This trip was in july on the 19th – 21st
Tuesday morning brought frantic last minute packing and fixing of stuff on the Sea Puppy. A full days sailing up the coast was planned. Little River Inlet, SC to Bald Head Island, NC. New territory for Patty and I.
I had made the same sail several times both there and back as crew on a Tartan 10 the WeBeJamming. This sail was to be with a more modest boat 🙂 at least in size. At 23.5 ft in length the Sea Puppy is 9 ft 6 inch shorter than the WeBeJamming. However she is a very stout boat for her size and I felt comfortable taking her out on the ocean for this 26 nm sail.
Actually preperations started the week before (check water tank on board and sink pump, get new outhaul and reefing lines, change out full batten racing sail for dacron sail with reefing points, make sure we had the right jibs on board one blade, a 100% and a 135% jib and a million other details). Both of us were up late monday evening packing cloths and stuff that we were taking ( I had to make sure I brought my GPS, VHF radio, flare kit, took kit, Compass, tablet pc etc… Forgot the tablet pc.. patty had to bring her laptop) then up early tuesday morning just after 6 am to check weather and radar and to get food packed and last minute jobs done. We still didn’t get away from the dock till 11 am.
What a relief to finally take in the dock lines and move out of the slip. No more preperation!!!! Life all of a sudden slows down when you leave the dock and your now moving at the speed of the wind, or your iron sail 🙂 coming from cricket cove marina we motored to Little River Inlet. With the motor on and the current with us we made good time. Even so a 23 foot sailboat doesn’t move fast, six knots at best.
You have to turn loose of your impatience and just go with it. Life is no longer about getting somewhere but about the journey. If you can’t turn loose of your scheadule you need to get a motor boat. Sailing uses the wind as a motor and is a game of skill to use the wind and currents to get from one place to another. However nature is bigger than any boat and will win any head to head contest. Sailing is about going with nature not against it. If the wind isn’t going to your destination you just have to take the long way around to windward 🙂 sometimes it feels like the real long way around to.
Tuesday turned out to be about a perfect sailing day. We saw about a dozen other boats on the Intracoastal Waterway but once we left the inlet we probably saw only three maybe four boats out on the ocean. Sailing was a dream, we did one tack into Cape Fear River. From little River Inlet with the wind on our starboard quarter we sailed a fast six to seven knots the intire way. Inlet to inlet in four and a half hours. Dock to dock in 6 hours.
Wednessday comes and it is a beatifull day. We still have a strong breeze through B dock where our slip is. Between that and the tarp we rigged it is very comfortable on the Sea Puppy even in the high 90 degrees weather. With a heat index over 100 this is important. Patty got a golf cart this morning for the day. They are the only transportation other than foot and bike on the island. Only a few businesses that need deliveries and such have regular cars and they don’t stay on the island. The barge ferry brings them on with their loads and then right back off. It’s amazing to see the big barges pushed into the marina by tug boats with dump trucks and cement trucks stacked five and six deep. People that live on the island have golf carts for their transportation and boats to go back to the mainland where their cars are kept. If they don’t have a boat then they use the ferry that runs ever half hour to hour through out the day.
With the golf cart we have full run of the island it is a wild and untamed looking place. There is not a lawn to be seen. All is natural and wild.. Houses sit in and among live oaks that are hundreds of years old. Unlike here they don’t clear cut a lot to build a house. Instead they build it around the existing trees. The roads are scaled to golf carts most of them not much more than paved tunnels thru the forest. With the branches of oaks and other trees giving permanent shelter from the sun they are a step back into history 🙂 or maybe my imagination of the old south where roads went under and around the mighty first growth forests, dim shaded green tunnels to places of mystery. As we wended our way around the island exploring we would pop out of these green tunnels to find ourselves overlooking the sunlit marsh with mud banks exposed in the low tide, fiddler crabs a dark cloud of movement over the mud, or maybe we would pop out the end of one of these shaded paths in to molten sun shining down on almost empty beachs, tidal pools and lazy waves breaking on the shore. Where in Myrtle Beach it would be blanketed in a wave of humanity stacked 100 deep and filling the water, on the island you might share the beach with just a handfull, fourty or fifty people as far as you could see. It almost made me think that I should be able to imagine a time when I might have been the only person on the beach. Well even on Bald Head Island that might be more imagination than even I can muster.
Tired and sandy after sitting on the beach reading. Even the lazy times of floating in the cool ocean water just beyond the breakers where those long swells come to die could no longer keep our weareness at bay. We got in our golf cart and dove back into the cool tunnels that are the veins of the island. Headed for the marina which is the heart of it all. It is were people come and go from. All transportation flows thru it like the lifeblood of the island.
I will continue this one day when I get some more time. 🙂 The trip back was interstinng to say the least.. involving 4 – 8 ft seas and winds from 0 to blowing 20 then gusting to maybe 25 or 30 knts at times.
Its a couple months later and I’m detirmined to at least chronical our trip back.. We did some real sailing on it or lets just characterize it as interesting in the chinesee manner.
We left Bald head marina about 11 in the morning and headed down river torward the inlet. The current was running very fast with a bit of a rip current cutting accross the entrance to the marina. The chanel was relatively smooth at this point, however as we got more torward the mouth of the cape fear river on the ocean it got rough quick. from the mouth of the river to probably a mile out were up to 8 and 9 foot waves. We didn’t even realize it till we were in it. a combination of wind and tide generated turbulance at the entrance to the river. From motoring out at 5 to 6 knots our speed dropped to 2.5 knots at best in this. Sea Puppy really doesn’t have the waterline length to handle this type of short period tall waves. To make it even worse patty had gone forward to put the jib on and we hit this area so quickly that she couldn’t get back to the cocpit. So she is forward hanging onto the pulpit getting wet to to the knees as the bow takes water over it. She wasn’t very happy about bouncing around up there. I did my best to keep sea puppy hitting and going over the waves as smoothly as possible but it was going to be another 30 min of this if we continued to try going straight out following the channel markers. Just to the left (NE) of the mouth of the inlet in front of bald head island maybe a hundred and fifty yards away the water was much calmer only 1 to 2 ft seas compared to the mess we were currently in. It was the opposite direction from where we wanted to go but we needed to get the jib and main up and get some real power driving sea puppy. we also needed to get patty back in the cockpit where it was safer instead of bouncing up and own on the bow while it went up and down in 6 to 9 ft arcs with her holding on for dear life. After getting in the calmer waters we quickly got sail up and then headed back accross the mouth of the inlet to head SW torward little river inlet. What a difference it makes to have sail up when crossing that nasty mess. We were no longer boucning around,the sails gave us more power and stability than the outboard could.
It looked like light winds for the day. At this point they were only 5 to 7 knots maybe. Just enough to give us a steady push. We sailed uneventfully for the next 2 hours or so down the coast torward little river. At this point a line of unexpected thunderstorms started developing along the landward side of the coastline. We were still in blue sky where we were but just to our left maybe 2 miles away and extending out of sight in the direction we were going were massive thunderstorms. The wind started picking up also. Probably generated off the front of these storms. We were already more than halfway to were we were headed. Out on the ocean with nowhere to duck to quickly. So it was a matter of just keeping on. In the next hour though the storms stayed put over land the wind continued to pick up. (oh did i mention that gradually the winds had shifted thru the day so that now we were sailing to windward.) 🙁 At this point the winds were blowing 15 to 20 with gust to about 25 and still rising. We were soon going to be seriously overpowered if some sail wasn’t taken in. I went forward and pulled the big jib down (150%) and replaced it with the blade. This was an imeadiate help. Next We took in a reef on the main. During this time the winds had picked up to 20 to 25 knots with gust above 30. The funny thing was that the seas all this time were only 3 to 4 feet. With the blade and a reef in the main sea puppy sailed about the way she would have in 10 to 12 knots of wind with the 150% and the full main. With another 40 minutes of good sailing behind us like this the wind just died. Zero wind!!! storms still off to our right over land but now no wind. Strangely, now that there was no wind the seas started to pick up till they were about 8 ft but with about a 6 second period. Actaully not a bad motion going up and over tall long swells. So now with motor running we traveled the last couple miles to the intrance to little river. About this time we finally came in under the storm line. By now though it was mostly rain. Another 35 minutes of motoring up the waterway to the criket cove marina and we were home.
I must say I actaully enjoyed the trip. It was a bit more of a challange that most of our sailing had been but the preperations we had made in rgging the reefing lines and bringing 3 different size jibs for all conditions paid off. If the forcast had been for thunderstorms like that I would have motored back up the waterway. As it was I was happier to be outside on the ocean rather than under lightening storms the entire way up the waterway for 6 or 7 hours. Actually if the forcast had been for bad thunderstorms I would have put off leaving for a day. We lucked out in that none of them moved out over the ocean and that we not knowing there were going to be storms took the outside route that avoided them. We monitored the radio all day and there were others that were not so fortunate. The coast guard cordinated a rescue of what sounded like a catamaran that flipped over not 10 miles from where we were due to the winds. As far as we were aware there was no one hurt though. Several fishermen went to their assistance and resolved the situation before a coast guard vessel could get there.
All in all the experience was enjoyable even if challanging. I never felt in danger or out of control. Sea Puppy did an excelent job of handling the conditions and the preperatons we had made kept it to a controlled situation under those conditions. It did point out to me that making preperations before hand is not just a good idea but a true survival trait. If we had not run the reefing lines prior to the trip so as to be able to reduce sail we would have been very overpowerd and out of control in these conditions. It also pointed out the need to do more training for these conditions. Though we did handle them adequatly there were several fumbles that practice would have alleviated in the reefing process.
Scott Carle
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