We Made it to Saturday morning after a long night of beating we got.

So Saturday morning Dec 17th I must have fell deep asleep and then all of a sudden I hear bamm, clack (ok so its hard to explain the noises I heard) so I fly up out of the bunk and didn't see Joe! My first thought was he went over board! (humm maybe this is a good thing wonder if I'm in the Will?) I look out back and Damn he was still on the back of the boat pulling out the head sail. (So much for the Will thought) So Joe got the head sail and mainsail set up and finally shut down the engine after listening to that thing for 24 hrs. whew quietness is awesome! Oh Baby,baby,baby!! Yeah! We were sailing along about 7-1/2 knots SWEET but still very rough out there.  Watch Video below.

The wind finally clocked around to the West and we had apparent winds of 20 knots 60 degrees of the bow. The 7.5 knots [big heel] we sailed at all day until 5ish allowed us to make up some good time lost the night before since we were motoring into a blow. As the winds died we left the main up-no Joe left the main sail up- more about that later! Duh

We were on the rum line off the Georgia coast and quite a ways from land-like in the 20 to 50 mile forecast zone [close to 50] where the waves and wind are significantly higher-especially since a high pressure system came thru that night- whew-
good sailing and nice day- more fishin' -Joe caught the big one!!

With 2 hand lines and one pole out, a seagull came up and for over an hour kept diving down to try to catch the spoons we were trolling. He just wouldn't give up. It would have been a mess if he got caught-so you know which one of us would have to deal with it- yeah-too bad Steve wasn't here to help!
The boat did awesome and our set up worked great-with Radar at the chart table, an auto pilot hand held remote, a great chart plotter software at the chart table on a laptop, in bad weather we can manage the boat boat from below, with looking out from time to time. At night there's nothin' but black.
And big cargotainer ships parked around each other 40-50 miles out from Charleson harbor. So we had quite a time dodging them using radar, visual,and navigating the big wind and 1 am. It seemed like forever to get past them when we were motoring 3 knots into a head wind.
On Brians watch about 3 in the morning he saw 2 blips on the radar and went above to check them out. It looked like 2 lights off in the distance. As we got closer the lights stayed in line with us.I was already turning to starboard but couldn't avoid these lights and then I also noticed a big black object between them . I decided to turn to port and that worked ! We started to go around these lights as we got closer it was 2 huge tugs pulling a HUGE container ship !!!! Man ,we were on a crash course with this ship about 25 to 30 miles out to sea. NO Worries!