Navigator: Ocracoke, NC to Morehead City, NC

We departed Ocracoke, on the outer banks of North Carolina, with a stiff northeasterly breeze and made excellent time under a double-reefed sail towards the west, enabling us to enter the Neuse River and moor in Oriental, NC at a free town dock, right behind TOMKAT for a couple days. It was nice to run in to a familiar face again on the trek southwards!
After checking out Oriental (the sailing capital of North Carolina), we sailed in company towards Morehead City, which is our last stop in the continental US. TOMKAT continued on to the south, towards Myrtle Beach, where they will spend a month, and then eventually on to Florida and the Bahamas. NAVIGATOR will spend about 3 weeks here in Morehead City (just across a bridge from Beaufort, NC) while we do some maintenance and watch the weather for our imminent departure to the islands.
Hurricane season officially ends 30 November, but after 1 November, storms are so rare that most boats heading to the Caribbean use the latter as the departure date. We intend to depart right around the first, weather permitting. So in the mean time, we check the weather three times per day to get an idea of the trends in the offshore forecast.
Some of the weather information we check is the surface analysis charts, which indicate areas of high and low pressure, and accompanying winds and seas. We also use the 500 millibar chart, which is basically a chart indicating the location of the jet stream - the jet stream is the "highway in the sky" which mid-latitude cyclones tend to follow. For our friends in New England, this is why you tend to have nor'easters making their way up from the Carolinas every week or so. Finally, we keep a close eye on the National Hurricane Center website for tropical forecasts and analysis.
Once we leave the coast, we won't have access to the internet, so we have also been practicing with our single-side-band radio, which is a high-frequency radio capable of transmitting and receiving data from thousands of miles away. This enables us to receive voice forecasts for the tropics and the mid-latitudes at any time during our voyage. Additionally, when used in combination with a computer with appropriate software, the SSB radio enables us to receive weather charts via fax, over the air-waves. So all the charts we look at on the internet are available for fax "download" over the air, it just takes a lot longer than clicking on a "favorite" website. But it helps keep us informed at sea.
Aside from tracking the weather, we have plenty of maintenance to do to keep the boat happy and looking good. Today we rode our folding bikes about 12 miles to get some supplies from the local "shopping mecca," including boat parts, toiletries, notebooks (I'm very particular about my notebooks), and some tools which we have misplaced or dropped into the sea over the past couple months.
Some may ask: "Why Morehead City/Beaufort?" We chose this location as our "jumping off point" for a couple key reasons. Given a 1 November departure (for the reasons stated above) from the Continent, the usual spots to depart from are Newport, RI, Norfolk, VA, Beaufort, NC, and Florida. We ruled out Newport because the distance from port to the Gulf Stream is about 350 miles, or 3 days sailing for us. This is too far to enable an accurate weather forecast, and the absolute worst thing we could do is find ourselves in the northerly setting Gulf Stream when hit by a Nor'easterly blowing wind - bad news! Plus it's too cold for our liking this time of year. Norfolk is a decent departure spot, but it is north of Cape Hatteras, the graveyard of the Atlantic, and about 200 miles from the Gulf Stream, so a bit more challenging at this time of year. Florida is too far south, and would require us to beat into 1200 miles of easterly trade winds to make our destination - that is not happening in a 34 foot sailboat.
So that leaves Beaufort, which is ideal for us because it is only about 100 miles from the Gulf Stream, enabling us to get safely across that "river in the ocean" with a good northwesterly forecast. Additionally, it is south of Cape Hatteras, which is the breeding ground for all the nor'easterly gales that make their way up the east coast. So we will wait for a good forecast around the 1st of November, boogie across the Gulf Stream under full sail, and then work our way south of Latitude 30N, which is the southern limit for November gales. After that, we'll make as much ground to the east in the zone of variable winds, before heading south to pick up the trade winds at about latitude 24N for the final leg.
We anticipate it will take about 14 days to get to the islands, but we have a few contingency plans in place (as I'm sure anyone who knows us would guess). These include stopping in Bermuda, which is right along our track line, to wait for good weather, or bailing out to the Bahamas if the weather gets too bad. Our goal is to anchor at the island of Culebra, just east of Puerto Rico, but weather will dictate our ultimate landfall, which could be anywhere from Puerto Rico to St. John, to Tortola and the British Virgin Islands. Any of which sound just fine to us.