Okay, it’s really our 2^nd passage with Ryana, but since this time we were without our excellent crew, Jack and Cynthia, I’m counting it as our first! It was the first time our there with just Ryan, me and Stanley. We waited until we had favorable winds from the south and the seas were calm. We set out Wednesday morning planning to get into the Chesapeake Bay sometime on Friday. Since there were no places for a boat our size to come into the coast we knew it would be a straight shot up North.

We started out well with light winds (< 5kts) so we motored along. Stanley got sick once before he found his sea legs. Around mid afternoon the winds got up closer to 8kts so we tried sailing for a while. With the light winds directly behind us we weren’t getting anywhere so we turned the engines back on. Things were uneventful until nightfall and around 10pm we were rounding Cape Hatteras. There was a lot of traffic at that point and we were using radar to dodge boats right and left. Having AIS helped a lot too as it would tell us what the boats were, their course and destination. We even heard the Captain of a tugboat that was towing a large barge about a half mile behind him admonishing another boat for not having AIS. He said in his nice southern drawl that they were basically idiots for being out there without it! Luckily we do so you can breathe easier Mom and Cindy! 🙂

Soon after all this excitement I went to lay down and Ryan was on watch. I woke up a few hours later to find him marveling at (freaking out!) the huge lightening storm farther out to sea. He said it was so intense that there was at least one lightening strike per second! Come morning all this had died down and since we’ve been motoring we’ve made excellent time. The Chesapeake is within our reach today! Given that fact and also that the dog had so far refused to go to the bathroom in 24 hours we decided to throttle up the engines and try to make landfall Thursday, about 15 hours early. By late afternoon Cape Henry was in our sites and we started getting that excited feeling telling us we had made it!! We got a slip in Little Creek and pulled in there about 7pm, almost exactly 36 hours after we left Beaufort. What sa great feeling! We have reached our summer cruising grounds!