The plot thickens

From Beaufort we continued on the Intracoastal Waterway for a few more days. Transiting the waterway is a lot like driving on a highway, with its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, the scenery is more dynamic than when you’re in open waters, and you don’t have to go out of the way to find a suitable spot to spend the night. A couple of times we docked right there, in the equivalent of a highway’s shoulder. On the minus side, the long hours of motoring requiring constant focus get tedious and tiring.

Navigation is in theory quite simple: when going South, leave the red buoys and beacons to your right and the green ones to your left, but there are caveats and exceptions. Cross currents can be strong and may push you out of the channel if you’re not paying attention. Sometimes markers are missing. Some areas are prone to shoaling. Hurricane Matthew changed the map and moved some buoys to the wrong place. You better follow locals’ advice—such as preferring one side of the channel or not passing too close to a marker—since you can’t fully trust your GPS, nor the charts, nor the buoys. More than once we had to cut across what the chartplotter claimed to be dry land.

And then there’s the exception to the rule: at the junction of the ICW with other channels, the meaning of red/green may be reversed. At one particularly confusing section where the buoys were not as charted, I may have taken one or two buoys on the wrong side. Luckily, our Ñandú has very short legs.

When we reached Cape Fear River we decided that enough was enough. In spite of the very scary name of the nearby cape, we went offshore to shake the sails and make faster progress by sailing through the night. Actually, Kathy wasn’t really keen on leaving the ICW until she went to buy food for Oliver. The pet store attendant happened to be a local sailor and he convinced her it was a good option.

Once offshore my first mate showed her outstanding seamanship (or is it seewomanship?) at the change of guards. Using all the tools (AIS, radar and binoculars) she was aware of everything around us in the dark, far and near: “There’s a cargo ship on our port but it’s moving away from us. Those lights on starboard seem to be a fishing vessel. Not dangerous, but keep an eye on it. The red light at three o’clock is buoy WR3. There’s still the two sailboats behind us. And there’s something in the radar a mile ahead of us that I haven’t been able to identify. We should change our course a few degrees to starboard to be safe.” Impressively professional. The opposite of me and my sloppy “yeah, there’s some traffic out there” when handing the controls back to her. She also saved us from a collision. When we slowed down to drop the main sail before entering the Charleston Channel, the skipper of one of those sailboats behind us was too sleepy to notice, and not even at the helm, until Kathy woke him up with a radio call. She saw him run to the helm to turn just a few feet from our stern.

This time the wind behaved as forecasted and it took us the expected 26 hours to reach Charleston. We sailed most of the way in fair and light winds. We had some head winds at the end but that was not a surprise either. Even my Android phone got it right when it dutifully notified “Light traffic in your area. Faster than usual.” And at this point I cannot say that what happened in the middle of the night when I briefly fired up one engine was unexpected. Yes. The bracket. Broke. Again. One of the new, supposedly indestructible ones.

The perverse mastermind behind this plot figured that damage would be maximized if the breakage occurred on the eve of thanksgiving. The waiting for a fix starts now with four and half days of holidays with guaranteed zero progress. That’s more than the time lost to the spilled paint fiasco, which makes this new twist extra brilliant. On the other hand, speaking of paint… I’m so glad I didn’t bother painting the new pieces. And on the same hand, there’s also the silly but consoling pleasure of being right. When I expressed doubts regarding the reliability of the new brackets, both the Yanmar and the Mastervolt associates dismissed my concerns. Ha! I told them so!