Sailing School in Beaufort, SC
We had been in Beaufort, SC for nearly two weeks now and it’s time to keep heading north.
Last night the smell of meat loaf in the oven and chili verde on the stove filled the salon as Liana prepared food for our upcoming passage. 
We have learned that good, easy-to-reheat (or eat cold) pre-cooked meals are an essential part of a good, safe passage. As Forest Gump would say, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.” This is true for passage making also. Sometimes you can prepare a three-course meal while underway and other times fixing a PB&J sandwich takes every muscle of your body to not let it and you wind up on the floor in heavy seas.
For days we have been watching passageweather.com. This is a great planning tool because it shows six-hour weather intervals that include wind speed and direction, wave height and direction, pressure changes and precipitation. We had a short three-day weather window with the southern end closing in behind us and getting nasty. Up north it was going from nasty to nice. We needed to head north quickly. But these are only weather predictions because guessing what God is going to do is still just a guess.
So this morning we made coffee at 5am, started the engine and navigation systems, and as soon as the sun gave us enough light we were off. Liana untied the mooring lines and let them slip off the ring from the mooring ball. The tide was ebbing out and we were at max current going back out to sea. This was a good plan because riding the current out is a free ride and the max ebb was around three knots.
But as soon as we got to our first bend something seemed amiss. The helm was jerking and it was not smoothly turning as it should. Silhouette has hydraulic steering, she can power thru the heaviest seas with little effort. So what was up with our steering? My first thought is a crab trap line might be hung up on it. Or something worse like the hydraulic ram might be leaking, or we could have a steering cable coming apart. All of these are bad things. Needless to say we turned around and went back to the mooring field and tied back up.
I put on dive gear to check it out. 
Nope, no ropes, no lines, no broken stuff under the boat. The rudder moved as smooth as can be. Next we emptied out the garage. The garage is a huge storage space at the aft end of the boat – big enough for Jimmy Hoffa and at least four of his buddies. It’s full of extra lines, dive tanks, dive gear, spare covers and an extra anchor. Under all of this stuff is the handling gear for the rudder. So we unloaded the garage and put it all out on deck.
Finally, we could lift the deck plate that protects the steering system. This is all heavy duty equipment – Silhouette displaces nearly 50,000 lbs so it has to be strong. Liana operated the steering at the helm and I watched it all work from inside the garage. It was fine. Everything is in perfect working order. The hydraulic lines were all like new – no leaks, the ram nice and clean, the cables – all in great condition. Nothing was wrong.
We came into this inlet under auto pilot so I never touched the helm until we turned in to pick up a mooring. So I did not feel the current against the rudder in these tight bends in the river where the current gets accelerated by the narrow channel. What I was feeling was turbulence from the changing velocity of the water. Ok, we’re good -but now the tide was flooding back in. We decide to wait for slack water after the max flood is done. We do not want to motor against the incoming tide that is running heavy. Slack water was at 2:30pm so we wait. 
In the mean time, I cleaned the hull of the marine growth that multiplies here like weeds.
Underway again. This time the rudder felt completely normal because we were at slack water, problem solved. Leaving Port Royal inlet was a blast! We found huge rolling waves as soon as we got out to the ocean and they were heading right into us.We would rise and fall ten feet or more. Then the waves would crash and spray away from the boat. Liana was at the helm when the bow plunged into one of these. I was sitting in the front of the cockpit. We both saw it coming. The bow went under and twelve inches of white foamy water rolled over the fore deck like the surf meeting the sand on the beach. I ducked just I time to get soaked. 
We were having fun.
After a few hours at sea we turned northeast and unfortunately put these seas to the beam. The rolling started. Waves would rise up underneath us and drop us back down – side to side. The port side rail would roll into the water and then rise up and we would dump the starboard side. Very uncomfortable.
We watched the sunset and the storms started to build. The storms that we should have been north of eight hours ago were now surrounding us.
To be continued..