Beaufort, NC to Jekyll Island, GA via Charleston (Nov 17, 2025 - Nov 21, 2025)

     Plans are the bane of sailors.  It can be very difficult to arrive at a fixed location on a fixed date.  When making arrangements to visit with people, we often tell them that they can pick either the day to meet us or the place to meet us, but not both.  It’s a bit of a joke because of course airlines don’t work that way, but there is also a lot of truth to it.  You really can’t predict accurately when the wind will blow or which way it will be blowing more than a few days in advance and both of those things are very important to sailors.  Sometimes we have VIP guests and our usual approach is to try to arrive a week or so early so that we can coordinate with their schedule.  But even that big of an adjustment doesn’t always work.  

    This year, we had VIP plans of that sort.  A previous attempt to meet up with my sister Kathy and her two boys had gone awry when our plans were driven by weather and boat work in a different direction.  So we had long promised to meet up with her for Thanksgiving this year on Dragonfly.  We picked Jekyll Island as a good destination for the meet-up and made our sailing plans to head south by November 1, leaving us lots of time to arrive in Georgia.  However, if you look back on the blog, you’ll find that we actually left on November 13.  A few days of this were driven by delays in selling all of our worldly possessions, but many more were imposed on us by the weather around Cape Hatteras.  As the days wound past us, we grew increasingly concerned about the schedule.  We had several stressed out conversations with Kathy, who was fantastically flexible and willing to adapt and just meet us in Charleston or wherever we were able to be by Thanksgiving.  

    As it turns out, there was shaping up to be one last good weather window from Beaufort headed south.  At first, it looked like we would need to run all the way direct to Jekyll which would be a 3 day passage that wasn’t the optimal approach for cats nor humans.  This decision is driven by the typical winter weather pattern on the east coast in the winter where low pressure systems roll over the coast and out to sea in waves, with the next one quickly pushing the calm warm high pressure systems away to make room for the next low pressure trough.  This normally dictates that you have 2, maybe 3 days of pleasant conditions out on the ocean at a time.  However, this particular high was starting to look like it might linger a bit longer than usual.  The night before we departed, we had made a one night reservation at the marina in Charleston.  This would allow us to depart at dawn and pull into Charleston the next day before sunset and enjoy a full nights rest safely tied to shore before doing the exact same thing the next day en route to Jekyll.  It was pretty clear that once this high pressure system finished, we would face a fairly intense low pressure system and likely be unable to continue south before Thanksgiving.  To our delight, by the time we were underway on the 17th, it seemed clear that we actually had good enough weather to spend two nights in Charleston and truly fully recover before moving on.

    I field a lot of questions about how we manage to keep watch on Dragonfly during longer passages and if someone has to be on lookout at all times.  The answer is actually not black and white.  I know good sailors who do not have someone on watch at all times.  Some people sail around the world by themselves and rely on electronic alarms to alert them to any dangers.  It’s all about your tolerance for risk.  For Lisa and I, we have decided to always have someone officially on watch and responsible for the safety of ship and crew.  This doesn’t mean that you have to sit at the wheel and stare out to sea every single minute, its normally fine to pop down and make yourself a snack or a drink or take a bathroom break.  But we rely on each other to check often and ensure that nothing sneaks up on us and causes danger.  

    We have experimented with a variety of different watch schedules.  In the beginning, I would stand watch for most of the day.  I would pass the helm to Lisa and try to get some sleep in the early evening according my needs and wake up around midnight or 1am and go until Lisa would awaken in the morning and take a brief nape before we got into port.  This didn’t work great for us because everyone felt unclear about what the other expected and we’d both try to give the other more time in bed and no one was happy.  So we switched to fixed schedules.  Our first schedule was simple: 3 hours on, 3 hours off.  This worked fairly well, but 3 hours can feel long on overnight watches.  We later switched to 8 on, 8 off during the day for 16 hours and 2 on, 2 off overnight so that no one had to stay awake too long during a time when your body really wants to be asleep.  Today, we seem to be mostly favoring 3 on and 3 off again.  

     Somehow, I always seem to get the excitement on the overnights.  On the way south from Beaufort, there was something enormous in the water ahead with some very weird lights.  I honestly couldn’t figure it out.  We have a system called AIS which is used by all commercial vessels, most cruising sailboats and a very small minority of fishing boats.  It broadcasts a signal that identifies a vessel by name and precise location and usually includes the destination, length and other similar information.  Our boat has a receiver that plots this information on your chart along with the speed of the target, direction of travel and past reported locations.  It also calculates when your closest approach will be and how far away from your course that is.  In the dark, I usually try to maintain at least a quarter mile of separation if I can.  We also have radar which locates the other ships even if they are small and do not have the AIS.  I could see a fairly small boat with normal lights and it was transmitting AIS and I could see its radar return.  Fairly close by there was this enormous vessel which wasn’t transmitting AIS, had a massive radar return and lights that I had never seen before.  Based on the lights, it looked to be further away than the small boat, but radar insisted it was actually pretty close to the small boat.  I didn’t love the uncertainty, but plotted a course outside of both radar returns and kept a close eye on it.  When you don’t know what’s going on, you can often call the other boat on radio and ask them what they are doing.  If they have AIS, this is easy because you can hail them by name.  If they don’t have AIS, the correct method is to call “Vessel 3.5 miles off the coast of South Carolina, 2 miles north of Cape Fear” or “Blue Hulled fishing boat 12 miles off of Currituck” or something that will allow the boat to know you are talking to them.  It’s a bit imprecise and awkward sometimes.  Old salts can usually say something like “29 foot Grady White cuddy cabin” but I’m unlikely to make out the brand of the boat in the daylight with binoculars, much less at night.  Some sailor behind me calls out on the radio: “Enormous working boat 12 miles off the coast scaring the hell out of all these sailboats, this is Puff.”  There is a long, long pause and finally a voice comes on the radio and says “This is the tugboat Working Man and I believe you may be hailing the barge we have under tow.”  In my mind, I could hear the dozen sailboats all go “Huh, that’s what that is.”  When the sun came up, it was quite a bit more obvious what was going on.

     This was the same trip where someone ran bang into a channel marker buoy.  I actually passed him just before he hit it, so when he called on the radio “Coast Guard, Coast Guard, Coast Guard, this is sailboat Wind Dancer” I immediately perked up, thinking he might be in need of help and that I would have to turn around and offer aid.  When he sheepishly confessed to having banged off the buoy and that he was concerned that he knocked the buoy off course, I was equally glad he was alright and also that I didn’t have to make a radio call like that.  

     We made it into Charleston without any drama to report to the Coast Guard and tied up at the longest dock I’ve ever seen in my life.  We spent I think two nights there, where the biggest drama was putting on shorts for the first time this year.  We took a guided food tour, which was tasty but marred by faintly racist drivel from the guide and ate a lot of good stuff in the two days we had available.  We hopped back out into the ocean to rush down to Jekyll Island so we could meet up with Kathy and my nephews and later Sara and Eric, our first sailing friends.  We saw dolphins cavorting on the bow, dodged a shrimp boat and tied up safely at the marina in Jekyll with a few days to spare before our first visitors.    

     I’m sorry not to add any pictures, but Starlink is acting stupid and it’s refusing to allow me to upload any and I don’t have time to mess with it.  If I eventually come back and add some I’ll delete this paragraph and you’ll never know it was ever here.