A trio of ocean hops

We are underway northbound in the Atlantic Ocean, about 15 miles east of Charleston, South Carolina as I begin typing. Today is our third successive hop in the Atlantic, and at this writing it looks like we'll be out here overnight, bound for Cape Fear.

When last I posted, we were anchored off St. Simons Island, where we hoped to meet up with friends for lunch. We settled in for the night expecting a quiet morning aboard. But at 4am a thunderstorm rolled through, kicking off with a 61mph gust of wind. That plowed our anchor through the soft mud some 40', and we staggered upstairs with the alarm blaring. The gust was over in mere moments, and realizing the anchor was still well set and we had stopped moving, we just adjusted the alarm and went back to bed.

61mph (53kt) wind gust recorded on our anemometer. Coincidentally the outside temp is also 61.

Our anniversary gift to ourselves was just being able to sleep in after being so rudely awakened. We had a video call scheduled with our newly-engaged niece in California at noon, and we agreed with our friend John to meet up whenever that call was done. We had a quiet morning aboard, finishing up the last of the sourdough bread our friend Karen made for us for breakfast, having defrosted it to have with dinner Saturday night. I puttered around fixing a few things in the morning, and we splashed the tender so we would be ready to go when our call was over.

The call with our niece and her new fiancé started out more or less as expected. I am her uncle by marriage, but Louise has known her her whole life, and so we were not surprised when they asked us if Aunt Louise would make a toast at their wedding next year. What was surprising, however, is that next they asked if I would officiate.

Out track plot the next morning. The top and bottom lobes were the limits of our swing; lobe on the right is where the gust pushed us. We love our Bruce, but if you pull it hard enough in pluff mud it just plows through.

I am honored to do it, but I must confess also to a certain amount of nervousness. Of the "don't mess it up" kind. Louise and I had asked a motorcycling buddy of ours to officiate at our wedding, and even though he was a mail-order minister with some experience, our ceremony was probably the largest he'd done, and he married Louise off to "Sean Lawrence Welk." It was all I could do not to immediately say "ah one, and ah two." Anyway, I have more than a year to study up and practice.

After our call and with some new dates on our calendar, we hopped in the tender and zipped off to Gascoigne Park to meet up with John. Laura Lee was unavailable. We had a very nice lunch at the Mallery Street Cafe, with much catching up, and afterward John swung us by the Winn-Dixie so we could pick up a few things. It was great seeing him, as always.

The last of Karen's wonderful sourdough. This was actually from dinner Saturday; there were still three pieces left for breakfast Sunday.

The busy morning and the lunch date had us off to a late start, but we wanted to get some miles in, so as soon as we got home we got underway. I had figured to stop at the Altamaha River, where we might have tendered in to Mudcat Charlies at the 2-way Fish Camp for our anniversary dinner.  But after a big lunch neither of us was hungry, and fried food and bottled beer did not call us, so we decided to press on to a further anchorage and just have a light snack on board.

Late in the afternoon we had a favorable tide to transit one of the shallowest stretches of the entire ICW, less than four feet deep at low tide, the Little Mud River, and with no dinner plans we ran the extra few miles to get it behind us. We had the anchor down just after 6pm behind Wolf Island on the South River (map), the same spot we had chosen in the other direction when we had to wait for favorable tide to cross the shallows.

This ICW daybeacon at Doboy Sound was knocked over somehow and lying flat. I filed a report.

As we enjoyed our snack and a beer, we discussed the possibility of going outside right there at Doboy Sound. It looked like we might have favorable conditions that would improve over the next two days, and if we got lucky we might be able to run outside to Georgetown or even Morehead City over one or two nights. I spent an hour or so researching the Doboy Inlet, which would be new to us.

Monday morning the forecast still looked just acceptable for the outside run, and with lots of bailout options we decided to try our luck. We did not have enough tide to just run down the South River to the sound -- there's a 5' bar at the river mouth -- so we went the few extra miles to take the ICW to where it intersects Doboy Sound.

I had to divert to go around this anchored shrimper on Doboy Sound.

The inlet proved to be no problem, but I was thankful for all the information that had been posted about it online. I recorded our tracks and published them for other mariners to use; these tricky, poorly charted and often poorly marked inlets can be challenging and even hazardous to the unprepared. Now we have a good track for the next time we need to use it.

Things started well, but contrary to forecast, conditions worsened throughout the day, with seas three feet on five seconds by mid-afternoon. The wind had picked up considerably, and, also counter to forecast, we were fighting a knot of counter-current. We decided to bail out to Wassaw Sound, near Savannah. We've been that way before, but that was nine years ago, so I again spent some time researching the inlet. Fortunately, we arrived at mid-tide.

Sunset at Romerly Marsh Creek.

We also arrived mid-ebb, and we fought our way up the Wilmington River against nearly two knots. This river is where it all started for us, when we bought the boat from John in Thunderbolt, a few miles upriver. It was such a hard slog that we stopped at the very first anchorage that would be comfortable, a side channel known as Romerly Marsh Creek (map). We were out of the swell here and had a comfortable night.

In the morning we again had a choice to make -- continue upriver to the ICW, or go right back out the inlet. It was again mid-ebb, and outside weather looked acceptable for a day run. We decided to go back out on a fair tide and make Edisto Island. I again recorded and published our tracks into and out of Wassaw Sound.

We can still see the SpaceX launches here. In the binoculars it's a well-defined streak and not this little dot that my cell phone captured.

We were hoping for a fair tide arrival as well, but we again found ourselves pushing into over a knot of current, doing 5.3 knots while making turns for 6.5. That actually improved throughout the day, and we just caught the last of the flood on the South Edisto, another new inlet for us. We have better charts nowadays, and found the inlet wide and deep, with the ancient NOAA soundings completely out of date.

We dropped the hook in an off-channel shoal near the entrance to Big Bay Creek (map). We tendered into the creek and tied up with permission at the Marina at Edisto Beach, and walked down to High Tides for dinner. The food was decent and they had my cherished Pluff Mud Porter in cans. The marina restaurant, Presley's, would have been more convenient, but they're dark Tuesdays, and we needed the walk anyway.

Cheers from High Tides, Edisto Beach. Louise and some scruffy guy who could not be bothered to shave.

This morning found us with the same decision as yesterday -- ICW or back outside. But before we could even make it, I had to fix the chartplotter, whose display started blinking off and on just as I went to the pilothouse to look at tide schedules. It had the appearance of a loose or intermittent power cord, and so I rooted through my box of orphan cables looking for the right type. I found one, but that was not the fix.

We have a plan "B" for this problem, which involves unbolting the TV from the guest stateroom and substituting it for the PC monitor, but that takes time, and we needed something working right away or the outside choice would not be an option at all. I have a little 4" HDMI monitor that I use for setup and troubleshooting our Raspberry Pi systems and the backup plotter computer, and I was able to rig this in place. The plotter software amazingly worked on the tiny monitor, although some of the data like ETA was omitted from the screen.

My plotter arrangement for the morning.

Today's outside forecast had improved, and we'd need to wait for the inside route until the flood, as we'd need tide for a couple of shallow stretches. So with the plotter now working, back out we went, whizzing out to sea with two knots behind us. So far it's been a good run. After lunch I tore into the defunct monitor, hoping to find a simple loose wire.

What I found instead was a fried power supply. It's a simple supply that turns 120vac into 12vdc, and that led me to discover that this monitor has an unadvertised direct 12vdc input. I removed the fried power supply altogether, attached a cable with a mostly correct plug on it to the DC input, connected it to 12v, and voila, we're back in business. I was glad, because I really did not want to haul the TV up from downstairs and jury-rig it into position.

Penny for scale.

This monitor is only eight months old, and normally I would complain to the manufacturer. But long-time readers may remember that this monitor was such a piece of junk to begin with, that after replacing it once with no real improvement, they just refunded my money and told me to keep it.We'll see how much longer my "free" monitor will keep working.

We had our sights set on Charleston Harbor when we left this morning. But as we approached the turn-in towards the harbor entrance off Folly Island, we decided conditions were right to just keep going overnight to Cape Fear, with a daytime bailout option at Five Fathom and a late night bailout at Winyah Bay.

The fried power supply, sitting atop our log book. Looks like two caps are blown, and I was noodling on how to fix it when I discovered we could just use DC power.

As I wrap up typing, Louise has already hit the berth, and we're on the final leg from Cape Romaine to Cape Fear. We had a bit of a fire drill right after dinner, when a project to backflush the waste tank with seawater and detergent overflowed into the master head, leaving me on my hands and knees cleaning everything with disinfectant and enzymatic cleaner. Thankfully, it mostly smelled like detergent.

We're about an hour from the Winyah Bay entrance, and the plotter says it's 12.5 hours to the Cape Fear River, which will put us at the entrance just as I come back on watch at 0900. That will also put us there mid-ebb, so we'll bash our way in against three knots, and drop a lunch hook at the first safe spot to wait it out.