Steve and Laura's Excellent Adventure

The conditions for our journey to Charleston from St. Augustine were as expected, with light winds and flat seas. We were forced to run the motors a bit more than we had hoped - roughly half of the time - but there's not much choice when your SOG (speed over ground) drops to 2 knots.  At 46 hours, the travel time was at the longer end of the model projections, but we had timed our departure appropriately and arrived at the Cooper River Marina in Charleston with plenty of daylight to spare.  Sunset Departure from St. Augustine We saw very little boat traffic during our two days at sea but had an interesting sighting as we entered the Charleston Harbor....a huge, single-masted sailboat. This was something we'd never seen before so Steve looked up the name of the vessel using the AIS (Automatic Identification System) information on our navigation system. The vessel's name is "M5" and we later learned that M5 is the world's largest single-masted sailing yacht, wit

We were up with the sun on Father's Day, looking forward to beginning our northbound sail from Satellite Beach to St. Augustine. We started with a quick dinghy ride to shore with Jake so that he could stretch his legs before our overnight trip and had completed our pre-departure checklist by 8 am. After the engines had warmed up, I began lifting the anchor. After about 10 feet of chain were pulled in, I noticed that the chain was wrapped in some sort of green aquatic growth.  I told Steve that it would take a few minutes to clear and then set about trying to free the chain. I removed a bit and then pulled in more chain, thinking that we would reach the end of the matted material soon. The more chain I pulled in, though, the more material wrapped itself around the chain. And unfortunately, this stuff wasn't your run of the mill plant. It was like a very fine mesh. In fact, at first, I wasn't sure whether it was aquatic growth or a net. After struggling for a while to pull th