Juno 423: Offshore Atlantic Passagemaking; Cape Fear Lives up to its Name

Friday May 10th - Sunday May 12th
The hours passed by watching waves, wind, clouds, and stars always changing, doing evenings watches changing every two hours through the night. Early Friday, the easterly winds dropped and we found ourselves motoring 3 am until dawn, then sailed until 2 pm and motored once again and enjoyed a game of chess. Harry won. Travelled 180 miles in the first 20 hours. Spent most of Saturday day motoring as the winds shifted to the SE and the ocean swells shook all the wind out of the sails. In taking down the main, Harry noticed the boom vang had lost a pin and did some necessary repairs in very lumpy seas to avoid a future catastrophe. We entered into the gulf stream on Saturday morning around 9 am, finding about 2-3 knots of current pushing us NE. With all the unanticipated motoring, Harry was concerned that we didn’t have enough fuel to make Beaufort so around 4 pm, we decided to change course and head for Cape Fear, NC. Soon afterwards, around 9 pm on Saturday, a nice SW breeze blowing 10 knots filled in and pushed us along all night. By 9 am Sunday morning, we were off pan-handle shoals just south of Cape Fear when a nasty looking line of storms were spotted to the west. We decided to ride out the storm at sea, delaying our arrival to Southport (Cape Fear) by an hour. We tied up at the Southport marina, gased up and refilled our water tanks and considered moving north on the ICW until more storms were spotted on the radar causing us to decide to stay put and we tied up for the night at the marina. We both enjoyed a shower, did a load of laundry and attended a talk at the marina on traversing the ICW between Southport and Beaufort which gave us both pause as there were some tricky currents to contend with that we hadn’t known about. As it was 8 pm by the time the seminar was over, we were both to tired to go out for Mother’s Day dinner so we ate leftovers and turned in early after considering the many options we had for moving northwards, ultimately deciding our best would be to go “outside” to Beaufort, NC exiting via Cape Fear in the morning.