Shit happens
By Mike Jastrzebski
When we left St. Augustine our plan was to go straight to Southport, NC. This would take us substantially offshore and allow us to give our new standing rigging and our sailing skills a little workout. After all, we haven’t had the sails up since we came back from the Bahamas a year ago.
The weather reports called for three or four days of anywhere from 5-15 knots of wind and possible showers along the way. The first day out was perfect and we sailed for 5 or 6 hours on a beam reach, then the wind shifted to our nose and died down to 3-5 knots so we motored through the night.
The morning brought threatening skies and a slight breeze on the nose. We reefed the sails and kept motoring until the storm hit us. It wasn’t particularly bad. The winds were on our nose at 10-15 knots with gusts to 20, so we tacked along our route until the storm passed and the wind died again.
At about this time Mary went below and popped her head back out to tell me that water was coming in from somewhere and it was pooling around the battery boxes. She said she had checked the bilge and looked around and found no major influx of water. A conundrum, at least until she went back down to fill some of our water bottles and discovered that our fresh water wasn’t working and a 25 gallon tank that should have been full was empty. We’d found our water leak but we were left with only a couple of bottles of drinking water to last us for the rest of the trip.
So what to do? Mary took over the wheel and I went forward and started our generator (a Honda 2000) so that I could make water. I filled the two 5 gallon folding water jugs we carry on board and then we changed our course and headed to Charleston, SC to repair the water system.
That should have been the end to this leg of our journey except that as we motored across Charleston Harbor a torrential rain hit us with winds of 20 plus knots and rain so thick that we couldn’t see the water we were traveling on. As the storm hit we were turning into the channel where the anchorage we planned to use was located. It was blowing so hard that I was having a hard time keeping the boat on track and I could only catch fleeting glimpses of the shoreline and I’m sure that had I not had a chart plotter, we would have lost the boat.
A half hour later, just as we were coming up to the red bouy that marked the area where we planned to anchor, the storm eased up and we were able to pick out an area to drop the hook and settle in. An hour later, after 48 hours of traveling, the storm was over and we were both napping. We figured Monday would be soon enough to work on the water system.
A final note here for anyone who is considering adding AIS to their boat, do it. Mary and I are in agreement that it’s probably the best thing we’ve added to our boat this past year. (That’s saying something considering how much we love our water maker.) Why? Peace of mind. You know where the big boats are, where they’re going, how fast they’re going, and an alarm will even go off if you get too close and if it looks like you’re on a collision course.
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