Daylight, Wind, and Equipment

Sailboats at Anchor in Charleston Harbor

(Written morning of Tue Nov 19)

We are continuing to work our way south one daylight hop at a time. Last evening we arrived in Charleston SC and are holed up at Safe Harbor - Charleston City marina for the week. We did three, one-day hops to get here: Sat - Southport NC to Little River SC; Sun - Little River SC to Georgetown SC; Mon - Georgetown SC to Charleston SC. (And all these Carolinas coastal towns are super cute - but that's a whole other blog)

Those three days were kind of stressful to be completely honest. As newbie sailors, we’re very much trying to avoid pulling into new inlets / anchorages / marinas in the dark. So we need to restrict our travel time to daylight hours. We really enjoy sailing with engines off, and greatly prefer that mode of travel. BUT, for reasons I’ll explain below, we were obliged to motor all 3 days.

Older photo of Luthien with sails up under previous owners

It is winter in the northern hemisphere. So at our latitude, this means (today, in Charleston) sunrise is at 6:54 am, sunset is at 5:16 pm, and allowing 30 mins on each side for decent visibility during twilight, means we have about 11 hours 15 mins of daylight.

The dependence on daylight is very different from when I was working. Sure, during the winter months, it was dark when I went into the office, and dark when I left the office. Which was kind of depressing. But the office itself was well lit. Streets were all well lit on the way to and from the office, and of course our houses are cozy and warm and also very well lit. I definitely could not tell you what time sunrise and sunset was off the top of my head on any given day.

These people are not worried about what time sunset was

Anyways, back to sailing. By some weird coincidence, all of the safe inlets that can accommodate a boat of our size, are ALSO 11 hours apart, if we are making a steady 7 - 7.5 knots all day in mostly a straight line to where we want to go. So that means we are up BEFORE the crack of dawn, get off the dock as the sun is rising, sail / motor while the sun is up, then pull into the next port just as the sun is setting. It is a bit of a hurry, hurry, are we going to make it in time, stress out.

Now we “can” make 7 kts all day under sail, if we have 10 - 15 kts of wind from most directions that are not directly against where we are trying to go. We can also tack upwind, but this greatly increases total distance sailed and time it takes to get to where we want to go. And the winds were not favorable over last three days. Here is what our wind instrument looked like yesterday. (The needle tells you where the wind is coming from, relative to your boat. IE directly head-on in this case).

Ugh - wind is dead on the bow

As I mentioned earlier, sailing, and tacking if necessary, would be greatly preferred to motoring, if we had more daylight hours or if the safe ports were closer. EG, if we were sailing near the Tropic of Capricorn right now, sunrise would be approximately 5:40 am and sunset would be 7:00 pm - nearly 13.5 hours of daylight. More than enough time to sail from port to port for us even if we had to tack. But we are not at the Tropic of Capricorn.

Where the daylight is at right now

And finally, there is the damn anchor. Our windlass failed on Friday of last week, which means we cannot raise or lower our anchor, and are obliged to sail / motor from marina to marina. This greatly increases sail time during the day, because these ports are often (always) up a river. There is a modest little anchorage right inside the Georgetown Inlet that we could have stayed at if we had a working anchor. Instead, we had to motor up river 10 nm (12 regular miles) to Georgetown marina, which added 2 hours to the end of our day on Sun, and 2 hours to the beginning of our day on Mon.

Georgetown Marina is 12 miles up a river from Georgetown Anchorage

So hence the title of this week's blog. Daylight, wind, and equipment were not our friends last week.

BUT nevermind all that. We’re in Charleston now, and comfortably docked. We think we’ll stay here a whole week. We’ll definitely get our windlass fixed before we move on. Terri is having a sleep in as I write this. I am having a coffee in the cockpit watching the sun rise instead of being on a zoom call. (apologies to those about to get on zoom calls). We are within walking distance of the bar / restaurant district, which could be dangerous, lol.

• Todd

This is the last time we were in Charleston - Camelias in Aug 2023