Jason and I are pretty tired of motoring down the glorified ditch of the ICW so we made the decision to leave Beaufort and head offshore straight to Jacksonville.  It’ll be an overnight, which we hate, but in this instance it just makes sense and saves us time. As has been standard with this trip, we started our day by breaking something important.  In this case, our main sail.  The rope that allows the sail to feed up into the track became so damaged that it was falling apart and the sail wouldn’t raise.  We didn’t want to risk forcing it in case it got jammed and we couldn’t easily lower it again.  Instead of turning back, we decided to just use our head sail and engine and just motor-sail all the way south.

We only saw two cargo ships and they were both in our way in the direction we were going. Overall it was a pretty uneventful sail with a truly fantastic sunset!

We entered the inlet at Jacksonville early in the morning when it was still dark.  We both thought this would be a good idea because it’s large and very well marked, however at night all of the lights and markers just merge together.   Not the thing we wanted to have to pay extreme attention to at the end of an all night sail! Eventually we made it far enough that the sun started to rise and we could relax a little bit!

After snaking our way through downtown Jacksonville and the St. Johns river we finally arrived at Holland Marine, our final destination for this trip!

Moving a boat from one place to another on purpose with a deadline is about one of the least fun things you can do on a boat.  We knew it wasn’t going to be a joyride but the weather back home was cold and shitty so we figured we might as well get it done.  There were many freezing nights, broken parts, and a lot of sporty sailing but we had a hell of an adventure!