We left Wrightsville Beach early in the morning, around 8:00.  By our calculations, we would be in the little river inlet around 3:00.  As we found out, our calculations were very wrong.

We travelled down the coast, past beautiful sites going to Cape Fear River.  We were at mile marker 300 on the Atlantic ICW, when we got the news Joe Biden won the presidency, and Kamala Harris will be the first female vice president.   WOO HOO    We continued to moter, down the Cape Fear RIver, seeing marinas, pelicans, and lots of beautiful landscape. 

As we exited the Cape Fear RIver, we put up our sails, looked at the distance to the LIttle River Inlet.  After sailing for a couple of hours, we calculated our entrance into Little RIver inlet.  We thought… how did we calculate this wrong?  It gets dark around 5:30 pm, and we would enter around 6:00 pm in the dark.   We just did not want to take a chance in running into a shoal in the dark in an inlet we didn’t know.  So, we said, “Let’s sail all night”.  The winds were good, the seas pretty calm, we can do this.   We have done this before, our boat was made for these conditions.  We set a watch schedule of 3 hours interval, and began our watch.

As the night progressed, the winds rose up and the seas got larger.    The winds grew to  a steady 22-28 knots, the seas rose to 6 – 8 foot waves.  We saw gusts to 38 knots.  Happy Together is a strong boat, and took care of us.   We were rocking and rolling all night, and we were over 20 miles off shore.   We were making good progress towards the next inlet, Georgetown.   However, if we continued down the coast, it would be another full day to go into Isle of Palms inlet.  It turns out Mytrle Beach is just shoreline, and South Carolina only has a few inlets closer to the southern end of the state.  We set our sights to Georgetown, SC.   We arrived in the Georgetown inlet around 3:00 AM, too early and too dark to enter a strange entrance channel.  We then set the boat to heave to, where the boat would stand still for a couple of hours until daylight.     

At daylight, we entered the long Georgetown passage, and anchored in the harbor.   Georgetown is a cute little spot, where I wish we could have enjoyed longer.   We had a nice dinner, a nice walk around the shopping area and then ice cream.  We returned to the boat, in the dark, where Happy Together was resting on soft mud.  We had to get the boat out of the mud and move it forward in the anchorage.   Why is it always in the dark?   After a good night’s sleep, we were off again down the ICW.  No more going off shore when the waves were over 6 feet, when the ICW is a perfectly good and safe to travel south.