I was hanging around in Banks Channel, Wrightsville Beach, and reveling in the fact that I had finally been out on the ocean again. A good sailor keeps an eye on the weather. I was close enough to shore and to civilization, that all the weather apps on my phone were available. Suddenly, there was a storm system coming the following week with some pretty heavy winds. I needed to remain in town for a bit longer to coordinate with a boatyard pal, Victor. I had helped Vic move his boat a few years ago and to celebrate he was going to help me, on a reunion cruise of sorts, jump offshore to Beaufort from the Masonboro Inlet. To avoid the windy storm coming, I had made a second reservation down at Carolina Beach.
As luck would have it, I convinced Mike, another pal from my boatyard days, to come down and have breakfast. We found the venerable Sawmill Restaurant on Carolina Beach Road and sunk into a booth for a good breakfast and a long conversation. Mike, Anthony, and I would indulge a bit in the boatyard after dark and imagine that we were the amateur security patrol for the dozens of boats in the yard. Going way back to my old blog, Mike was also instrumental in helping me survive the night I spent sleeping on a sinking boat. That story is here.
The windy storm forecast petered out by the time the day had arrived but I had a nice time back on a mooring in Carolina Beach. Ironically, Mollynogger had spent a good deal of time there before me. Eventually, I wandered back up to Banks Channel where it’s free to anchor. I managed to meet up with Mike again. He drove around looking for a place he thought he remembered, but we ended up at a BBQ place. This yankee, who is usually plant-based, had a fried catfish sandwich with coleslaw and fried okra on the side. I have never claimed to be perfectly plant-based and I will “go along to get along” whenever it is conducive to catching up with an old friend. Besides, that was a damn good catfish sandwich, better than average coleslaw, and I love okra!
Vic and I finally coordinated our schedules and decided the day to sail was that coming Wednesday. His mother (and his dog, too) had been on the trip we had done before on his boat, but Cheryl couldn’t make this trip. Nevertheless, she gave Vic a ride down from Beaufort, so we all had a chat at the public dock and then loaded up the dinghy; a couple guys, a knapsack, and some beer.
Victor and I can often have long philosophical discussions and that night was no exception. Halfway through solving the world’s problems, I had to remind us both that we were getting up early in the morning. The trip from Masonboro Inlet to the Beaufort Inlet was a little more than sixty miles. With about fourteen hours of available daylight that time of year, we needed to start moving as soon as the sun came up to reach Beaufort in daylight. I set my alarm for 05:30 and we crawled into our bunks. The V berth can get a little stuffy when it’s warm, so I slept up there and let Vic crash on a berth in the main cabin where there was a little breeze. Luckily, there hadn’t been many bugs in the air nearby and we could leave all the hatches open.
My alarm went off but I hit the snooze.
In a short minute, Vic yelled from the main cabin “Are you getting up?”
“Oh, all right,” I grunted.
We each rolled out of bed and I made some coffee. Breakfast was going to be after we got out on the ocean. After tidying up, and securing things for sailing, we checked the fluids on Mollynogger’s Perkins diesel. Vic is an engineer and very thorough. He decided to check the Racor fuel filter. It didn’t look great, so we changed it out for new. With all that settled we crawled into the cockpit to start the engine.
As the engine rumbled, I went forward to start raising the anchor. With about half the chain shipped, the engine’s idle changed slightly, and a few moments later the Perkins coughed and stopped.
“Did you do that?” I called back from the bow.
“No!”
To be honest, my brain froze. I couldn’t wait to get sailing again. I couldn’t wait to get out of the touristy towns I’d been stuck in for three weeks. And I couldn’t wait to take a boat friend out sailing on my new boat.
… but the engine wouldn’t start.
Victor took over and started troubleshooting. Luckily, as my brain caught up with him, he was doing exactly what I would have been doing if my brain had been engaged. The Perkins is a basic diesel engine and a diesel engine needs three things: fuel, air, and compression. We thought perhaps some air had gotten into the fuel line when we changed the fuel filter. So we bled the injectors and tried starting it with the auxiliary fuel pump running, without it again, standing on one foot while running the pump, etc. We tried anything and everything, and could not find any diesel joy.
If I recall, I ended up making breakfast right there at anchor as we thought about what we could do to start the engine. Blueberry pancakes, more coffee, and plenty of head scratching.
Finally, we decided to check the engine intake. The Perkins is old school and does not have an air filter. There is a metal mesh breather fitting on the intake underneath a mushroom looking cover. Vic had been looking for some kind of filter housing and though I knew its location, my brain was just now catching up. He stuck his finger under the bell and it came back greasy and black. Not good but new evidence. I set to work loosening the hose clamp and got inside to find that the mesh was coated with a heavy layer of oily black grease and cat hair from Admiral Pickles, the former Commodore of Mollynogger. I cleaned the mesh with a bit of diesel from the old fuel filter. We put it all back together, crossed our fingers, and finally turned the key again.
The engine roared back to life.
In the meantime, I had finally gotten desperate enough to text Gaylen and Allison, the previous owners to ask for troubleshooting advice. We had found the air intake moments later and I texted back that we were in business.
We had spent three hours getting the damn engine to run. It might have occurred to a good sailor to re-evaluate starting off for Beaufort with the diminished daylight hours remaining. But … yeah … no.
We were both excited to sail and hadn’t consider waiting.
The wind was a little light for the rest of the morning. We motorsailed for a while but sooner than I anticipated, we were able to turn off the engine and let the sails take over. That never gets old. The beautiful sounds of just wind and waves can be such a contrast to the roaring machine sound of the diesel. With winds between 9 and 12 knots out of the southeast, we were reaching along pointed almost directly at the Beaufort Inlet sea buoys many miles away. The challenge was the steering. The wind was pushing the waves up under Mollynogger’s starboard stern quarter. With each wave, her stern would rise and she’d shake her hip off to port. Without steering strongly against that shimmy, Molly’s heading would radically shift off to starboard, the genoa would then go slack and Molly would try to round up even further. It was a bit of a workout, but it was glorious sailing. Mother Nature was being relatively gentle with us.
We sailed all afternoon long toward Beaufort. Another boat accompanied us on a similar track. We had passed them after leaving Masonboro Inlet, but she later deployed a spinnaker and slowly crept past us. I had made some sloppy joe type mix with lentils and TVP the night before and had nearly thrown it out, but it was much better after the flavors had steeped together overnight. Later on, Victor craved the Spaghetti-Os that he had seen in the galley. Our cruise was mostly a luxurious romp on the ocean with each of us taking turns at the helm.
The chartplotter display had a bit of a lag which made holding a course more difficult than it needed to be. Victor had started following only the binnacle compass despite the air bubble under the dome. It was definitely easier to hold a steady course that way.
We were ten miles or so from the inlet when the sun had gone down and the sky and sea became equally black. Night sailing was not exactly what Victor had signed up for but I have always relished it. There were plenty of lights on shore, but not much in the way of visual references. The Beaufort sea buoys were still too far away to have anything to aim at. We had to rely on the chartplotter once more.
The same wind and waves had Molly doing the same dance as her stern lifted and she sashayed to starboard. Now, however, it was more mental work as the bowsprit waggled ahead of us with nothing but blackness before it. I was loving it and Victor was earning his nighttime sealegs.
The Coast Guard kept broadcasting a notice about a log floating in a channel somewhere. They sternly warned mariners to keep an eye out and mentioned the creek and the county where the log was a danger to navigation. I had no idea what county we were about to enter and wouldn’t have recognized a North Carolina county name anyway. We soldiered on through the night darkened sea.
Finally, I was able to make out the wink of a buoy light ahead of us. We were sailing ENE and would arrive at the inlet on a track almost perpendicular to the channel. At that moment, I only had to keep an eye on the distant light of the buoy with nothing but night sky behind it. On arrival we would turn sharply to port and head in toward Beaufort. Now that it was dark, our plan was to get out of the ocean and just far enough in the inlet to anchor across from Radio Island. After some rest and the return of daylight, we could get into the Beaufort Channel and around into the anchorage across from Front Street downtown.
After we had made the turn, we just needed to follow the channel markers of the inlet to get in. However, with all the lights of Beaufort, and Morehead City off to the Southwest, it was hard to decide which lights were the lights of the channel. I had thought that after turning toward the shore the action of the wind and waves would ease. That was definitely not the case. Further, as we approached the coast and the water got shallower, the waves were stacking up. We were still on a bit of an angle before the wind and Molly’s shimmy had gotten a little wild. The waves were taller and sharper. So when a wave came under the stern, we had a stronger hip shift to port and a longer ride down a bigger wave. I was really working to keep her on track; fighting the helm while struggling to recognize the marker lights and stay between them.
“I’m closing the ports,” Victor exclaimed suddenly! And he bounded down below to dog the portlights.
We smiled about it later but closing the ports was essential on our sleigh ride into the inlet.
Perilously, there was a flashing white light ahead that I couldn’t understand. I racked my brain to remember light patterns. Boats like Molly, plus ships, tugs pushing or towing a barge, vessels that are fishing or trolling or dredging or simply at anchor all display different lights for safety and recognition. Was I looking at a tow, a dredging operation, or what? I was still steering hard to stay in the channel while I tried to decipher what the hell that white light could be.
The Beaufort Inlet Channel swings to port at Fort Macon. We just needed to get off the ocean and around that corner to the inside. In addition to the flashing white light and the lights of town, there was a couple range lights for ships to steer by and the lighted buoys for the channel into town. The plethora of lights conspired against my confidence, but we managed to make the turn and started to look for the anchorage. As we turned farther to the west and got near Radio Island, it became obvious that the flashing white light was on a building. It was frustrating to think that a light on a building could cause a mariner such confusion. It was a fairly precise, regular flash, but I suppose it could have been some kind of electrical short or a maintenance problem. Regardless, I think it was dangerous.
As I turned off the channel to enter the anchorage to port, Victor spotted a boat with no lights anchored where we were headed. The white hull was barely visible in the moonlight. The moon had been in its third quarter two nights before so we had about half a moon. I steered well clear of the other boat. When we were far out of the channel, I watched the depth sounder until Molly was in about 10 feet of water and we dropped the anchor. We were quite relieved to be at a peaceful anchorage by then.
I don’t remember eating anything once the anchor was down. We must have had a beer, but I remember having to clean up the cabin. I had thought that things around the cabin were secure. Whatever mild negligence of mine, the floor was covered. Captain James Corbett of Salem, Massachusetts once told me “You’ll remember all your sins at sea.” Those words were ringing in my ears. It had been a long day and steering against the wave action was some work. I can’t speak for Vic, but I slept like that floating log.
In the morning a power yacht of a particularly sleek, modern design had anchored fairly close behind us. We raised the anchor and made our way into town. As we passed the yacht, her name, Contraband, was quite familiar. I couldn’t remember where I had seen her before, but I knew I had. Just a couple weeks later, while looking for something else I had found a picture of the Contraband from when I had been at the St. Johns Yacht Harbor outside of Charleston in December of 2022.
With the anchor down in Taylor Creek, I got settled in and Victor packed his bag. I rowed him ashore and he got a ride home. It was an amazing sight to see dozens of million dollar fishing boats lining the quay. It was the Big Rock Fishing Tournament week and there were many, many really fancy fishing boats in town.
Yep. Another touristy town, but there I was on my way north with no particular destination in mind.
Life was good. Still is.
