Last State!

Chris Hannant

Another long passage to skip past Georgia and arrive in Florida - the last state before jumping over to the Bahamas! With building swell and wind, timing getting into St Mary’s inlet was critical. We needed to arrive at about midnight or later to have slack or incoming tide. Ideally slack. At this point the swell was forecast to be 5’ at 5 seconds and with a wind against tide situation that would not be fun. We left Beaufort at 6am and had beautiful wind on the beam for the first couple hours in the ocean. As it clocked more behind us, we had to drop the main. Stupidly, I forgot I had 2 fishing lines out and after turning up into the wind and then back on course we ended up with one wrapped in our starboard prop 🤦🏼‍♂️ Luckily the sea state was still relatively calm and I was able to jump in and clear it. From there we had a solid few hours of speedy wing-on-wing before the wind built too much for the code 0. We went down to just jib and one engine on for a while just to keep our timing consistent for the midnight arrival, but eventually we had to start slowing down big time so we cut the motor and started reducing sail periodically. The wind and swell continued to build and eventually I just had a tiny sliver of headsail out and we were still doing 5.5 knots practically bare poles. Thankfully this was allowing for a perfectly timed arrival to the inlet. Just as things were really starting to pick up, we were able to draw an angle between the jetties that kept everything behind us until we were protected. A couple sets lifted us up at a butt-clenching angle but Cloud handled it incredibly well and didn’t get squirrely on us as she surfed down a few faces. Felt very good to get into protected waters and anchor behind Cumberland Island before crossing back over the boarder into Florida at Fernandina beach the next day. Such a lovely little town where we are celebrating Talon’s second birthday today!