Charleston to St. Mary's GA

With new batteries and alternator we felt confident leaving for the next overnight trip of 120 miles from Charleston, SC to St. Mary’s GA. The forecast was 15-20 knots (1 Knot = 1.1 mph) of wind out of the North East with 5 - 7 foot waves, this sounded a little rough but doable.. We motored out of the channel about 7 miles to where we were out of the shallows and reefs that surround this and many other harbor/river entrances. As we were motoring the waves started growing higher and where quite steep and irregular. In the deeper ocean the waves were spread way out cresting every 7 seconds or so and 5-7 foot waves are nothing to speak of. In the shallower area that we were in these wave grew taller and closer together with crests coming every 2 seconds. We were wallowing fore and aft and side to side in a very uncomfortable motion. We decided to carry on a little further into deeper water hoping that he wave pattern would improve. About 10 miles out we found no relief and decided to come back into the harbor. Motoring back almost directly into the wind and waves was even more uncomfortable and rough than when we were coming out. About 15 minutes into our return trip a loop of the roller furling headsail flipped open about ½ way up. After a few seconds it tugged enough sail back to flip again it did that 2 more times and now we had about 2 foot of sail pulled out over a length of about 10 feet. This was very odd as the roller furler did not actually unroll, the material simply pulled out enough in the wind to unfurl and it snow balled. I tried to unroll the furler but a line was fouled and before I was able to do anything the headsail tore in several different directions and places. After a while of trying to motor in the wind and waves with this huge flag pulling the boat off course repeatedly we figured out how to wind the sail up enough to get the shreds out of the wind.

Remains of headsail
We got back in the marina and did a decent job of docking quite unlike our first arrival where we tried to back into a narrow channel against the tidal current and ended it up spinning out with people scrambling to help us 2 times. This lovely boat is great for straight line cruising on the open sea but not so good in tight quarters, especially at low speeds.
Going below we found the laptop on the cabin floor along with the microwave which had fallen off of it’s low shelf and was hanging by it’s power cord. We found out that Corel dishes do in fact break and that Ziggy really, really hates this kind of sailing.
We cleaned up fixed up and decided to wait for better weather which finally came 3 days later on October 26th.
Our buddy John showed up about 2:00 pm and we shoved off with a full compliment consisting of Rick Moeller, John Hoshaw, the lovely Julie Lambert, Ziggy and your’s truly, Capt. Mark (Bligh) Lambert. The weather was chilly but pleasant, there wasn’t much wind so we motored most of the way with the main sail up to lend a hand.
We came into St. Mary’s, GA mid afternoon looking for a marina to stay at and finally raised the harbor master on the radio who told us to go to the far docks and cautioned us to look out for the boats on the dock. We motored over to the dock with our fenders (great big rubber baby buggy bumpers for the side of the boat) and lines out ready to dock. We docked fairly well this time and noticed that just 10 feet ahead of us there were ¾” diameter bolts sticking out of the side of the dock up to 2 feet. The dockmaster wasn’t warning us about boats, he was warning us about the bolts but in his southern drawl something was lost in the translation.