went below to start the water maker and get our cameras. We were going to get some pictures of Timonee underway. We accelerated until we were just a little bit ahead of them, getting pictures of their boat at all angles. It worked well; we finished out the rolls of film that we had needed to use since January. Before heading down for my off watch time, I fixed us both some lunch, and set out chicken for dinner. Close to sunset, we decided to drop our speed a little bit, and get our sail plan set for the night time run. Timonee turned into the wind and dropped their speed, I did the same, Mike woke up at that point because he heard the engines slow. He thought something was wrong. After assuring him that nothing was wrong, he decided he was far to awake to go back to sleep, so I headed below to fix us some dinner. It turned out very well, we had sort-of chicken fajitas (this would be cut up grilled chicken without the peppers and onions). At 2308 GMT, we saw dolphins, and Mike didn't even call out for Flipper! We decided not to go forward to watch them from our bow, so they swam at the side of our boat where we could see them from the fly bridge. It was a pretty quiet night. At one point, the winds increased to about 20 knots, but that only lasted for about an hour, and as I had predicted, the winds dropped again to 10 knots. Around 0300 GMT, the winds started clocking, until we were in a run. Unfortunately, with a beam sea and winds on our stern, we had no support, and we started rocking as much as 15 degrees to each side. There is nothing wrong with this, it's just not enjoyable. At 0510 GMT on May 18, we were hailed by John and Patricia on S/V Haven. They wanted to say hello, and find out where we were going. We chatted with them for a little while, and then they drifted to far behind us for us to see. The rest of the night went smoothly. Just after dawn, we started seeing signs of inlets. A series of sport fish boats cut across our path. Several came very close to us, we still wonder if there was anyone at the helm of those boats, or if they were on autopilot while their owners were getting things together elsewhere. We tried to hail several of them, but no one responded to our hails. As we got close to the Charleston harbor inlet, we saw a fleet of fishing boats. We spent quite a bit of time dodging them as we made our way to the buoys that would guide us in. After we got into the inlet, and the seas settled down, I went in the pilot house to plot our course to the anchorage. I engaged the autopilot, and saw, immediately that we were a bit off course. We had been having problems with our autopilot steering the boat since West Palm Beach and could not figure out what the problem was. I looked at the autopilot compass, then at the GPS calculated course heading. They were off by almost 20 degrees! Then it dawned on me. When we redid our storage, we placed several steel items in the same locker as our autopilot compass. As soon as I pulled those items out, our autopilot started behaving again. We headed to the anchorage, and discovered there really wasn't any room for us there. We called the City Marina, and tied up there at about 1300 GMT. That evening, we took Bob and Joanne out to dinner to say thank you for all of the work they did helping us get our boat in order in Fernandina Beach.