The weather is such a capricious mistress. When you sail, you have to sleep with her, but you never quite know what you're going to find when you go to bed. Is she going to show her dominatrix side or is she just going to roll over and nod off?

Wednesday and Thursday the waters off Cape Fear and Cape Hatteras were nothing short of sedate. Mistress Weather was making ZZZs and you'd think that would make for an uneventful passage. We left Charleston at 5:00 a.m. and the sun rose as we were making our way out the harbor entrance. The winds were light from the S/SW and though we sailed for a bit that day, we mostly motor-sailed. There was a bit of chop left over after the weekend blow, but by late afternoon it was so still, you could walk around deck quite easily.

Then the dolphins came. There were about a half dozen of them in the school. I ran up onto the foredeck and lay down on the bow, reaching my arm over the side. I was shouting to them and clapping and whistling and they would turn up on their sides and look at me, our eyes just over an arm's length apart. They would surface right under my fingers, splashing me and bringing their dorsal fins within a fraction of an inch of my fingertips, but never quite close enough for me to touch them. One fellow in particular with a small maze of scars on his back, kept nosing the others aside, wanting to be the one getting all the attention. Like people give each other air kisses, I was giving him air petting and he seemed to be enjoying it.

Finally, I stood up and tried to take some pictures of them and while they made a few more passes under the bow, they tired of the game when I was not so close, and they took off. I had accidentally put my camera onto the movie mode, and I'll try to share my several seconds of dolphins at the bow with you.

I took the first night watch and it is quite a sensation powering through the blackness with a few billion stars above and a night so dark, you cannot make out the edge of the earth where the sea meets the sky. I was listening to dance music and rocking out in my safety harness, oilskins and baseball cap. If the dolphins were still around, I'll bet they were cracking up!

Bruce came up at midnight and Chip, the Intrepid Seadog and I took to the bunk. Chip loves coming off watch. He runs around the big aft bunk delighted that he is allowed in the bunk - which is usually off limits for him.

When we went back topsides a little after three, Bruce was hunched over the cockpit VHF radio. He'd been listening to a developing situation. There were two boats that left Charleston that same morning with us, but they motored faster and had passed us. One of them, a 47-foot Catalina with a singlehander aboard, had run over a bunch of line and fouled his prop. The other boat had gone to his assistance and they had sent a dinghy over with one of their crewmembers and he was diving on the prop out there 35-40 miles offshore in 100 feet of water in the middle of the night. In the end, one diver without air wasn't able to hold the knife and underwater light at the same time. One of the boats managed to raise Boat U.S. towing service out of Wrightsville Beach and within about two and a half hours, the guy had made it out to his boat, gone over the side and cleared his prop.

These GPS systems linked to the autopilots are so accurate, that I actually had to take the boat off auto when I came upon this guy several hours later. We were making the rhum line from Charleston to Beaufort and he was sitting out there waiting for his diver right on the course line. I talked to Tom on the VHF as I passed him, and I said I hoped he would soon be under way and able to pass us again. Sure enough, just before we arrived in Beaufort, he sailed by once more.

Later, we all shared a beer outside the marina office and Tom remarked that he had been so lucky to have that happen on a night when the weather mistress was snoring. Yes, but had there been a little bit of wind, he could have sailed. So while we call her capricious, so are we sailors - never happy.

Fair winds!