All I can say is PHEW!!! Our 26-27 hour sail from St. Augustine to Beaufort, S.C. was quite a ride and turned into 31 hours. Because of the rain and thunderstorms that came thru St. Augustine on Monday and Tuesday, we changed our original plan heading to Charleston to a little more conservative one of only 1 overnight to Beaufort, S.C. leaving early Wednesday. That also gave us a chance to have one last sundowner with Roy & Michelle on "Dreamy". We sure will miss them and wish them safe journeys in EVERY path they will be heading down in the next 6 months! Wednesday, 7am, arrived with a beautiful cloudless sky, a fireball sun in the east and a light breeze out of the ENE we were expecting it out of the WNW! We were able to sail for only a couple of hours with 1-3 ft seas and all of the sails but in order to make our destination in 26-27 hours we needed to maintain 5.5 knots so the 'Yanmar iron sail" had to do a little assisting. What a beautiful day sunny, warm and calm seas, in fact that evening it was "dead calm", flatter than I have ever seen the ocean surface in a long time . Well that was just the calm before the storm. Chris Parker (our weather guru) said "be somewhere by 3am! The winds were all over the place but calm, from NE to E to S and even W when they clocked back to NE about 4am and by 5pm gusting to 25 knots with 10ft seas that were pounding at Triple Stars' hull like hitting a wall. Jan just couldn't keep her head under the pillow anymore and by 5:30 am came up to see if she "could help"! For the next 5 hours we bashed into the NE swells and had gusting winds to 36 knots! At one point we were only making 1.5 - 2 knots with the engine revved up at 3200 rpm and briefly considered turning back towards Savannah, GA and riding the swells instead of bashing into them. Not wanting to regress as long as we could make better than 2 knots we would press forward. We made it to the 1st buoy of the channel markers by 8:30...only 90 minutes behind schedule. It took almost 90 minutes to go 5 miles in the channel before we got to the mouth of the actual "Port Royal Sound" heading towards Beaufort. The next 2 hours were so much better and made it to Beaufort on an incoming tide by 12:30 looking for an anchorage. We only saw 1 suitable spot right by the town, so we continued thru the 1:00 "Lady's Island" Swing Bridge opening and anchored just a =BD mile or so north of the town. It's dead calm now and after a quick sandwich, sort of cleaning up (books and everything else that littered the floor from the passage)and finally a hot shower we are having a couple of drinks to celebrate our, cheese and crackers and GOOD NIGHT! Tomorrow we will begin to look at when we will head out for the next leg to either Charleston or Georgetown, since heading outside to around Cape Fear or Cape Hatteras will definitely wait until late next week some time!!!!