Heading South By Circumstance

 First things first! Congrats to those intrepid ladies of the Scarlet Knights Fencing Team. You may have noticed a good luck message I posted for them on the past Wednesday, and not only did they perform amazingly on that meet, but they did as well on Friday too! Let's wish them luck on Monday as they go to the state semi-finals. Go Knights!

On to what the Wafflers have been doing...

Thursday and Friday were sailing prep days. Food and fuel were taken on, and things were stowed for sea. We knew Friday was not going to be good to go off-shore, so we did a little extra cleaning. We enjoy a nice dinner at Bob's home (steaks from Burbage's) and then we packed our remaining gear and headed off to spend the night on the Black Dog so that we could get an early start.

Having arrived at the boat, we stowed things and then settled in for a nightcap. We did our customary reading aloud from "The Art of Course Sailing", and readied for an early night. One side note, and accident with Bob's roll on deodorant resulted in a new one being added to the shopping list in Beaufort.

The original plan was to go north to Georgetown. However the winds were totally wrong. The new plan was this, underway by 7 AM to take advantage of the falling tide, and sail down the ocean to Beaufort. It was an ambitious plan, but we were feeling ambitious.

We were up at 6:15 and cast off by 6:55. The receding tide was swift, and we made good time. We had to spend an extra 15 minutes in Charleston Harbor recovering a pair of gloves that got blown overboard (in my defense, Bob's exact words were "throw me those gloves over there"), and also recover a hat that got blown over while recovering the gloves.

But as I said, we made good time and cleared the jetties that nark the entrance to the harbor by 8:30. The winds were initially good (15-20 knots), and it was worth mentioning is was cold. Cold enough, in fact, to drive us into our foul weather gear even though the sun was shining. We got are sea legs under us, and it was a good sail.

Sadly, it did not last. Around lunchtime, the wind fell off drastically, and we had to revise our plans. We opted to go back inland at St Helena Sound and seek an anchorage there, continuing to Beaufort tomorrow. This would keep us from navigating into Beaufort in the dark.

We made the sound in good time, supplementing the wind with the engine, and we found a nice anchorage at Morgan Island, This island is inhabited by monkeys who were released from testing labs. We anchored close enough that we could see the monkeys, was was interesting.

Now dinner has been eaten, and things cleaned up. Tomorrow we won't leave quite so early, and we will reach Beaufort most likely by lunch, or possibly happy hour.