Adventure time

 Our weather window was now and it was time to leave. Which is always when that one more thing comes up. I had just fired up the various electronics and noticed that our depth sounder was not working. Sometimes this would happen on our Tug I would turn everything off and try again and it usually came back on. Unfortunately that trick did not work this time. The question then became how big of a deal is a depth sounder for where we wanted to take the boat. We were at a facility that had knowledgeable folks and a haul out if we needed it. After looking at our charts one more time and scratching my head a bit we decided to go. Unfortunately the channel into the Xquisite center was in the process of being dredged so we only had a two hour window to get out on this tide so if we messed with the problem to long we would miss our window to leave and maybe our weather window. We decided that after we got out of the channel we would not have to worry much about water depth until we came in to the next port or wanted to anchor. On the chart it appeared we would have 20 feet or more under the boat coming into Southport the biggest problem might be if we changed our route and needed to spend a night on anchor somewhere and maybe I might find the problem while underway and get it going again. We untied the boat and headed out for what would be our longest passage to date.

Max up the mast untangling things

It was a fine day to be leaving we had wind pushing us in the right direction at about 15mph. Perfect champagne sailing conditions.  Better yet this was predicted for the next 5 days which should make for a great trip north. Our sailing instructor was leaving the in the channel just ahead of us in another boat training yet another set of new owners. We hoped to make him proud showing off our basic skills as we headed off on this adventure! This is where humility sets in. I let the head sail out first then decided I would attempt to raise the main. Yes that's the wrong order and it's dumb to have a big head sail out while one is pointing into the wind and wave trying to raise the main sail. This was then compounded by some additional frustration as the dumb thing did not want to go up. Yes unfortunately my fragile male ego was endanger and after a few attempts we were not making much progress so in an attempt to save face we put the boat back into the wind and sailed until we were out of sight with just the head sail. 

As we came around the island I found some calmer waters out of sight of our friendly instructor, and attempted the big main sail again this time pulling in the Genoa. Turned out we had forgotten about opening two of the 5 clutches used for reefing. We have 3 clutches in the cockpit and two more on the boom (one on each side). Additionally it also seemed that we had the main halliard crossing into our Lazy Jack system which was also limiting our ability to raise the sail past a certain point. Unfortunately we managed to tangle this up sufficiently enough that someone needed to go halfway up the mast to do some untangling. Have I mentioned how nice it is to have an eager teenager that actually wanted to go up the mast while we were rolling around out in the open ocean. Max volunteered to go up and sort out our problems. Once these issues were sorted we had much better luck getting the darn sail up and then turned to boat back into the wind.

So now we were officially underway! Rest of the evening went pretty well. We decided to put a reef in the main and a reef in the Genoa even though the weather forecast predicted 15mph winds with the occasional gust to 20 during the night. Speeds our sails should be able to easily handle without the reef but it was a new boat and we were erroring on the side of safety. I won't lie the first night was a bit ery. It was full of new sounds and not really knowing what to expect from a "new" boat but we managed it ok.

I'm not sure if I mentioned it yet or not but before we left we also found out that our generator was not working. It seemed the engine was running fine and it produced power but that power was not being sent to the batteries for some reason? This ment we would be fully reliant on our solar and wind generators to produce all the power we would need along the way... Again it's a new boat and we had no idea how much power anything used. So we turned off extras where we could and experimented with running stuff we prioritized like the icemaker, Starlink, charging cell phones, iPads, and microwave use. Turns out running these systems along with our other power hungry stuff like radar, electric winches, auto pilots and what not would use about 40% of our battery bank most nights. During the day our solar would get the two banks back up to about 80%. When this happened turned out to be interesting as half of our solar is on the starboard side of the boat and half is on the stern. Turns out the stern gets a lot of sunlight all of the time vs the starboard side that was in the shade much of the time when were had the sails out on that side of the boat. So depending on our wind angle our batteries might be recharged by 2pm or 9pm. Turned out we had 4 mostly sun filled days heading to Southport and we were generally back up to 80% of power or more by 9pm when the sun started to go away. During the day our panels were pretty good about generating 60-70 amps of power along the way and the battery system/inverter kept up with all of our needs even supporting the hot water heater occasionally.

By the third day we had all mostly settled into a routine. During the day we took turns when awake at watch. I would take the 9pm - 2am shift. Max would take 2am-7am and Amy would take the 6/7am to whenever I showed up again shift. Most nights we reefed the main sail to the first reef but we were now leaving the headsail out and pretty comfortably sailing 6-10 knots in the jet stream. On our last night we had seen some small storm predictions and I was hoping that if we slowed the boat down a bit we might avoid it. Unfortunately we still found the storm. Luckily we were able to sail through the smallest part but we still saw winds up to 35kts and the waves creeped up to the occasional 15ft range. As we sailed into it we had put our 2nd reef in the main sail and pulled in the Genoa replacing that with our storm jib. As the wind continued to build I got nervous and dropped the main completely and we sailed for about an hour under just the storm jib making 8kts. Unfortunately after the rain and high winds passed it was still dark we were still in pretty large seas and while we could easily pull out the head sail I was less inclined to turn the boat into the wind to raise the main again leaving us traveling at about 4kts. This slowed us down quite a bit. Eventually the sun came up and the adrenaline from the past night went away and by about noon the sea had calmed back down allowing us to sail into the Cape Fear inlet and into Southport. We had survived our first minor storm at sea and were all looking forward to some time on land.