After the Bahamas trip, I was down on the dock daily, cleaning from the last trip and getting ready for the next crew to take her out. A few days after being back I got an offer to deliver a catamaran to the NE coast from Fort Lauderdale starting in the middle of June. David and I took the offer and departed on June 13.
It was a beautiful Leopard Catamaran, with 4 staterooms, 4 heads, and comfortable living areas. Day 1 was gorgeous, there wasn’t much wind so we had to motor, but the ocean was flat and beautiful. An hour after leaving the inlet, we noticed there was something wrong with the port engine, it wasn’t discharging as much water as the starboard, so we turned her off and tried to run mainly on the starboard.
A few hours later, the wind picked up enough to put the headsail out, but a few hours after that we had a squall come through with 55+ kt/hr winds, and the headsail blew. Once the squall passed and it looked like we could avoid another storm for a little bit, we replaced the headsail, we were lucky enough that there was another one onboard already. After this happened, the port transmission had an issue, and we could no longer go forward on the port, only in reverse. This wasn’t an issue, but we were worried about the starboard engine as well. Within hours, the starboard engine started giving us issues starting and the alternator wasn’t charging either. We decided to pull into a marina as soon as possible.
Morning 2 we entered Fernandina Harbor and tied up at a dock. We replaced the starter on the starboard engine, but there was nothing we could do on the port engine until the boat was hauled out of the water. We had dinner as a squall passed through, got some more groceries, and departed during sunset. The next few days were uneventful and full of nice sails.
Approaching North Carolina we realized there was a chance we could run out of fuel. The starboard and the port engine have separate tanks and you can only transfer starboard to port but not port to starboard, and we were using the starboard fuel. In the middle of the night we siphoned fuel out of the port engine, filled jerry cans, and added fuel to the starboard. This got us through the night and we repeated the process in the morning to get us to the fuel dock.
For the next 24 hours, we were going by Cape Hatteras, which was the favorite part of my sail. I was often taking the 12 am – 3 am shift and 6 am – 8 am overnight shifts. On this shift I took 3 am-6 am. As the sun started breaking out around 5 am, I saw a fin and then a dolphin jump. We were completely under sail with no engine and had dolphins jumping at our bow before sunrise. Less than 30 minutes later with the sun rising, we had some more dolphins at our bow. It is always so beautiful to see and reminds me why I love being on the ocean more than anything else.
We approached the Chesapeake Bay after sunset and worried about fish traps, we went to a marina for a few hours until sunrise. Entering the marina at midnight, we saw one trap in the middle of the channel, however, when leaving the next morning we noticed there were multiple traps around the whole channel and were happy with our decision to dock for the night. While sailing through the main channel, we didn’t notice any more traps and continued 24/7 until we reached the end where the boat was going to call home for the next few months. This was one of my favorite sailing trips; we had great people around us, I got to learn a lot while becoming more confident sailing, and seeing dolphins nearly every day is always a bonus!