Heading up the Waterway to Southport

You have to wonder about people that sail sometimes. I mean the forcast was for rain and 20 knots all day friday. Thirty to fifty knots gale force winds that night. Mid twenty knots saturday and twenties on Sunday.

So what do I and 5 other boats do Friday? head up the waterway from Little River Inlet to Cape Fear River via the Intracoastal Waterway friday morning. 3 of the boats had dogers and or bimini’s but a couple of us didn’t have anything but foul weather gear. The forcast was right.. It rained, it poured, it blew, and we motored on and on through it.

This was my post during most of the day sitting in front of the mast with the auto pilot remote in my hand. To be honest it was most comfortable. They funny looking orange hat I have on is a seriously cool hat.. it overhangs enough in the front to protect my glasses from the rain and has a longer overhang to the rear that doesnt let a drop touch my neck.. I wore full bibs, boots, and jacket with the hat and a pair of gortex gloves and stayed 95% dry and warm for the whole day. In everything from calm to a light drizle to pouring rain and 20+ knots of wind. The gortex gloves are really old and got soaked through but even wet they kept my hands warm. They are insulated with thinsulate.

All the pictures here except the ones of the storm that night are by Miriam.

We had to wait about 15 minutes for the Sunset Beach bridge to open. It was just drizling at this point and all the boats were together. Breck in Runaway, Angela on Valkyr, Patty on Pirate Girl, and Orin on La’ Bon Vie. Ben on Winds of Freedom was running late and would catch up with us in Southport later that day.

Valkyr

Pirate Girl with jeff standing on the stern fishing while waiting for the Sunset Beach bridge to open

La’Bon Vie

It was a fairly long day.. about 6 hours under motor in the rain and with my motor that is long and loud. It helped a lot being able to sit forward and steer with that much distance between us and the engine. Even at 4 hp my little 2 stroke johnson is painfully noisy.

The only excitement of the day was when I had to go below to use the head. I gave Miriam the remote to the auto pilot and went below. So I’m sitting there in the head compartment 🙂 in which the radio is also mounted when I hear over it

“There are three sailboats together heading north on the waterway. Watch out for the little one it’s all over the place. It just about hit us.”

I look out the port and we are not headed straight up the waterway. I dash up on deck just as Miriam steers us away from another boat about 30 ft away approaching from the other direction. As we pass the guy on it leans out from under his bimini and hollers

“DO YOU THINK YOU COULD GET ANY CLOSER!!!!!”
He sounded a bit irate. I don’t know why.. We didn’t hit him. At this point no one is in any danger. I’m not sure anyone ever was but Miriam is still having a little trouble with the autopilot so I get her to come back and take the tiller while I turn the autopilot off. Boat under control I attend to the real emergency and go back below to take care of business. 🙂 It was close but I made it.

All in all it was a long slow but very beautifull day. I’m not sure most people would think so sitting out in the pouring rain and cold wind but there is a grey but quiet beauty to the waterway as the wind blows and the rain pours down

Amazingly enough we were only 20 minutes behind the other bigger boats getting into southport and docking. We made excellent time with our little 4hp engine. Even though they were all much bigger boats with big inboard diesels we doggedly didn’t let them open up to much of a gap through the day. They even saved me a slip at the docks at the Provisioning Co. It’s the restraunt that was holding the party for the Stead Bonnet race that we had come up for. They have about 5 slips that are free to use if your coming to the restraunt. First come first serve.

You would think “how cool that they saved me a slip.” I thought so to at the moment. First let me describe the slip.. or even better show you a picture.

doesnt look bad does it.. what you can’t see is that just behind my engine on starboard is a piling that I had to manuver around to get into that little slip. You can’t just back out of there. You have to go wide around it to get out. In calm conditions this is not hard at all.

here is another shot from just in front of the boat looking out over the cape fear river off of sea puppys starboard side.

lots of pilings huh?

It was blowing about 15 or so when we pulled in and docked. It gradually built all evening till about midnight when it hit mid 40’s to 50 knots. The two miles or so of open water off of Sea Puppys starboard side that you can see in the above picture let that wind build 2 to 4 ft waves that started hitting Sea Puppy broadside, slamming her into the dock starting about 10 pm. I went out several times and retied lines and re-aranged stuff on deck battening down. Below you can see the little work dock that was tied up in front of sea puppy. You can also see it in front of sea puppy in the second picture over this.

This dock was bucking like a wild bronco and all that was holding it was the little line you see there. I took one of my 5/16 3 strand nylon dock lines and resecured it. You can see just beside the cleat on the edge of the dock where my line wore a 1 inch deep groove in the wood from how hard the dock was thrashing around from the wind and waves throwing it around.

I had out 3 large fenders and all my dock lines which are 5/16 3 strand nylon.. with a breaking strength enough for any one of them to pick up the entire weight of Sea Puppy all by themselves. She was bucking and straining at them hard enough that I could see them stretching.

About midnight with the winds running about 40 knots I was getting worried. We were curled up in the v-berth and instead of dying out it just kept getting stronger and stronger. I finally got on the phone to Richard who was on Orrins Beneteau 39 right beside us at the next dock and asked if he thought it was going to get any worse. I was starting to think that Sea Puppy was going to damage herself hitting the dock if it continued. Richard, Orrin and Lou were all watching movies and drinking. La Bon Vie at about 20,000 lbs was barely rocking in her slip while Sea Puppy at 3500 had the bow coming entirely out of the water on the bigger waves as she jumped up and down and hit the dock. Richard still watching the movie just told me to relax that this was a really mild storm and that I was just being a worry wort basically. Not totally convince but because Richard has years more experience at this stuff than me I crawled back into my bucking and bouncing bed. Jump!. Thud!! Bounce! Jump! Thud! Bounce!.. ring.. ring.. ring.. my cell phone goes off.. I hear Richard.. “Get your asses over here..that boat is about to jump right out of the water.” Richard actually had looked out he port and over at Sea Puppy and been shocked at how bad it was. La Bon Vie was barely moving but little Sea Puppy was going crazy. You could almost see her keel every once in a while she as she bounced up and down. We decided to take them up on the offer of the v-berth on La Bon Vie 🙂 It was bad enough that Mirriam went down the dock on all fours till she got on La Bon Vie. The finger dock we were tied up to was bouncing 2 to 4 feet up and down also.

I didn’t go straight to La Bon Vie. Pirate Girl who was on the other side of La Bon Vie from Sea Puppy was having problems now. She was bouncing hard enough that she had pulled the midship cleat and the board it was attached to clean out of the dock. She was tied up to the leeward side of the dock and the wind was pushing her out away from the dock. Patty had just come on deck after hearing the board beating against the side of her boat at the end of the dock line. It took us about 15 minutes but we got the board untied from the dock line and re-ran her dock lines to double up the remaining ones. We tied the stern one directly to a piling and the bow one to the only cleat left that it could reach on the dock. All Pattys docklines were only 3/8 or less and none of them very long.. the longest probably only 30 ft. They held but you could see that they were being stressed much more than even Sea Puppys, even though Sea Puppy was taking 2 to 3 times as much force in wind and waves being on the windward side of everyone else. Patty already has the line to make some 5/16 3 strand docklines 🙂 I think it will be a priority now. With a couple 50 ft spring lines and a couple 30 ft bow and stern lines she should be much more secure in similar situations. I know that it was a real comfort to me to know that it wasn’t going to be a dock line on sea puppy that would fail if anything did. They would pull a deck cleat clean off the boat first.

The aftermath of it all was no damage at all to Sea Puppy other than one of the fenders popped under the pounding. Having three of them rigged, two low and one high between sea puppy and the dock worked perfectly. Even though I worried that she might get high enough to actually come down on top of the dock it never quite got that bad.

Lessons learned…. 1. dont tie up on the windward side of an exposed dock when there is a blow coming.. go find a good sheltered anchorage. There was one about a mile away. 2. don’t tie up at a dock with a blow coming that you have to do tight manuvering around pilings to get out of. You wont be able to do it under adverse conditions. My engine isn’t powerfull enough to deal with that kind of manuvering under those conditions. 3. Sea Puppy can handle much more than I would have thought with no damage at all.

Here is a couple pictures I took just prior to midnight before we left the boat to go to La Bon Vie. It is dark and they are not very good. I had to lighten them considerable to get anything to come out. They also don’t really show how bad it was.