End of Day 5 Beaufort NC to Antigua

These Blog entries are edited versions of the messages we sent back as we completed the passage. They were sent by radio using a laptop that controls a modem and the HF/SSB radio, using the SailMail system. We sent the messages daily to Charlotte and she then forwarded them on to a list of family members.

2359hrs (EST, GMT-5) 23 Nov 2019

Dear All,

Just before dawn on Day 5

BV kept sailing through the early hours of this morning with variable speeds of 4.5-7 knots, which is better than we had expected from the forecast.  My 4-8am watch was very civilised with slight seas, a tiny sliver of moon to pick out the horizon and, with just a handful of cumulus clouds, an almost complete view of the stars.  Not a bad vista for drinking a mug of tea under, especially as there were also several shooting stars.

The game now is to see if we are far enough out from the high to keep that steady southeasterly progression, or if we get too close to the centre and lose the wind again.

The morning check-in on the SSB radio had Innamorata 2 and Scoot down at N27deg30min, about 200nm further south than us, on their direct line towards St Martin.  A couple of days ago Zwailer dropped south from 33N to about our latitude and yesterday, like us, tracked essentially southeast.  At the check in she was just 38nm east of us, so we've caught them up a bit, probably because we spent several hours under power whereas I think they were being purist and just continued, very slowly, under sail.  Miles is due to depart Beaufort NC either after lunch Sunday 24 Nov or on Monday.  It all depends on the weather.  Grace has also made good progress, albeit in fitting their watermaker rather than in miles under the keel.  However, the work is, apparently, nearly finished and Helen and Dave will be looking for a weather window next week for heading offshore down to the Bahamas.

Though we didn't manage to make radio contact with them, we have used the SSB radio to email our friends Lars and Susanne on Sea Wind.  They are just about to arrive in Bermuda after a challenging sail from Newport with up to 60 knot winds.  After a few days in Bermuda they hope to sail on to St Martin so we might get to meet up with them again fairly soon this season.

The wind was up a bit and down a bit all night and into the morning  and so, with the wind light, as soon as the radio net was over, I took the opportunity to swim under BV to check whether or not there was anything wrapped around the prop shaft.  Thankfully, the answer was negative which was a big relief for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, I didn't have to spend any length of time in the water and underneath the boat - not a fun thing out in the open ocean, even if I was tied to BV.  Secondly, we have no concerns now about running the engine if the wind goes light again.  I can report though that the water in the +3km deep swimming pool out back is crystal clear and a beautiful deep blue colour.

Our dorado (also called a mahi-mahi or a dolphin fish)

Inevitably, with the fridge fully stocked and me in my wetsuit ready to go in the water, as I started to reel in the fishing line it went taut and we found that we had a good-sized dorado (also called a mahi-mahi or a dolphin fish) on the hook.  I managed to get it in surprisingly easily and dealt with it after my swim.  Tonight's dinner is fish and chips, even if it is Saturday not Friday!

A smaller specimen than the last dorado we caught, this one was about 85cm (2’6”) long.  Plenty big enough for a few meals

Lunchtime dorado with cous cous

The afternoon was our turn to be purist often making just 3 knots under sail.  However, by nightfall our speed had dropped to 2.5 knots so at 1720hrs we switched on the engine to maintain some sort of progress.  It's just as well that we had checked the prop this morning because we could start the engine after dark without any nagging doubts about something being caught around the it and causing damage.

Dinnertime fish and chips
(with homemade tartare sauce, of course)

Dinner was indeed fish and chips which provided a nice morale boost given the lack of wind.  But that was to change; by 2200hrs we were sailing again, close hauled with about 7 knots of wind, and we were able to sail directly towards our waypoint.  It's time to see if we can improve our 24hr miles run stats.

Love to all,

Reg and Nicky

Passage statistics:

Position at midday 23 Nov: N30 44 W6846

Position at midnight 23 Nov: N30 00 W67 46

Midday to midday distance: 136 nautical miles

Midnight to midnight distance: 137 nautical miles

Total miles covered:  638 nautical miles

Approximate distance to go (direct line): 843 nautical miles

End of Day 5 - Beaufort North Carolina to Antigua

End of Day 4 Beaufort NC to Antigua

These Blog entries are edited versions of the messages we sent back as we completed the passage. They were sent by radio using a laptop that controls a modem and the HF/SSB radio, using the SailMail system. We sent the messages daily to Charlotte and she then forwarded them on to a list of family members.

2359hrs (EST, GMT-5) 22 Nov 2019

Dear All,

Well the good news is that the daytime temperature is up at 27 degrees Celsius, so it's definitely shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops weather. The bad news is that the weather is a mess for our intended route.

Motoring gently to maintain progress away from the high pressure no wind area

We lost the wind completely at 0400hrs and started motoring gently to try to get on the eastern side of the high pressure which is developing just south of us. On yesterday's forecast that would have worked out nicely but the new forecast shows that the high pressure just seems to be following the route that we want to take; if that happens then there could be an awful lot of motoring on this passage!

The picture of Tropical Storm Sebastian on Tuesday when we left.  The latest news has it following the curve up to the ENE and accelerating towards Europe

Tropical Storm Sebastian is about 900 miles to our southeast and the latest prediction has that moving ENE at 13 knots and accelerating so there is more chance of the UK feeling the effects of Sebastian than us.

Pork stew production

Taking advantage of the morning's benign conditions, I cooked up a big stew in anticipation of our sailing again from this evening though, with the latest forecast, having 'ready meals' in the fridge seems to be much less of a requirement.  However, the portions of stew will fill the fridge and I only ever seem to catch fish when the fridge is full, so I'm trailing a fishing line in anticipation of a big catch.

In the end we motored for 9 hours and 20 mins
before we could start sailing again

More mundane morning activities included showers (because standing up in the shower is easier when the boat isn't being thrown around) and then running the watermaker to fill up the tanks.  We've used about 80 litres of water so far on this passage and running the watermaker for an hour replenished all of that.

At 1300hrs there was just enough wind to start sailing again. Initially there was only enough to creep along at 3-4 knots, but from 1700hrs we've been able to make 5-6 knots; long may that continue!

We didn't catch any fish today but we may have caught something on the outside of the boat.  We can hear a tapping and a bit of a rattle from around the area ahead of the propeller.  I guess that at some time tomorrow we'll have to stop BV, dive over the side and see if we have caught some fishing gear.  We don't want to run the engine again until we have checked because fishing line can quickly wrap itself around the prop shaft, damage the cutlass bearing and melt into a really difficult to remove blob of plastic.

In the run up to midnight we were able to keep sailing on our new southeasterly course.  The speed varied from 4-7 knots but more often around 5knots so we kept moving, which is good, plus it stopped the sails from slatting and shaking the rig which they had being doing all morning.  Either turning the propshaft backwards by hand or perhaps the faster periods of sailing seems to have released whatever was caught under the hull because the tapping has gone.  We'll keep monitoring that but try to do a proper underwater check when we next lose the wind.

Love to all,

Reg and Nicky

Passage statistics:

Position at midday 22 Nov: N31 56 W70 37

Position at midnight 22 Nov: N31 25 W69 39

Midday to midday distance: 146 nautical miles

Midnight to midnight distance: 134 nautical miles

Total miles covered:  471 nautical miles

Approximate distance to go (direct line): 966 nautical miles

End of Day 4 - Beaufort North Carolina to Antigua

End of Day 3 Beaufort NC to Antigua

These Blog entries are edited versions of the messages we sent back as we completed the passage. They were sent by radio using a laptop that controls a modem and the HF/SSB radio, using the SailMail system. We sent the messages daily to Charlotte and she then forwarded them on to a list of family members.

2359hrs (EST, GMT-5) 21 Nov 2019

Dear All,

This morning we had some 'interesting seas'.  The swell was building to over 2 metres from the NE whilst the wind-driven waves have been coming from the north.  Consequently there was a lot of movement on board BV; that's not helping me get my sealegs established again!  Fortunately, the waves and the swell all aligned in the afternoon and made for a lot more predictable boat movement.

After the morning download of weather we reconsidered our plan.  The prediction of where the high pressure will sit seems to have firmed up and going further south will mean that we will go right into it, with no definite benefit of avoiding headwinds later.

Beam reaching – fast but a bit wet

So we decided to hardened up to the wind and have spent the day tracking east hoping that this will help to keep us far enough north of the high pressure that we don't lose the wind entirely over the next couple of days.  The easterly course meant that the seas were mostly on the beam, side on to us, so BV's motion was affected by them far more than when they had been from more astern.

But the sailing was fast, even though the wind had dropped a few notches from overnight, so we kept up a great speed and by 1800 this evening we had maintained an average speed of over 7kts for over 36hrs, which is pretty impressive for us.  However, in the last watch of the day, the wind was up and down and all around the northerly quadrant which made setting BV up to sail something approaching a straight line a bit of a challenge. But, in general, there's a little more wind than we had expected from the forecast.  That's definitely a blessing, even if Nicky had to make more sail trim adjustments than she might have wanted – not the easiest thing to do in the pitch black night (cloud cover and no moon until much later).

The morning HF Net had showed all the boats are quite spread out.  Zwailer, the other one headed for Antigua, is quite a lot further north (about 33degN) and also a fair distance further east (72W at 0815EST).  By all accounts they've had some strong winds up there - Richard talked about sustained 25-30kt G40-45 overnight and said that they had been doing 10kts before they rolled away some of their headsail!  Hearing that, we can't say we regretted heading further south where the winds have been lighter and our sailing angle more downwind too.  Their conditions sound pretty darned uncomfortable, but they may have the last laugh if they keep the wind better through the high pressure area.

It's getting warmer but we are still wrapped up despite the sea temperature being much higher than on the coastline.  It reached a peak temperature of 26.6 degrees Celsius when we were in the Gulf Stream but has now dropped to 24 degrees Celsius.  The air temperature this afternoon was around 20 degrees C, which is hugely better than it was in Beaufort but even so, the shorts and T shirt rig is going to have to wait until we are a bit further south.

Love to all,

Reg and Nicky 

Passage statistics:

Position at midday 21 Nov: N31 55 W73 11

Position at midnight 21 Nov: N31 58 W71 52

Midday to midday distance: 169 nautical miles

Midnight to midnight distance: 167 nautical miles

Total miles covered:  367 nautical miles

Approximate distance to go (direct line): 1050 nautical miles

End of Day 3 - Beaufort North Carolina to Antigua

End of Day 2 Beaufort NC to Antigua

These Blog entries are edited versions of the messages we sent back as we completed the passage. They were sent by radio using a laptop that controls a modem and the HF/SSB radio, using the SailMail system. We sent the messages daily to Charlotte and she then forwarded them on to a list of family members.

2359hrs (EST, GMT-5) 20 Nov 2019

Dear All,

From midnight we had 20-30 knot winds.  BV took it all in her stride like the champ that she is.  We therefore made good progress and got to the middle of the Gulf Stream at around 9am where we had breakfast and then gybed onto our new track of 125 degrees magnetic.

Gybing BV onto our new track…

… which inevitably means that there are ropes everywhere!

An hour before that Nicky had had a chat with Innamorata II, Scoot and Zwailer on the SSB.  Even Grace of Longstone checked in from back at Beaufort.  All was going well but Zwailer was having an uncomfortable time crossing the Gulf Stream much further north.  Looks like our plan to sail 90 miles south to get a smoother Gulf Stream crossing was a good one because our seas are very slight.

Single reefed main and poled out genoa – our favourite downwind rig

Our new track should stay the same for several days. We've decided to take a traditional course to Antigua from the US E coast, aiming for a point a few hundred miles southeast of Bermuda and then turning south towards Antigua.  That will put a lot onto the passage mileage, but we hope that it will mean that we can actually make our intended destination.  If we go on too much of a direct routing, we think that when the easterly trade winds re-establish themselves next week it is likely to be too much of a battle into wind to get as far east as Antigua and we'd have to divert to the BVIs. However, the weather systems coming up make it hard to work out exactly how southeasterly or easterly a track we should take to that area south of Bermuda.  There's a high pressure building out from the coast of the US on Friday.  On our current track (approx 126degM) the forecasts have this high enveloping us, bringing 2 days of little wind (and lots of motoring?).  We could stay above it which would mean just one day of light winds but at the end of the weekend we would be at about 30N67W, wanting to turn south to Antigua and facing 15+kt directly on the nose.  However, on our current track at the end of the weekend (assuming that we motored through the light airs) we would be in an area where the winds would be much more favourable for heading on to Antigua.  The questions are: is it cheating to motor through the high pressure area; and how accurate do we think the weekend forecast is?  Nothing is very clear and the forecast winds are changing on every prediction.  We'll probably just end up playing it out as it comes.

Despite being at sea, Nicky rustled up a fabulous garlic shrimp supper

These huge shrimp were a leaving present from Dianne Tetreault, the
Beaufort OCC Port Officer, because she knew that, to our
disappointment, the shrimp boats hadn’t gone out because
of the bad weather whilst we were in Beaufort

During the day and early evening we had anything from 15-25 knots of wind from the port quarter which made for comfortable sailing at 7-8knots.  Shortly before midnight the wind became more northerly and increased a bit, so we had to reduce the genoa but continued to hurtle along somewhat faster than is entirely consistent with comfort.  Still, we're making good progress it will be interesting to see how we have got on compared with the others when we radio in our positions at 8am.

Love to all,

Reg and Nicky

Passage statistics:

Position at midday 20 Nov: N33 00 W076 07

Position at midnight 20 Nov: N32 21 W074 41

1740hrs to midday distance: 118 nautical miles

Midnight to midnight distance: 164 nautical miles

Total miles covered:  201 nautical miles

Approximate distance to go (direct line to English Harbour Antigua): 1157 nautical miles

End of Day 2 - Beaufort North Carolina to Antigua

End of Day 1 Beaufort NC to Antigua

These Blog entries are edited versions of the messages we sent back as we completed the passage. They were sent by radio using a laptop that controls a modem and the HF/SSB radio, using the SailMail system. We sent the messages daily to Charlotte and she then forwarded them on to a list of family members.

2359hrs (EST, GMT-5) 19 Nov 2019

Dear All,

What a day.  We were all set with nearly everything prepared for a 0700hrs departure except that our AquaDrive shaft had not arrived on Monday as it should have done. UPS had left it on a truck so it had zigzagged back and forth between the same two depots on its journey to us, eventually arriving a day late. Innamorata II, Scoot and Zwailer all set off without us and we spent most of the day keeping everything crossed and hoping that we would get the part and not miss our weather window to head south.

The package finally arrived – a huge thanks to Dianne Tetreault, the Beaufort OCC Port Officer, for receiving the delivery on our behalf and then immediately driving it to us at the dinghy dock.  Right:  Opening the box revealed the new shaft and, to our relief, it was exactly to the spec we ordered

So mid-afternoon today we finally got the new AquaDrive shaft and immediately set about installing it.

Out with the old….

…. and in with the new

We showered, stowed the dinghy, and then we lifted the anchor and crept round to the Beaufort Town dock to get water. Creeping because the new shaft needed to be run-in and we were restricted to just idle power setting for half an hour.  Tied to the dock we kept the prop turning as we filled up with water and dumped the rubbish so when we set off properly at 1740hrs we could start to use up to half power. Fortunately for us, by going straight away the tide was rushing out at 3 knots so as we picked our way past the channel markers we were going at 6 knots even with the low power setting.

The wind was very light so we motored gently for another 3 hours, progressively increasing power to complete the running in process. By then the wind had built enough for us to switch to sail power; a perfect running in cycle for the new shaft.

For the rest of the night we are going to be heading south towards our chosen Gulf Stream crossing point.  By the time we cross the stream the wind will have built to 25-30 knots from the northwest.  By crossing directly south of Beaufort we hope, because the Gulf Stream is running from west to east there, that we will minimise our exposure to rough seas from wind opposing the stream.

Love to all,

Reg and Nicky

Passage statistics:

Position at midday 19 Nov: N34 43 W76 40

Position at midnight 19 Nov: N34 08 W76 36

Midday to midday distance:  N/A

1740hrs to midnight distance: 36.2 nautical miles

Total miles covered:  36.2 nautical miles

Approximate distance to go (direct line): 1300 nautical miles

End of Day 1 - Beaufort North Carolina to Antigua

Beaufort NC USA (Part 4)

You don’t get a group of yachties together for long without there being great discussion about the weather and the previous evening at Clawson’s Restaurant had been no exception to the rule.  Very strong winds were forecast for the weekend and with that in mind we wanted to reposition our anchor a bit so that we could put out something more than the 25m scope we had already.  So, first thing on Thursday 14 November we moved BV to the town dock to top up on water and fuel, only to discover on our return that the red yacht that had arrived the previous day and anchored close to us, had repositioned somewhat in our absence.  Not a perfect state of affairs!  We reanchored in what we hoped would be a good position, well aware that we had a day and a bit before the strongest winds were due to hit; plenty of time to reassess the situation if necessary.

Watermaker reinstallation.  Top left:  tubes, pressure gauge and pipework with the new membranes.  Bottom left:  All put back together….  Right:  ….and reinstalled under the aft bunk

Mid-morning Dianne came past with our watermaker membranes and o-rings and wind generator blades for Carol and Steve.  I set to with fixing the watermaker whilst Nicky and Carol repaired to the laundry for a mammoth session of feeding quarters into the machines.  By the time Nicky returned I had the membranes installed, a leak check complete and the whole shebang up and going for its run-in period.  It takes an hour at minimum pressure to clean the preserving fluids off the membrane and then another hour at pressure before the product is guaranteed to be potable.  But at the end of that time it was certainly very potable with a TDS of less than 150 ppm almost an order of magnitude better than the 1000+ppm we had when we identified the issue.

In and around the other jobs on board we had discovered that we had an over-pressure or over-temperature leak from the hot water tank so I played with that a little, cleaning scale off the safety systems and adjusting the water temperature.  Then we met up with Steve and Helen Lawrence (Miles) for beers in the Back Street Pub and subsequently a scratch dinner on board BV.  Great fun.

The wind started to pick up overnight and Nicky spent a good part of the night awake watching how we, and other yachts in the anchorage swung.  At the tide change we got too close for comfort to the red yacht and were both up letting out a little additional chain to ensure that we remained clear.  Chris Parker’s forecast on the morning of Friday 15 November was very pessimistic about the imminent storm with much discussion of gusts of around 50kts and sustained winds around 40kts in our area [Ed: albeit a short distance offshore].

Anchored in Town Creek, close to the new bridge between Beaufort and Morehead City

We decided to take the opportunity to move to the anchorage in Town Creek.  The anchorage there is much smaller than the one in Taylor Creek but the tide doesn’t flow through it as extremely.  There were already 2 other yachts there but there was space for a third behind them so we bagged the gap, laid out 45m of chain and dug the anchor in hard.  Much more comfortable!  Innamorata II took the opportunity to move up to Jarrett’s/Bock Marine to join Grace of Longstone and Miles negotiated a good rate (due to weather) in the Town Dock Marina.

And then we waited.  We did some admin paperwork, caught up some of the blog backlog, and I had another play with the water heater, swapping out the pressure and temperature valve which appeared to be leaking through the temperature side for a 3 Bar (vice 2.5 Bar) pressure-only valve.  That made a big difference but clearly the pressure’s not correct.  If I can remove the temperature valve on the old safety system, I’ll replace it as a pressure-only valve.

We checked the weather and saw that a weather window for a passage to Antigua was likely to open up on Monday.  Discussion emails flew around the OCC group.  For us, with our transmission part still not due to arrive until Monday (and food shopping still to do), Tuesday first thing was looking good for our departure, with the added advantage of giving a day for the seas to start reducing.

A brief lull in the rain

Homemade Pizza Mk1

By the early hours of the morning on Saturday 16 November, the wind was howling at around 30kt winds and the rain was hammering down, but BV was riding nicely on her 45m of chain pointing straight into the wind.  She was much more settled in this anchorage than she would have been in Taylor Creek with the tide flooding and ebbing through and we were a lot happier with a good length of chain out.  During the day we planned our movements for Monday, wrote a detailed shopping list, read some books, including Pete Goss’ [Ed: what a novelty, to find time to read a book!], did some blog writing and cooked up a pizza which we ate watching a film.  A cosy day on board.

The xy-Grib picture of the low pressure system that produced all that wind.  We were under the tip of the pink arrow, close to the flag-shaped wind-barb that indicates 50kts of wind from the northeast

The wind howled and howled all night.  We slept through reasonably well with earplugs in, confident in our anchor and chain and the holding now that we had been in situ over 24hours.  We guessed at the wind reaching 35-40kts in the anchorage; the local paper reported that the wind had reached 60kts close by at the entrance to the harbour!

The old exhaust which had been patched earlier in the year needed replacing

Homemade Pizza Mk2

We spent Sunday doing checks and preparations:  engine checks, generator checks.  In doing the latter we found  that the exhaust was not looking good, so we spent the afternoon fitting the spare and cleaning up.  Nicky bailed the paddling pool dinghy of gallons of water.  We delayed making soup due to the generator exhaust change.  And, of course, we checked on the weather.  The plan was still looking good though the longer range forecast offshore was complicated, with the GFS and European models differing quite significantly in places.  By the evening the wind had dropped enough to make an expedition ashore a viable option and we dinghied into Taylor Creek to meet up with Sam and Jane (and Poco the dog) from Scoot as well as Steve and Helen from Miles.  It was nice to get off the boat for a bit and, as ever, the Back Street Pub did us proud – we’ll miss its great beers.  It was a fun evening with, of course, more weather and routing discussion, after which we returned to BV for Homemade Pizzas Pt 2.

Zwailer arrives in the anchorage

Dianne had kindly agreed to drive us around a on Monday 18 November as, most difficult for us, we needed to get to the CBP Office in Morehead City to obtain exit paperwork.  We also needed to do a food shop and to get our propane bottles refilled, both of which we could do on foot in Beaufort but they would be tasks much more easily achieved in a vehicle.  Richard and Jane on Zwailer, who also intended to head for Antigua, needed to visit CBP too so first thing on Monday they repositioned to Town Creek and from there we all dinghied ashore to meet Dianne.

Thanks to Dianne, all our tasks were quite quickly and very easily completed.  Propane first, then CBP and then a whistle-stop tour of Lidl and Walmart for top-up shopping for Zwailer and provisioning for us.  We ended with a stop at Frank’s Franks and enjoyed hotdogs (thank you Dianne) whilst hearing about Frank’s work with the homeless who live in the woods surrounding Morehead City.  A totally different side of the place compared to that on show at the Veterans’ Day Parade when so many local muscle cars drove the parade route.

Back on BV we stowed the food and cooked up a huge goulash – passage meals for at least 3 days.  We also re-taped the anti-chafing foam on the spreaders and re-ran the burgee halyard which had chafed through in the wind on Friday (happily during the day so we didn’t lose the burgee which went over the side!).  To our disappointment we discovered that UPS had accidentally left our transmission shaft unit on a truck on Friday so it had shuttled back and forth between a couple of depots and then sat back where it had started over the weekend.  Getting hold of a real agent via UPS’ automated switchboard is virtually impossible but Nicky eventually managed to do so and was assured that the item would arrive on Tuesday.  We decided to take advantage of the extra hours available with a run ashore to the Cru Bar to use their internet to update our computers and, rather than eat our passage food, ‘drowned’ our sorrows in a couple of large burgers at Clawsons.

Zwailer – final preparations before she left at about 1300 on Tuesday 19 November

Beaufort, North Carolina, USA

Beaufort NC USA (Part 3)

Sunday 10 November dawned bright and clear and whilst it would have been fun to make good use of the weather to go exploring we had more work to do on BV.

The membranes, which live inside the white tubes, need to be replaced which meant disturbing most of the connections

This time the watermaker was the object of our attention.  We already had new membranes on order but we needed to pull the whole thing to pieces in advance of the membranes arriving to see what extra bits we needed to order in.  Getting the tubes out of the locker under the aft bunk was the first struggle and, inevitably, several small, critical plastic pipe connectors weakened with age, broke in the process.  I struggled on with disassembling everything whilst Nicky did numerous online searches to identify the offending plastic parts, find a supplier and put in an order for replacements.  And then she repeated the procedure for the replacement seals/o-rings we needed.  In and amongst that she managed to complete her work on the inventory though, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, it’s out of date almost as soon as it’s printed! 

More beautiful weather, though a southwesterly wind, so not ideal for those trying to head south

The following day, Monday 11 November, we walked the mile or so to Ace Hardware to buy some of the ‘easy to get’ parts we needed for reassembling the watermaker. Inevitably, some of these ‘easy to get’ parts proved to be not so easy to get, being UK plumbing spec rather than US spec.  So, we resorted to purchasing a recommended releasing agent and later managed to get the seized items apart, cleaned up and put back together again, which was a result.  In the process, we discovered that we were following in the watermaker footsteps of our friends Helen and Dave on Grace of Longstone.  The plumbing man in Ace Hardware remembered them as having visited a couple of times the week before, also needing small, ‘easy to get’ but actually quite esoteric parts.  Seeing as we were in the area, we also took the opportunity to top up our food supplies at the entertainingly named local supermarket chain, Piggly Wiggly.

We spent the evening back in the Back Street Pub with the usual suspects (Dianne plus Steve and Carol (Innamorata II)) as well as Matthew (Barfly) and recent arrivals Rik and Sanne (Incentive) and Rudi (See Ya).  The latter three crews spent time discussing the forecast and options for heading further south – perhaps on Tuesday, perhaps on Wednesday.  Along with Innamorata II and we listened in on the discussions a little enviously.  But we were cheered up by Dianne who arrived doing her best Father Christmas impression, bearing mailed in packages for Steve and Carol and us, ours being a big box containing a replacement Navtex.

The new Navtex installed.  Not the one I really wanted but chosen because it fitted the hole in the wood!

So, Tuesday 12 November began with my fitting the replacement Navtex, which went very smoothly.  Its installation also showed that the old antenna was providing a fair signal (good news as fitting the new antenna and cabling would be a fiddly job).  Nicky moved on from the inventory to updating our servicing records, another time-consuming and tedious but necessary task.  It was only quite a lot later in the afternoon that I realised that, somehow, our electronic log was now reading entirely the wrong mileage: 5913.2nm instead of 52,295.1nm.  How did that happen and why did it change to that number?  I spent the rest of the afternoon fruitlessly chasing down the gremlin which I can only assume got into the system when I disturbed something fitting the new Navtex.

It was windy overnight into Wednesday 13 November and we didn’t sleep too well.  There were a couple of yachts that had recently anchored quite close to us and with the fast-flowing tide through the anchorage we were a little concerned that they might swing too close to us.  Happily, the change in wind direction brought a bit of a clearing of the anchorage, though that meant that Barfly, Incentive and See Ya also headed off south.  I had a frustrating morning not sorting out the mileage reading and ended up having to accept that the old mileage was lost with the ones and zeros gone to binary heaven.  To vent my frustration I walked up to Ace Hardware to buy another bit of pipe to fix the outflow of the watermaker (I bought the wrong sized pipe on Monday), which I subsequently fitted.  Meanwhile Nicky lubricated all the blocks and clutches and emailed Steve and Helen Lawrence on Miles, an OCC yacht we had briefly met in Fishing Bay and which was heading to Beaufort via the ICW.  I also chased up the production/delivery of the Aqua Drive shaft only to discover that it had been somewhat delayed because one of the CV units had been broken on delivery to the assembling company.  Still, it sounded as if the part was likely to be sent out the next day, which was excellent news.

We rounded off the day with Wednesday’s half price chicken wings dinner at Clawsons Restaurant on Beaufort’s Front Street.  Dianne came over with Helen and Dave (Grace of Longstone) and Carol and Steve (Innamorata II) joined the party too, though as a vegetarian Carol found the offerings pretty meagre (unless you wanted salad, which she didn’t as it was so cold outside once).  And yet again, Dianne did her Christmas elf impression, this time bringing in the small, plastic pipe connectors for the watermaker project.  We hoped for the membranes and o-rings to arrive in the morning.

Beaufort, North Carolina, USA