Hi Everyone, hope you are all well?

Right now we are motoring up the coast en route to Charleston, South Carolina. We are about 90 miles east of Jacksonville, FL. We are about 160 miles south of the entrance to Charleston harbour and we are due to arrive early tomorrow morning (Wednesday 17th May). We have covered 228 nm in just under 25 hours since leaving West Palm Beach; pretty fast!

We are “sailing" in the centre of the Gulf Stream and last night we topped over 12 knots under sail. The Gulf Stream current is about 3.5 knots. However we have now lost all the wind which is forcing us to use the engine.  We are still moving at over 10 knots and taking full advantage of the Gulf Stream flow.

We arrived in West Palm Beach, FL on Saturday (13th May) and anchored to the south of the harbour entrance close to Peanut Island. Re-entering the US was a big milestone. We (Rick, Mike and Howard) had made specific journeys through Miami and New York in April to ensure our visa status' were active. Arriving and getting checked in before our I-94 visas elapsed again (17th May) was important and which required us to all make a visit to West Palm Beach Customs and Immigration.

The anchorage was nice enough. It had a nice view of all of the West Palm Beach mansions. However the harbour is very busy with all shapes and sizes of boats and ships. Sports fishing is a big thing here and these boats move in and out of the harbour really fast creating large wakes which disturbed our peace and quiet. We did not do very much during our stay; we did some shopping and prepared for heading north. We had in fact intended to leave on today (Tuesday 16th) but we spotted some heavy weather forecast for the Charleston area and decided to make a run for it so that we could get in to harbour before the weather arrived.

Not much else to report right now. Things are a little quiet but we are hoping for some wind later on today. We did get some visitors earlier on today. 

Anyway, that’s it for now. Will give another update when we are in Charleston. 

In the meantime take care of yourselves.

The Crew aboard Lilli Mae.