Once more round Cape Hatteras, maybe for the last time. November 13-14, 2025

    Pretty much everyone knows the legend of Diamond Shoals and Cape Hatteras.  Every year a few boats sink rounding this famous little point of land and 95% of the time my Mom asks me if I heard about the latest tragedy.  In a world where every square meter of land and sea is meticulously mapped, the Shoals appear on the map in a kind of “Here there be dragons” way.  No government agency maps it because it literally shifts with each wave, building and receding seemingly at random.  The shoals really want to extend offshore further, but they run into the mighty Gulf Stream which draws a line that they cannot pass as any sand that ventures too close gets swept away.  Unfortunately, the Gulf Stream runs into the wrong direction and moves nearly as fast as poor Dragonfly can travel, so traveling in the stream is not an option unless we enjoy standing still.

Pretty much everywhere on the globe has these little numbers indicating the depth of the ocean at that spot.  Sometimes these numbers are inaccurate, but they usually correspond to something useful.  Notice the entire area of Diamond Shoals is numberless.  This is the government officially saying “We have no idea whatsoever what’s out there.”

    Therefore we must pass between these two forces of nature.  This funnel can produce some terribly unpleasant weather when storms pass over and suck up the warm waters of the stream.  If the winds blow opposite the current, it produces large and violent waves.  If you happen to own an aircraft carrier or a cargo ship, you simply deal with the resulting seas.  If you own a sailboat, you just wait for the conditions to be just perfect.  No too much wind, not too close to a front passing by, no wind whatsoever from the north, not a day with big seas, no reports of kraken, that sort of thing.  The weather had been quite miserable for a week or more and the marinas and anchorages of Hampton Roads were littered with sailboats anxious to head south and find some warmth.  By Tuesday the 11th, everyone in the marina was discussing the weather excitedly as it really appeared that a perfect window was fast approaching.  It was fairly brief with strong southerly winds brewing behind the nice weather, but you really couldn’t hope for much better conditions around Diamond Shoals, which honestly is all we really cared about.

     The downside of this short window was that it was going to put the squeeze on us time-wise.  If we left Thursday morning right at dawn, we would need to average 6.5 knots, maybe more like 7 in order to arrive in Beaufort before sunset of Friday.  We generally assume we will travel at 6 knots (basically an average walking speed) so this would pose a challenge.  If we went any slower, we’d end up arriving in the dark.  Some sailors do arrive in the dark and we did have the advantage of having been to Beaufort before, but we’d still really prefer not to navigate in harbors in the dark if at all possible.  We made the choice to move ourselves next to Hampton, next to the tunnel in order to shave an hour or two from our journey.  The marina there is owned by the same company as our home marina and they provided us with a slip at no charge and filled our tanks with diesel at their cost (or what they claim is their cost anyhow).  They had a pleasant restaurant on site and we made our preparations for a departure at first light.

It was a perfectly lovely morning, if a bit cold.

    The morning broke cool and clear.  It wasn’t as savagely cold as it had been, but we were bundled up in the warmest clothes we own (the count of things we own has been dramatically reduced in the past month or so).  As we made our way out of the harbor and through the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, it was as if a starting gun had been fired.  All of the boats that had been trapped in Tidewater were on the move.  The seas were covered in bobbing sailboats in a slow motion race south.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many boats out there before.  We were kind of mid-pack but had to keep our heads on a swivel as our collision alarm tried to go off constantly because there were simply too many boats much closer than one would normally see.

Some years, we only see a couple of boats going round.  This year there were dozens.

    Fortunately there was enough wind to fill the sails and boost our speed enough that we had high hopes we’d arrive in Beaufort with a couple of hours of daylight to spare.There was lots of excited chatter on the VHF radios as boats negotiated who would cross each other’s path first and boats further ahead reporting on conditions.  Friends who were sailing together would chat about who would change speed to stay close and if they had enough fuel to arrive safely.  The faster you push the engines, the faster your fuel gauge drops and you always have to be careful to save enough to deal with every contingency.  There is nowhere to turn in around the coast of North Carolina, so you might have motor back to Norfolk.  We saw a boat make the sad U-turn and head back early Thursday night.  It was a bit ironic that everyone was trying to stay together and struggling as we ended up sailing side by side with another boat for 34 hours or so and never got separated by more than 2 miles.  Sometimes we were faster, sometimes they were.

The nice thing about being surrounded by other boats is that one of them got a great action shot of Dragonfly at sea.

    It did get a bit sporty as we approached the shoals and a bit more so as we made the turn towards Cape Lookout, which is almost as famous for ships running aground as Diamond Shoals.  No less a sailor than Blackbeard wrecked on those shores.  However, it doesn’t move very much and modern technology has pretty much eliminated the risk of that spot.  We did have some wind-driven choppy waves that caused the cats to hide out and both the intrepid crew to be annoyed overnight.  We traded off watches on a 3 hour schedule overnight with our conversations pretty much limited to a situation report on which of the nearby boats was sailing in a particularly erratic or foolish fashion as one of us headed off to join the cats in the heated cabin.

This little recess at the foot of the bed is where they hide when we are out to sea.  In bad weather you can only see their ears.

    The installation of heat in the salon has been absolutely transformative in the experience of sailing south in November.  I remember vividly the first passages bundled up in four layers of clothing and clutching a hot water bottle and being absolutely miserable.  The heater keeping the interior at a balmy 70 degrees seemed like cheating.  Highly recommend you get heating wherever you live.  It’s great.

    During the day, we do 6 hour shifts and when I came on watch at 6am it was clear that we were going to make it well before sunset.  I had turned both engines on overnight because the headwinds and ugly seas had robbed us of our cushion and the two big diesel engines plowed forward relentlessly.  Our increase in speed meant that it wasn’t going to make any sense to try to nap before we arrived since docking is very much a two person job so I fueled up with some coffee and settled in to pilot us into the dock.

Safely at the dock in Beaufort.

    Beaufort has pretty stiff current which makes docking an adventure because both the wind and the current conspired to push Dragonfly around fairly forcefully.  I’m pretty good at maneuvering in close quarters, but this approach required a 180 degree turn in a small space surrounded by other boats and then backing up in a reverse 90 degree turn into the slip while the wind and current had their own unhelpful ideas of which way we should go.  The dockhands were beefy guys who caught the lines and alternately tugged us towards them, then shoved us off the dock when we were being pressed on by the current and we ended up securely tied up and happy to make a return visit to one of favorite ports on the east coast.