24 Hours of Going Everywhere, Definitely Somewhere… but Actually Nowhere

Well, any account wouldn’t be any good without a really epic adventure plugged in somewhere.  Of course any epic adventure would be a sham without a good potentially life threatening miscalculation/oversight.  

So here is the first of hopefully many really epic “mistakes” to grace the pages of this blog.  

Enjoy!

Wednesday, the 22^nd of February:

The way out of Beaufort Inlet, the clearly visible building is where we started, dubbed "The Hotel"

Antonio and I set out early to attack the headwind on the way South-  after our very dull (wind-wise) introduction to the ICW the day before, we were anxious to make some real headway, and Antonio was especially anxious to see what it was like out on “the big blue”.  Having sailed on the ocean before, I was slightly better prepared for the uncertainty it could offer, but I was keen to make some headway too.  It was probably this irrational urge to tackle something big and scary that led to our undoing, like so many before us no doubt.

We made it out of the Beaufort Inlet with some difficulty, tacking in and out of the wind to save the engine, and then proceeded about ten miles off the coast.  We would need to travel south-west towards Wilmington, but we had to tack east to keep from running back into the land.  It’s the painful part of traveling into the wind; spending too much time heading away from the destination, and far too little time cruising triumphantly towards it.

Putting distance between us and land...

This is the Chinook on its way back, we didn't get a shot of it directly overhead and loud

On the way out we got to see some really fun stuff, starting with dolphins (sorry, they are really tricky to get on camera).  We got buzzed by a Chinook on patrol a few times, by buzzed I mean we could read the lettering on the pilot’s sunglasses (the first indication that the military was paying some attention to us).

Meanwhile we had plenty of time to speculate what this mysterious ship was all about:

It was moving in and out on the main channel the entire time we headed away from land, and theories ranged from 'it’s training day' to 'the pilot anxiously needed to pee'

Finally far enough offshore we made our first big tack to the South, to the future.  The day went well as we alternated control of the vessel, meanwhile the other did stuff like confirm our position, make tea, and stare off into the unending horizon.  I suppose that is the one constantly impressive thing about being on the ocean when you’ve been enveloped by land forever leading up to the departure.  It’s easily recalled and imagined for anyone who’s been to the beach, but when it’s in front of your face as well as behind your ears, for hours, you really come to appreciate it.

Land is to starboard (right side of boat) not that you can much see it...

...moving on from postulating what is most impressive about the ocean… (everything is impressive).

So we made our way for most of the day, without much incident, and with plenty of documentation.

The nature of the trip changed when night started to fall, and we started making decisions based on how far we’d come and what we had left to go- namely, “Whaddayah think about this restricted area up ahead?”…  (refer to map at bottom of post)

We approached Bogue Inlet with the idea we’d stop and anchor for the night and resume our journey the next morning.  I had access to the weather forecast, and while it didn’t look too terrible rain-wise, the wind was getting heavier and we’d been moving all day.  I was not thrilled about what would have been an all-nighter into the wind to get to Wilmington (although Antonio was more for that idea) if we could stop and rest after what had already been a big day.  In referencing the charts it was difficult to get a read on how to enter the inlet.  Unlike Beaufort inlet, Bogue was narrow, shallow, and didn’t seem to have any good markers.

We got closer to take a good look, only to see a beach (with car headlights on it), and no apparent inlet at all…  This is more or less what it looked like on the GPS:

Looks like water to me...

…but all we could see was one massive beach with rather large crashing waves.  No inlet.

We were getting closer though, involuntarily riding waves crashing towards the beach.  I decided now was a time to use what little engine time we had at our disposal and gunned it back out to deeper waters.  

With the light fading fast and no way of telling where the "inlet" part of Bogue Inlet really was, we decided we had no choice but to skip the overnight rest area and keep moving towards Wilmington.  To do so, we would have to put a lot of distance between us and the coast, because we would need to get around the massive “Restricted Area”.

It became more and more obvious as we approached the restricted area that it was no joke, it was lit by a huge flare constantly, and from miles away we could see the “fence” of beacons that outlined its edge- on top of that there were muffled booming noises coming from that general direction.  All of that combined with the information about submerged explosives/mines that we got from our chart and it was clear that we shouldn’t mess with the military. 

Just about then, as we were getting used to the idea of a very uncomfortable night of wind, waves, and avoiding the military, we noticed the Coast Guard approaching us from the direction of the inlet.

They had seen us from the coast and assumed we were in trouble; I didn’t have the VHF radio on, so we didn’t hear them trying to hail us either.  Oops, my bad…

Anyway, after a lifetime of reassuring the circling coast guard patrol (and myself) that we were OK and weren’t in need of formal assistance the wind had only gotten stronger, and the swells were getting pretty rough.  While I wasn’t too worried about the structural state of the hull, seeing the steel rigging snapping between noodle-loose and too-tight got me nervous and we pulled in the sails to keep from demasting the boat…

Normally, the captain would cut the motor on… which we couldn’t do.  So we found ourselves looking at a stronger wind, that was blowing the wrong way, a motor we couldn’t count on, and sails that might break the camel’s back.  The nausea was bad enough when the weather was nice, and the nausea was bad enough riding crashing waves, the nausea was really bad with the Coast Guard patrol circling the boat taking down all our information… but none of it was as nauseating as floating along without any forward propulsion or method of directing the boat into the waves… that were still getting bigger.  We were adrift in mounting storm conditions.  Inside, the cabin was already strewn with every imaginable item that was totally useless at the time.  Nothing was left on the shelves, and the floor was invisible under all my personal belongings piled knee high.  Things were only getting worse.  Something had to be done.

Although it might not have been hopeless to head into the wind and try and get around the restricted area I decided it would be safer to turn the wind direction to our advantage and let it blow us back to where we came from, where we belonged at that time.  I pulled the headsail out just enough to give me some drive, with the headsail rolled out less than a third the wind was plenty strong enough to use that to point us back towards Beaufort.  So that’s what we did, for hours we backtracked with a handkerchief in the dark.

The swells were still massive, but they were pretty regular which helped because unlike movies would lead you to believe, they are almost impossible to see silhouetted against the stars:

A fabricated image(yes it's supposed to be dark) to give you the impression of what the waves look like at night... this particular one is right next to the boat

The big violent ones don’t look like it, while the most harmless ones can look scarier than the rest.  So continuing to get bashed around I looked for anything to take my mind off the danger, cold, and nausea. 

I stumbled across a game I dubbed “Seabird Slalom” after hearing an uncharacteristic “thud” and laughing at the incredibly surprised and awkward escape of a sleeping seabird- my first “roadkill” (it flew away just fine).  It still boggles my mind to some degree how I was able to run into a bird with my slow moving banged up boat…  Keep in mind that the boat was making a lot of noise in that wind, with ropes smacking the mast a few times a second, the rigging snapping to and fro in the gusts, and the waves slapping the hull.

If you’re at all afraid of the dark I don’t recommend the experience.  The sleeping seabirds a few feet away, were no more defined than a plastic jug...

This was definitely the darkest chapter in the Big Venture thus far, without a trustworthy engine and rigging that was not inspiring confidence, I was still looking at the prospect of re-entering Beaufort Inlet in wind-storm conditions.  

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one concerned with our immediate future.  Antonio told me later that during one of his shifts a spotlight on shore tracked us for miles.

… and miles and miles and miles of this.  I suppose I should thank ADHD that in the intense attention that must be paid in a situation like this I found a sense of… boredom?  

Which isn’t the right word for it of course, but when your nerves have been frayed for that long without anything really terrible actually happening, you just get sort of sick of it- it becomes monotonous...

...a sense that got forcefully refreshed with dread as I started seeing the beacons in the distance marking the channel we would need follow to enter Beaufort Inlet.  

The inlet meant we were close to a place we could put in for the night, a place we could sleep, a place we could get off the boat and kiss the ground.  But it also meant a harrowing journey through the unpredictable inlet that was difficult enough to get out of earlier that day when we were freshly awake and oh yeah, when we could see…

It got really nerve racking when we made the turn into the main channel leading to the inlet, the wind was coming at more of an angle now, and so were the waves.  The currents around inlets are unpredictable always, and in these storm conditions in the dark I was having to quadruple check our position and verify and re-verify where the markers were- this must have gotten really annoying for Antonio, but he did a great job reassuring me again and again with the chart, the GPS and the spotlight we were using to read markers…  Meanwhile the waves were getting more violent and frothy seeming, or was it because we were at a less submissive angle than we had been all night?

Soon we were riding crashing waves that seemed to put Bernoulli on the same scale as a surfboard.  I was terrified that one of these crashing waves was going to “drop” the boat on a sandbank, breaking its back and starting the sinking process.  I figured it was due time alert the Coast Guard of our situation.

Antonio had his doubts about bringing the authorities into the picture, but I figured that is what they are there for, and that their services yield the most benefit for those that make the call earlier rather than too late…

Antonio made the call on the VHF asking for an escort- Since my VHF radio is inside the cabin Antonio was having to relay their questions and answers to me in the cockpit.  Meanwhile, I even more distractedly continued into the gauntlet, I mean inlet, still without engine power -gnashing my teeth the whole time.

Unfortunately the Coast Guard only arrived after we had made it through the treacherous mouth of the inlet and were back in protected waters.  First thing they asked as they approached was if we were carrying any weapons- I immediately thought of my machete… next question was where it was located on the boat… I immediately thought of the knee deep swamp of personal belongings...  

They asked question after question about where this and that, I simply kept answering “Probably on the floor?”

In the end they did escort us the remaining few thousand feet to a slip just up the way from where we started the previous morning.  

The time was about 5:30am when the Coast Guard left us with a ticket for having expired flares… 

I don’t regret calling them, because we were probably lucky we didn’t need their assistance in the end, and had we slightly less luck on our side they might have been fishing us out of the water.

We were utterly exhausted, I’ve probably only been that psychologically strained a small handful of times in my whole life, and after grappling with the rudder all day and night and having been so utterly consumed by stress over survival for such a long time, it was a rather unreal experience peeling off the wet clothes and literally picking up the pieces of my shattered life off the floor.  But we were safe, as hard as it was to convince myself it was over.

The next day when we awoke safe and sound... pheew!

The sheet from the chart book we used that day AFTER being repaired with masking tape and hung out to dry...

The path we took on that day of adventure, with the Marines' restricted area on the left