Not a lot to report today. The weather–the strong winds a lots of rain that was initially supposed to be here as early as yesterday morning–the weather that to get out of I’ve spent $400 at this marina for–you know, that weather. Yeah, with it’s been a compete bust. If I had my career to do all over again, I’d pick weather forecaster. It’s got to be the only job in the world were you can be wrong 80% of the time and nobody fires you for it. We did have a small line of thunderstorms come across this late afternoon for about 30 minutes, but no strong winds, no big waves. Phhhhhhht. Nada.
Slept in until 10:30 this morning! That was awesome. I’ve definitely needed to catch up on my sleep. Then, I confirmed with the marina office when slack current would be tomorrow and checked the weather forecast to get an idea of what Sunday’s weather was going to be. And lo and behold, offshore doesn’t look like an option for me on Sunday now. They are forecasting 4.5′ seas with a 4.9 second period.1 No bueno. In fact, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be good for offshore now for me until Tuesday! So much for skipping Georgia’s ICW!
I guess I could depart the marina tomorrow as planned and find a local anchorage to hang out at until Tuesday (to exit offshore via the St. Mary’s Inlet just north of here). But, based on how accurate the forecasts have been so far, I could end up waiting for a week! In the meantime, the hurricanes are coming to get me!!!!!
Instead, I’m going to motor up the ICW (once again!) to the Brunswick area (specifically, what is reportedly a nice anchorage just north of Brunswick to the east of Lanier Island). GPS says it’s a 35nm/6.5 hour slog. I’ll plan to spend two nights there as long as the forecast still looks good to head offshore Tuesday morning. (The Brunswick Inlet is just south of there.) The ICW up to that point is actually pretty straight forward. It doesn’t start to get real crazy until further north.
So, that is the plan.
The rest of the day was spent doing yoga, dishes, vacuuming the boat, taking Uber to and from Publix to stock up on produce and dairy (I didn’t want to bicycle because of the rain forecast, so that is another $20 the weather guessers owe me!) đ and doing more blogging.
I may wander into town now that the rain has stopped and see if the one microbrewery here has any of the dark kind of beer that I like. If not, I’ll come back to the boat and review how I plan to get off the dock tomorrow morning.
- People often ask me what size seas I’d be comfortable in. It’s not that simple, really, because it’s not the height of the wave that’s the determinant of comfort or safety. It’s the period between waves. More specifically, it’s a ratio of the height to the period. For example, I can be on 20-foot seas, but if the period between each wave is 30 seconds, my boat will just slowly rise up for 15 seconds then back down for 15 seconds. No big deal. But, if I’m in 6-foot seas that pass by every five seconds, it’s going to be absolutely miserable with the boat being jolted up and down constantly. And it could be dangerous if the seas are say, 15 feet with a 7 second period.
The basic rule of them is that the period in seconds should be greater than the wave height. The longer the period is, the more comfortable and safe the ride will be. So, in my case, having 4.5 foot seas with a 4.9 second period would be very uncomfortable even though the waves are relatively small. And while these kinds of waves won’t do anything to directly damage my boat, if the ride is so uncomfortable that it greatly fatigues the crew or makes them seasick, then that is dangerous.
Had the forecast called for 4.5-foot seas with a 10-second period, I would have gone offshore. The other thing to realize is that I need to be very conservative going out single-handed. Not only do I not have much offshore experience, but I need to be sure that if my autopilot (my very old autopilot) should fail while I’m offshore, it’s not going to put me in duress. With one or more other crew members in such a situation, someone can be at the wheel holding the boat in the direction it needs to be to change or reef or douse sails (or even to tack or jibe). Just being on my own, this would be extremely difficult, if not impossible for me to do depending on the weather. So, I’ve pretty much decided that for now, I will only venture offshore if the forecast is fairly certain that the seas will be below 4 feet.
Because the second rule of thumb regarding waves (and this is fairly recent research) is that whatever the forecast wave height will be, every 100 waves will be 150% of that height, and every 1000 waves will be double that height. This means if you have six-foot waves forecast with a 10-second period, you will experience a 9-foot wave every 17 minutes. Similarly, while 1000 waves might seem like a lot, in less than every three hours you will be hit by a 12-foot wave. Let me tell you there is a big difference between a 6-foot wave and a 12-foot wave, especially with a period of 10 seconds.
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