Bimini... Finally!

Like any other project in any aspect of life, leaving Miami took longer than anticipated... We had a number of setbacks but most of the real reasons for us not being able to leave sooner were related to procrastination and not having a good plan to tackle all of our pending tasks.

We tried to leave on December 24, 2012 from the Coconut Grove Sailing Club and we initially headed south to Caesar's Creek to get a good angle on the wind and so that we wouldn't have to fight the Gulfstream so much.  We left Coconut Grove around 3PM and got to Caesar's Creek around 9PM, it was a slow but nice sail, a perfect start to our trip!  We anchored near Caesar's Creek and figured we would take a nap, wake up around midnight, go out through the channel and onto Bimini... Due to our misinterpretation of the charts and the fact that we were not familiar with the channel, we ran aground!  We tried all kinds of things to get us off the ground but we were unsuccessful, so we left an anchor out and went back to sleep... Around 4:30AM we were off the ground thanks to the tide and we were too tired to try to leave at that point, so we anchored in deeper water and went back to sleep.  We missed our weather window.  Have you ever heard about 'Never enter a strange harbor at night'? I guess I took it too literally, even though I knew about this, I somehow did not apply this principle to leaving a strange harbor at night... anyway, we learned our lesson, hopefully we won't make the same mistake again!

We spent the next few days anchored in No Name Harbor waiting for the weather to be just right, but it wasn't until the night of Tuesday, January 1, 2013 that we were able to get a good window again.  We said goodbye to some friends again and we left the Coconut Grove Sailing Club at 8:30PM that night.

We motored across Biscayne Bay in a calm, out to the open ocean through the channel just south of Cape Florida, and initially towards Fowey Rocks Lighthouse in order to not have to fight the Gulfstream too much while going east to Bimini.  I originally thought that we would be able to sail across the Gulfstream, but the wind didn't seem to be coming from the south enough for me to do that, I did try it for about half an hour to an hour, most of that time was spend going mostly north and loosing ground... We reached Bimini at 12:00PM on Wednesday after motoring for almost 15.5 hours, that was a bit longer than I expected!

We will be hanging out in Bimini until the weather looks favorable for a run across the banks hopefully to the Northwest channel light, then to Chubb Cay or Nassau.  The weather doesn't look like it will make this leg of the trip easy anytime soon so we will be hanging out here for a while.

We are currently docked at Brown's Marina, the staff is excellent and we have been very pleased with their service, I recommend it.  There are a number of smaller sailboats here, some of them are planning on going on in the same general direction so we will try to tag along.

We went fishing a couple of days ago and caught several fish, I might try my luck at spearfishing later on and hopefully I'll catch something reasonable...

Wish us luck!

PS:  There are plenty of sharks in this harbor, Lorena was going to step onto the boat from the dock and while she was looking down she saw a 10 foot shark (probably a bull shark!), then while talking about that the next day we say a few more right off the dock!  Note to self: no swimming after dark!