In late September, we'll be back on the boat. (I'm writing this at the end of June, doing a little armchair sailing.)

In October we hope to be jumping "outside" at Beaufort to sail for Charleston.

This will be 32 or so hours at sea. Ideally, it's 32 hours or relatively flat seas and a favorable breeze.

What are the odds of this happening?

See Pilot Chart 106. The October pages have this little nugget of goodness.

The wind roses show me that there's only a 1-2% chance of no wind. (Those are the numbers inside the rose.)

The rose below Hatteras has two interesting features. The long arrow coming from the Northeast tells me the most common wind direction. The 5 feathers tell me the most common wind strength: 5 on the Beaufort scale, which means 17-21 knots. This is very sporty, and suggests we should be carrying nothing more than mizzen and stays'l.

The predominant direction would be ideal for a ketch to run down the coast. The strength is likely to be a bit much, but, we can reef to keep things under control.

Inside the dotted "100 fathom curve" there's a favorable current, suggesting we shouldn't try to get very far from shore.

The pilot chart has a lot more details that I didn't take screen shots of. For example, we're unlikely to get waves above 12′ in this area during October. (Twelve Feet!?!!) There's a chance of extra-tropical cyclones, which can lead to extremely bad sailing, forcing us to wait. And temperatures will remain moderate.

But this isn't the current, local weather. This is weather history. I need to start getting the weather emails again.

https://www.weather.gov/marine/faq#3

This is an antiquated, but still very nice service to provide email of forecast products. The science project nature of FTPMAIL is a holdover from the early days of the internet. But. It still works. I want some of the AMZ100, all the AMZ200, and some of the AMZ300 suites of products. I send an email, I get the text forecasts.

If we can't get out in October (or early November,) our fall-back plan is to drive down the ICW. As we get to the end of the year, the seas can get bigger, even though the winds are more moderate. We might find a window, but we can't wait forever. By December, the waves in the North Atlantic are getting bigger from the effects of winter storms to the north of us, and the ICW is our path of least resistance.