Catamaran Delivery, Day 7: Beaufort, NC to Hampstead, NC

Dec 6

It was a cold, cold day.

We cast off the lines at 6:30am, leaving from the Beaufort town docks, aiming to reach a small fuel dock / marina in Hampstead, NC. It promised to be a long day; we estimated that it would take us 9-10 hours on the water, and when we arrived, the marina in question would have no services other than restrooms, fuel, and showers.

It’s a somewhat sparse section of the ICW, and we’re going to have a few days with runs like this. The weather, thankfully, promises to warm a bit in the coming days; we’re still seeing daily temperatures in the low 30s, despite being in NC. However, it was a starkly beautiful run - we saw dolphins again, as well as various beaches that opened into the open ocean. The gale has passed, but the wind and waves out there are still quite kicked up.

After stopping and filling our fuel tanks up, I flipped on the reverse-cycle air conditioning. After 15 minutes, the temperatures had not gone up at all, and I could hear a weird gurgling sound from the bilge under the port hull. The captain and I pulled up the floorboards to inspect things, and found that one of the seawater intakes was clogged with leaves, kelp, and detritus, suggesting that it hadn’t been cleaned recently.

We were concerned for a time that the system might be airlocked, but thankfully that wasn’t the case. However, we still had no heat, and upon further cushion-removing, locker-spelunking exploration we found that the evaporator for the salon and port hull AC was frozen solid.

I used a heat gun to try to warm it, but ultimately we needed to simply let it thaw on its own. I turned my attention to cooking, and made chicken arrabbiata over polenta. I also managed to give myself a second degree burn in the process, as my finger slipped onto the metal handle of a pan that had been in the over.

Nursing a bag of frozen hash browns, we ate, then curled up and watched Captain Phillips; it’s shocking that Tom Hanks - normally on my list of milquetoast actors - didn’t get more praise for his fine acting at the end of the film. The accent was a bit rough, but otherwise I enjoyed it greatly.