Poised

We are anchored just off the Coast Guard Station at Fort Macon, on the barrier island near Beaufort and Morehead City, North Carolina (map).  This is just about as close as we can get to Beaufort Inlet, which leaves us poised for a possible outside run to Masonboro Inlet at first light tomorrow morning.  We will check the forecast first thing, and if weather at Masonboro looks good in the late afternoon for our arrival, we will weigh anchor and get under way.

This morning we had a spirited discussion about the plan.  We had high winds most of the night and all of this morning at our cozy little anchorage in Cedar Creek -- and that was in fairly protected waters with trees all around.  The temptation was to remain there for another night until the high winds and roiled seas abated before proceeding the roughly three hours here to the Beaufort area.  If we did that, we would definitely miss the one decent weather window for an outside run, tomorrow.  After that, the outside forecast is too dicey to chance it until after the Thanksgiving holiday.

We heard the winds here near the inlet would settled down close to 5pm today, and so we opted to get a late start out of Cedar Creek to time our arrival here with calmer winds, but still enough daylight to get fully settled.  On our way back into the ICW we had to arrange a passing with towboat Pamlico, pushing a good sized tow northbound, and we asked him how things looked.  He reported rough conditions in the Newport River, but by the time we arrived there two hours later it was fairly settled and we had no trouble crossing.

Getting the anchor dropped on station here was a bit of a challenge in 15-20 knots, with nearly a knot of ebb current, but now that we are on the hook all is well.  For that matter, getting the anchor up in Cedar Creek in even more of a blow was also challenging, and Louise had to concede defeat on getting all the mud off the chain as it came in.  We'll need to rinse out the chain and locker the next time we have dockside water.

Tomorrow's run, should we undertake it, is a full 68 nautical miles, our longest ever.  Once we are outside we are fully committed -- there are no stops in between.  At our normal cruise speed of around seven knots, the trip will take nearly ten hours end to end.  That will put us in the anchorage there just at dusk, around 5pm.  With a little luck I will be able to bump it up to around eight knots,  which will shave an hour and a half off the transit.  In reality, I am hoping to make it through the inlet by 4pm as a best case.

If, for any reason, we can not make the Masonboro Inlet, or arrive in the daylight, we will instead divert to the ship channel at the Cape Fear River, which means going around Frying Pan Shoals on an overnight run and arriving at the inlet at dawn Tuesday.  An overnight passage like this is inevitably in our future, but I would just as soon it not be concurrent with our very first outside passage.

Before we leave in the morning we will email our float plan to our Coast Guard designated emergency contacts.  I expect we will be in cell coverage for the first and last couple of hours on each end, VHF radio coverage most of the way, and SSB coverage full-time.  We do not have a real-time tracker yet to which I can point you, but I will do my best to update the blog when we arrive safely in Wrightsville Beach at the end of our passage.

Assuming we do, in fact, go out tomorrow, we will then continue inside along the ICW on Tuesday towards the Cape Fear River entrance.  I expect then that we will be spending Thanksgiving somewhere in or around Southport, and we will be researching decent restaurants in the area offering the holiday meal.