Fernandina Beach to Charleston, South Carolina – 162 miles sailed
After a stop at the marina fuel dock to fill up on diesel and fantastically free and fresh US municipal water, we pointed SeaLight to the ocean and began our long sail. We fought the incoming tide all the way out the long inlet as a large Navy ship passed us along the way. There was a slight west wind this morning so we deployed the headsail as soon as we were clear of the channel and pointed north.
Then, a whole lot of nothing. I worked on updating our banking and financials for several hours, sorting through soggy, crumpled receipts, pouring through bank transactions, trying to make sense of it all. In the end, I calculated that we have spent five times more per month while in the US compared to what we spent in the Bahamas. I was flabbergasted. But after thinking about it more it makes sense. There is very little to spend money on in the Bahamas, really only food. We anchored out every night and spent nothing on marina dockage. We did not need to buy any expensive boat parts and did not suffer any boat breakdowns. We sailed a lot so didn’t use as much fuel, and didn’t cover nearly as many miles as we did through the US. We ate nearly all our meals on the boat, rarely going out to restaurants. And we did a lot of provisioning in the US before we left so the boat was fully, and I mean fully packed with supplies before we reached the Bahamas so we didn’t need to buy much beyond fresh vegetables, milk, meat, and seafood we couldn’t catch ourselves. We didn’t spend anything on admission fees or vehicles, besides the one day car rental in Long Island. And for the week our friends Dave and Kira joined us, they paid for absolutely everything despite our protests, and even started issuing threats of violence whenever I reached for my wallet, and Dave’s way bigger than me.
The US makes it very easy to spend money. In fact the whole place is designed to draw money out of consumers, from admission fees to cool places, to an unlimited quantity of beautiful restaurants and cafes, to stores of every variety, everywhere, open all the time. Hey man, I’m not complaining with the windfall of choice in the US, but there is something to be said being on the hook in a beautiful Bahamian anchorage with no stores for miles and no need to spend money on anything, allowing one to simply enjoy the natural surroundings. I actually thought Ana would have a tougher time in some of these secluded areas of the Bahamas as she simply loves to shop, to browse, to buy. But she had no trouble at all. When we did visit a small Bahamian town she would absolutely look in every one of the small shops we could find, and enjoyed browsing but rarely bought anything. But now, we are back in T.J. Maxx land…
Nothing of interest happened during the passage until around 2:30 pm when a dense ocean fog rolled in and it was scary as hell. Our visibility was cut to less than a hundred feet and we were well out of cell range so had no way of seeing where other boats were as we do not have radar on the boat. We got out our fog horn and sounded it periodically. We blew whistles. We put on rainsuits as the moisture from the fog was soaking everything in the cockpit. We listened carefully for noise or signals coming from any other boats. We scanned in every direction with binoculars. We slowed the boat. We monitored the weather forecast on the VHF, which delivered a dense fog warning for coastal areas all the way to south-east Georgia. We did all these things for about six hours with the only moment of joy arriving when we noticed a beautiful small dolphin surfing on the wake beside our boat. We adjusted our heading westwards to get closer to the Savannah, Georgia coast in order to get a cell signal so that we could see the locations of all the big ships and thread our way around them.
By 10:00 pm we had passed through the worst of the fog and visibility was not perfect, but back up to a mile or so. I went down for a nap, which was fitful and uncomfortable, then Ana and I switched places shortly after 2 am.
My watch was uneventful and I did not see any other boats. It was just me, a sky full of stars, and the creaking and moaning of SeaLight as she powered through the night sea.
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