On our way down the US East Coast we usually had a window of 1-2 days for good sailing (or motoring) followed by 4-5 days of strong winds from a low-pressure system. Funny enough, almost every time we had a good window was on a Monday or Tuesday, which are the two days on which Bernie works. Sometimes he could be found multi-tasking during his morning-shift, half sea-sickish in front of his computer, taking care of the kids, navigating and holding meetings all at the same time… Ela usually did the shift before him, so he got a couple of hours of sleep before the meetings.
As strong winds were predicted, we were on the search for a good hide-out near Charleston and were very happy to find Bohicket Creek (~250 nm from Beaufort, NC). At the entrance, we saw a few dolphins and then carefully navigated up the river until our anchor spot close to the marina. A tiny sand-bar even gave us a bit of protection from the ripping current so that we could spend a few very relaxed days in Bohicket. Everything was so practical: The marina close by with all amenities, a grocery store within walking distance and beautiful sunset views in the evenings. Also, the nightly live-music contributed to our happiness in Bohicket. Jannis and Julia were big fans of the live-music and also joined a jam-sesion with their harmonicas. To me it felt like we were slowly arriving in cruising life and we were even able to eat our meals in the cockpit instead of inside. Still we were getting a few boat projects done as well and Bernie installed the MPPT chargers for the solar panels. With those additional 2200 W of solar, we were all the sudden really power-rich! No more generator and much less power saving… Having this power would also enable us to use our watermaker to generate freshwater and run the washing machine (although it took another few weeks before we familiarized ourselves with the watermaker).
