I thought I would pass this along. I just received this from some friends who were on their way from Morehead City to St. Augustine. Paul & Chris have sailed from Seattle to FL and Nova Scotia to FL plus some. Not rookies. They do have AIS on their Outbound 44.
...Now comes the exciting part. At about 4am we were motor sailing 32 miles offshore approaching Cape Fear. There was some moon, but the overcast skies made for a dark night. I was on watch, while Chris was sleeping in the starboard bunk. Crunch! The sound was like the old soda and beer cans, when they were thicker than todays paper thin ones, being stomped on on the sand. A metal crush muffled sound. I jumped up and pulled the throttle back to idle. Chris jumped up and reinserted her heart back into her chest. Having a medical background can be helpful in these situations. I looked behind me and there was 20-25ft cabin cruiser style fishing boat a few hundred feet off my stern. No lights! Just the gray looking outline of a white boat in the dark. It looked like a boat that was abandoned or just drifting. I turned the boat around to investigate. Then the green and red running lights turned on on the boat. I tried raising them on the radio, but no response. Eventually we came up close enough to yell to them, “Are you OK?” They said yes. We then yelled at them to pick up channel 16 on the radio. After a brief, somewhat strange conversation, he said he was fine, that we didn’t need to stand by.
Looking at our boat showed no damage. The best I can figure out is that we did a glancing blow with our 77lb Spade anchor on our bow. I had the Radar running at the time with a 2 mile guard zone. It is supposed to sound an alarm if anything enters the zone. This boats radar signature was just too small. Night watches became even more diligent from then on.