Still anchored in St. Augustine, and for the first time in a couple of weeks, it feels like I’m not just watching the weather—I’m getting ready to move with it.

The plan is to head out Monday and point the bow toward Wilmington, NC. The window is lining up the way you hope it does: winds generally in the right direction, nothing overly aggressive in the forecast, and a sea state that looks manageable for a solo run. Not glassy, but not something you have to wrestle with either.

It should shape up to be one overnight and then a full day run. Long enough to settle into the rhythm again—keeping watch, sail adjustments, checking in on systems—but short enough to stay sharp the whole way through. Its about 289 nautical miles from here.

The current thinking is to make landfall near the mouth of the Cape Fear River before dark on Wednesday, drop the anchor, and then work my way upriver toward Wilmington the following morning. I’ve heard enough good things about the town to make it more than just a waypoint.

For now, though, I’m still here. Anchor down. Watching the same water that, in a few days, I’ll be leaving behind.

It’s that in-between moment—when the boat is still, but your attention has already started moving north.

📝Harbor Notes

Sometime around 10:30 last Monday night, I stepped out into the cockpit before turning in for the night and found a neighbor where there hadn’t been one before.

Fifty feet off the stern, maybe less. Close enough that I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep with another boat that close.

Nothing had changed in any obvious way. Same anchor, same scope. But something had shifted the geometry of it all. The spacing. The angles. The invisible lines we trust to hold steady.

I was planning to move and re-anchor if required so I started my engine which caused the fellow on the other boat to come out on deck. I realized he was floating over my anchor, so pulling it up would prove difficult. I called over. He answered. We compared notes across the water like two people trying to reconcile different versions of the same story.

“You’ve got too much rode out,” he said. He thought I had too much chain out for the depth. Little did he realize I was in a deeper hole than he was.

It was a reasonable conclusion. It just wasn’t the right one. I had about 5 feet of anchor chain out for every 1 foot of depth I was in. Appropriate for the conditions.

He had set his anchor earlier in the day, and settled in with enough distance to sleep without thinking about it. The kind of spacing that usually holds.

But there were other hands at work out here.

One of them had come down from the northeast as night fell, steady and insistent, pressing on the hull, leaning into the rigging, asking the boat to lie one way. Another had been sliding quietly past beneath us, pulling in the opposite direction, less visible but no less committed.

Between them, they’d been negotiating.

Not with us—just with each other.

And somewhere in that quiet back-and-forth, our boats had been invited into the conversation. Pivoting on their anchors, tracing arcs we didn’t plan, closing distance we thought we’d already settled.

Standing there in the dark, it was clear neither of us was wrong. We were just seeing different pieces of the same influence.

We talked it through for a few minutes. No tension, just two sailors trying to make sense of a situation that didn’t quite line up with expectations. He decided to move and re-anchor across the channel. I offered to come over in my tender, help him reset. He waved it off.

A few minutes later, his deck light came on, and I could hear the windlass take up. He brought the anchor up and eased across the channel to a smaller anchorage with room to swing and drift.

The rest of the night settled down after that and I was able to sleep.

I mentioned last week that I finally got my fiddle back. I am really happy with its sound. The luthier who worked on it did a good job placing the next back on the body.

This week, its been coming out of the case regularly.

I spent some time working back into a few Irish traditional tunes—muscle memory more than anything at first. I used to sit in on a regular session in Austin, sometimes just listening, sometimes playing along when I could keep up. It’s a different kind of music to return to on a boat. Less room, different acoustics, more movement under your feet. But in some ways, it fits better out here than it ever did on land.

There’s a rhythm to it that lines up with the motion.

The tune I kept coming back to this week is a jig called Out on the Ocean. Six-eight time, steady and rolling, the kind of cadence that doesn’t fight the boat—it leans into it. I worked through it a bit each day, just getting it back into my hands, then finally made a recording.

Afterward, I paired it with some video from December—me and Antony sailing down through the Exumas, on our way to Georgetown. It was one of those days where things were a little more active than comfortable. Probably blowing 30 knots, maybe more, with the boat moving the way it does when everything is powered up and committed.

Not a calm day. But a good one.

Watching it back with that tune underneath, it all lined up. The phrasing, the motion, the feel of it—it all matched.

It’s called Out on the Ocean, which feels about right.

Give it a listen.

Another light week on the maintenance front, which I’ll take when I can get it.

I finally got around to something that had been sitting on the list longer than it should have—greasing the furling motors for both the mainsail and the genoa. I’d run out of grease a while back, so I had some shipped up to a friend in Jacksonville. We met up last weekend, and I was able to get everything I needed back on board.

What should’ve been a quick job turned into a small detour.

The grease ports are capped with nylon screws, and over time the heads had gotten brittle. When I went to back one out, it snapped clean off. No big deal, but it meant I had to slow down and deal with it properly. Being nylon helped—I drilled into the remaining body and worked it out with a bit. Took a little patience, but nothing complicated once I got into it.

After that, the rest went the way it’s supposed to. Fresh grease in both motors, everything moving as it should.

It’s the kind of maintenance that doesn’t feel urgent until it is. Easy to defer, easy to forget, but it’s what keeps things from becoming real problems later. I’ve been staying on top of that using MaintHub—the app I built—which has been doing exactly what I wanted it to do: keep the small things from slipping through.

Otherwise, systems are in good shape. The generator’s been running every couple of days to top off the batteries without issue, and nothing on board is currently giving me trouble.

The one thing I’m still watching is the raw water pump behavior after a rough sail. I replaced the cover recently, and I’m curious to see if that improves the seal enough to fix the intermittent priming issue I’ve been seeing. That’ll get tested soon enough once I’m back offshore.

For now, though, everything’s working.

It’s been a good stay here in St. Augustine.

It always is, but this one felt a little more settled than most. Maybe it was the extra time on anchor, or just the rhythm of being here without needing to move. A week and a half in one place starts to feel like something closer to living than passing through.

This town has always carried more weight for me than just another stop. My grandparents met here during World War II, when my grandfather was stationed in the Coast Guard. So every time I come back, there’s a layer to it that goes beyond the marina, beyond the harbor, beyond whatever I happen to be doing that week. It’s not just familiar—it’s inherited.

Being out on anchor has been easy. Comfortable. A couple of close neighbors along the way, but nothing that didn’t sort itself out. That’s part of it anywhere you go.

The dolphins have been the constant.

They’ve come through almost every day—sometimes a pair, sometimes a larger pod—moving through the anchorage like they’ve got somewhere to be but aren’t in much of a hurry to get there. I managed to catch a bit of it on video this week, which I’ll share here. It’s one of those things that doesn’t really get old, no matter how many times you see it.

If there’s a downside, it’s the weekend traffic. The party boats make their rounds—music up, voices carrying across the water. They’re not reckless, and the wakes aren’t bad, but the noise has a way of reaching you whether you want it or not. It’s a small tradeoff for being somewhere this active.

And that’s really what this place is—active, layered, lived-in.

There’s a part of me that’s always a little reluctant to leave here. It does feel like a kind of home. Not in the sense of staying, but in the sense of returning. Knowing it’s here, knowing I’ll come back through again.

But that’s not what this is about.

The weather window is lining up, the next leg is calling, and it’s time to move. I’ll be pulling the anchor in the next day or so and pointing north.

Leaving something familiar behind, and heading toward whatever comes next.