Overnight: Cape Canaveral to Charleston

Our first overnight passage was great!  We ran for about 32 hours.

We left Ocean Club Marina a bit late so we were unsure of our arrival time in Charleston.  We toyed with the idea of stopping in Jacksonville, FL or elsewhere along the way to better time our entry into Charleston but after seeing that the weather was due to deteriorate a bit on Sunday we decided to push on.  The reason that timing is a concern is that there are very strong currents in Charleston so your entry into the harbor should be planned at slack tide. You also don’t want to arrive at an unfamiliar port at night…

We decided to see what kind of time we would make, knowing that we’d probably catch the Gulf Stream for a while and that would speed us along.  We figured if we made slow time and it looked like a late arrival to Charleston, we’d try to stop early in Hilton Head rather than risk a night entry.

The seas were calm, but not quite as glassy as the day before. We ran the boat from the pilot house this trip. We passed time during the day by playing with our rainbow hoop, a new toy that Jeff brought us. He also showed us how to do the “calm seas dance”. (It seems to have worked J)  We had dolphins playing at the bow early in the trip though we didn’t see any turtles. 

It was calm enough that we cooked a real dinner. We rotated 3 hour shifts beginning at 9pm and we all managed to get at least 5 hours of sleep overall.

  Running at night.

Snack Time

We got a lot of work done, finalizing our engine room checklist/temperature list, trip log and provisioning list. We tried to establish good practices for long voyages/overnights.  It was great experience using the monitors and tools at the helm for me. I also played around with using Coastal Explorer and Active Captain as we were under way. 

Some of the cameras we have set up on Blossom. 

We can watching engine room checks from the helm.

As it was, we made fantastic time!  I was on night watch from 9-midnight just as we touched the Gulf Stream and saw us hit 12.1 knots. At only 62% load that’s an amazing speed. Once we left the stream we were back to a more normal 8.4 knots.  We would have liked to have run the engine harder but our engine room temps were too high to push the RPMs any higher.

One of the highlights of the trip was walking out to the bridge and looking up to see a sky full of stars and the Milky Way.  It was 84 degrees overnight so it was nice to be able to step out for fresh air. 

Sunset at sea

We arrived in Charleston right at slack tide and had an easy entry into the Charleston Harbor Marina. Martin did a great job docking.  I think it's very cool that this is where my Mom and I stayed for a long weekend back in 2012 when we met Sean & Louise - and got to see Vector for the first time. We're actually docked in the exact place that Vector was :)  We are across the bay from Charleston proper, that's our starboard view actually!  To port, we look over the marina and the USS Yorktown.

View of Charleston Harbor Marina and the USS Yorktown

Blossom ran well and was very comfortable. Boat check: we had a few minor issues on this leg:

*  Once again, the engine room temperature was extremely high. We have to figure something out because we can’t have an engine room averaging 45+ degrees more than ambient temperature.

*   Martin noticed during an engine room check that our AC water loop pressure is decreasing so we think we have another leak.  He knows how to pump it up so we’ll take care of that as soon as we arrive.  It’s so hot, there’s no way we can do without AC.  We haven’t used it underway and have managed, but barely!

*  Our steering wheel in the pilot house (that we didn’t need on this trip) is squeaking away as the autopilot corrects/auto corrects our heading.

*  Blossom has a very strong list to port. Martin and Jeff transferred fuel until we evened out. No more leaning left!  We need to figure out how to redistribute weight or add some ballast.

*   On a good note, our steering fluid and pressure held up throughout the trip. We had no autopilot errors so we know that the leaky pump is isolated.

While it’s a bit disappointing to be having these issues, it’s expected.  This is why a maiden voyage is called a "shake down cruise". We wanted to run her pretty hard right away and shake loose the bits that would need fixing. We have 1 year to work out the kinks under warranty. Better now than a year from now!

It looks like we may once again change our itinerary. This has been a great example of how difficult it is to make plans on a boat. We had hoped to get to Norfolk with Jeff. But the seas are picking up enough that we’d rather not head out tomorrow. The boat can easily handle the current forecast but we aren't as hardy yet and it's hurricane season. There's a tropical storm with a current forecast to pass us by Friday. No sense taking risks, so we’re going to stay in Charleston with Jeff and having Jim fly in here to meet us. We'd like to try to make it to Norfolk and then Baltimore with Jim. That looks possible right now... But if our worse case scenario is being "stuck" in Charleston to train for a while, well isn't that horrible? ;)

 

Sunrise over Charleston

We’re learning and having a lot of fun. Life is very, very good.