Our route was to be a loop that had been very hard to plan for, given the fluky weather reports. Tropical storm Bonnie was brewing to our southeast and was predicted to set ashore on Sunday with rain and wind. I got super lucky last time I did a multiple day trip and played the wind so I sailed downwind the whole time, making a circle back as the front moved through and the wind changed direction. This time we were looking at steady easterly winds, so I chose to start south in Beaufort and sail north to Ocracoke on a beat. Then we would sail downwind to Oriental and finish the trip motoring against the wind down the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) back to Beaufort.
We set off from the Taylor Creek public boat ramp just outside of Beaufort, next to The Boathouse Marina. I had put in there before for my family trip out to Cape Lookout. It is a nice ramp and I haven’t had any issues leaving the car and trailer there for multiple days at a time. I used some large plastic storage tubs for organizing all our junk so set up was quick, hitting the water at 11am right on schedule.
The wind was a steady 8-12mph. We motored about an hour out of Taylor’s creek and above Harker’s Island. I have had my boat for about 4 years now, but haven’t had a bridge crossing yet, so no opportunity to announce myself on VHF radio until the Harker’s Island Bridge. It was cool to make the boat official when the Bridge Tender asked my boat name for his log. We made the corner turning northeast into Core Sound and put the sails up.
Core Sound is an extremely shallow and shoally inner bay with no maintained channels. The coastal sailing guide didn’t even bother to review it during the last edition because it is so difficult to navigate, but that is where the SJ21 swing keel came in handy. At the first bottom bump I apologized to Clay and asked him to go crank the keel. He said there was no need to apologize, but quickly learned that I was just trying to be proactive since he would be back and forth twenty times that day.
My initial concern when route planning was whether we could hold the starboard close hauled point that would allow us to make it up the sound without having to tack back and forth, especially given the shallow nature of the sound. It worked out great as the east wind slowly became ESE. We didn’t tack once the entire day, listening to reggae and drinking beer in a beautiful Carolina day. It was a perfect sail.
One of my other route planning concerns was how much ground we could cover in a day. I had gone up to 24 miles with my son on board, but I was effectively single handing and trying to consider the comfort of a 12 yr old. We made 42 miles the first day, much farther than I had expected, almost to the abandoned whaling town of Portsmouth. We anchored out near the marsh, eating dinner in a duck blind and shooting a few rounds out of my newly inherited .38 revolver, just because we could. The mosquitos came out with a fierceness so, we pulled anchor and drove farther out. We never really got loose of them and I barely slept that night for slapping mosquitos.
Saturday, we woke up and set sail for the Ocracoke channel. I had read that this is a challenging channel to navigate, but the ferries made it easy, though we had to motor the last couple miles because of the east wind. We were tied up to a marina dock by 11am and happy to have reached a pretty remote town by sail. Total miles on Saturday were a much easier 14 miles.
We walked around Ocracoke and found lunch at an awesome spot that served a “box of clams” which were one of the best meals of my life. We stumbled out of the restaurant and rented a golf cart to tour the island. We checked out the seashore, then hit a nearby bar, Howard’s. We met a Marine aviator and his wife and had a good talk. They invited us to the Fireman’s ball were we ate local barbeque and drank yet more beer. Watched the sunset by the lighthouse, then hit the sack relatively early for us around 10p knowing we had the biggest sailing day to come.
Sunday morning came early. We got up and prepped the boat to go, then I checked the radar on my phone. The first band of thunderstorms were just offshore and could be seen plainly on the horizon. We were initially going to try to get out ahead of them, but thought better to wait and see what we were in for while still on land. The Pamlico Sound is 30 miles wide and 70 miles long and parts of the day would be completely out of sight of land. I had sailed a lot up the Pamlico and Albemarle rivers, but never this far out in the sound. It is known for its long fetch and shallow depths that create confused, steep waves with a short frequency. The band of storms passed with heavy rain and some cloud lightning, but was not exceptionally windy.
As soon as the storm passed we left harbor and motored out. I had set up some reefing lines before we left but we set out under full main and jib headed almost dead downwind with an ESE wind. The winds built up as we got out into the main part of the sound and about the time I said we should probably reef, the first big winds hit us. We did the usual downwind calm to extreme chaos tack to shorten sail with no shortage of cussing. With the jib down and the main reefed, I was still not completely comfortable until we made the turn west headed for Cedar Island and we started a broad reach. The winds built up to around 15mph sustained with gusts into the 20s, then the band past and it settled into a beautifully steady 10-15mph while the clouds opened up.
There are scarce navigation buoys in Pamlico Sound and with no sight of land, it was all dead reckoning. I had an ipad with electronic charts, but we relied primarily on the NOAA printable charts that I have laminated and use as my standard. I never took the time to figure out the GPS function on the ipad and phone connections were not happening, so we actually navigated the entire trip the old fashioned way. The ferries going to/from Cedar Island to Ocracoke were invaluable though and we use them to cheat a bit, seeing about 3 that day.
The rain stayed away and we made sight of Cedar Island, but the winds began to steadily build. I have been in 20-25mph sustained winds with gusts up to 30 on the Pamlico River that I later verified with weather data while single handed and flew the jib and reefed main comfortably. This day the wind built so great, I felt like we need to drop the jib and was even starting to feel concerned about how much it kept building on just the reefed main. We had turned more easterly and were almost running with the standing ringing screaming at us. Clay has had his six pack captain’s license and is an excellent offshore fisherman and we both called the gusts in the mid to upper 30s with sustained in upper 20s. We couldn’t get a weather station to confirm those afterward, but it was pretty crazy to say the least.
Given the conditions we decided to not make for the turn into the Neuse River, but to dog out into West Bay where I knew of a fisherman canal that might serve as some protection. The entrance to West Bay is scary shallow and with all the waves, hard to identify. We made the turn, dropped the sails and motored up. The protection we had hoped for never arrived as the wind had shifted to the south and was coming straight down the bay. We beat head on into the windy, almost vertically faced waves with an inconceivably short period that beat the hell out of the boat. I was cringing each time we jumped off one of the larger 3-4ft waves and slammed down. I was glad I had changed that keel cable. (not a lot of pics given the conditions)
We made it to the canal and collapsed. Cooked up some Spam and started drinking in earnest. We shot a few more rounds out of the.38, then got paranoid of the Military Laser Range signs along the shore, scared we might get a visit if we made too much racket. We eventually motored into Turnagain Bay after a 37 mile day and found a spot.
As we anchored, a water snake came out to greet us, which should have served as an omen. That night we got slammed by mosquitos. No amount of motoring around would rid them and we went as far out towards the Neuse as I was comfortable anchoring in given the unpredictable weather. We set up the shoddy mosquito net I brought over the hatches and killed as many as we could inside. The mosquito netting was a joke to them however and we woke up with no less than 200 in the cabin around 4am. It was brutal and no sleep was had.
We greeted Monday morning tired and ready to get out of Turnagain Bay. We had set up a boom tent with a tarp and some bamboo I brought to get out of the sun the day before and kept it up all day for the impending rain. We sailed out of the bay with the jib and the boom tent powering us along better than I expected. I thought we would have to motor all day, but were able to have the jib up most of the day as a supplement to the engine. The sun popped out as we came to the Morehead City bridge.
The ICW was a pretty straightforward affair and even though it rained all day, it was a nice end to the trip. The boom tent gave us an “African Queen” feel. We stayed relatively dry and motoring was much less work than the previous day’s adventure. 37 miles later, we made it to the Beaufort Inn’s private dock. Looking at the boat at the dock I wondered what all the boats on the ICW thought about our boom tent. We cleaned up and found some dinner and last drinks.
Tuesday morning we took a short ride back up Taylor Creek to the marina. Clay got to see the wild ponies on Carrot Island which closed the trip perfectly. The haul out and drive home was uneventful. We had a blast and covered a total of about 130 miles over the four days of sailing. It was great to get so much time on the boat and to catch up with my buddy Clay. *Credits to Clay for all the pics
