Chub Cay to Bimini - the Grand Bahama Bank from hell, revisited

I woke up on Tuesday morning to troubleshoot an issue with the running lights.  As usual, when you need something to work, it stops working.  I tested it the night before precisely for that reason and discovered it wasn't turning on.  It only took me a few minutes to figure out the problem and fix it.  Afterwards I made breakfast, raised the dinghy, and left around 9 AM.  Undaunted followed closely behind.

The winds were a bit stronger than forecasted, I got to the nortwest channel during an ebb and the current was ripping, it was bumpy and steep but not difficult or scary...  On my way to the channel, I observed what looked like an exposed reef just a few feet from my boat.  I rushed to check my GPS location while at the same time keeping an eye on the reef.  The GPS confirmed that I was in good water, then I realized the "reef" was actually the dark topsides of some type of whale, and that there were a few of them swimming around!  Obviously this only happens when there is no one around to confirm your story when you are telling it at the bar. 

Once on the banks, I set my course for the Cat Cay waypoint... ETA 2am... I figured I might end up anchoring somewhere in the banks.  The wind fell and so did my speed, so I shaked out the reef in my main. The wind shifted direction a few times, sometimes it would be just behind the beam, other times it would be directly on my stern.  For a while, I even rigged a sort of whisker pole  by putting a block at the end of the boom, and running a line from the cockpit, through the block, and into the jib clew.  Undaunted chose the northern route through the banks. I wanted to check the cat cay route, so we slowly parted ways.  They reported having caught a 12 pound Mutton Snapper while trolling on the banks, so i threw a line out to test my luck... We chatted on the VHF until we could tell our distance was making our comunication difficult, so we said goodbye, like I've had to do with so many awesome people during this trip.  I caught a chunk of seaweed on my lure, the ocean sure owes me a large amount of fish by now, the odds have to be stacking up in my favor.  I have a feeling that the ocean is like "the house" at a casino, the odds are stacked in it's favor, but if you spend enough credits, it gives you a couple back to make you think you will win in the end, but sailors, fishermen, and other gamblers should know that in the end, "the house" always wins... but I digress.

A lonely dolphin swam along my boat for a while in the middle of this featureless dessert of sand and sea called the Great Bahama Bank.  Night fell and although the wind was not strong enough to warrant putting a reef in the main, I did so anyway just so I might not have to do it at night.  To my surprise, my speed did not drop, and the jib filled up with better wind than before.  By this time, the stars had started to shine and everything was perfect.  There were no boats around and it felt kind of spooky to be sailing alone in the middle of nowhere, headed towards even shallower banks which I would have to navigate by moonlight (and GPS).  I took a couple of short naps.  My speed rarely dropped under 5.5 knots and the wind was building at the rate of a third world construction site (slowly).  I got to the east side of  North Cat Cay at around 11:45 PM and started to look for an anchorage.  I couldn't find any calm water so I ended up sailing all the way to South Bimini through some really shallow spots, in strange waters, super tired, and at night... basically begging for something to go wrong... somehow, Murphy spared my last night and I made it to Nixon's Harbour in South Bimini around 2:00AM... not bad for 90 nautical miles.  By the way, the wind increased throughout the night while I was sailing, at the end, I was doing 5.5 knots with a deeply reefed main and deeply reefed jib! What ever happened to the promised night lee that Bruce Van Sant claims occurs in the banks after a sunny day and a forecast of under 15 knots????

Anyway, this morning I woke up and was pleased to find that the nameless Catalina 27 was anchored a few yards away, they made it around 5:00 AM!  We waited for slack high tide and motored over to Browns Marina.  Southern Blue and Wandrian are still somewhere on the banks...

Today I will experience the elusive activity called a proper shower, which, if I remember correctly, aids one in getting to that mythical state of being called "clean".

Seas the Moment reaches Nassau

We spent about 5 nights at Chub Cay, two of them at the pricey marina, three of them anchored out in a couple of nearby spots.  There isn't much to do in that little island, so we did plenty of reading, walking, sleeping, etc...

I was a bit upset when I wrote my previous post about Chub Cay (and it shows in the tone and mood of my comments), but after a couple of days I finally understood why such an expensive place offers so little services to the cruising sailor.  In short, the project to renovate the whole club seems to have gone a bit bankrupt, and we don't represent their core business, so they don't cater to us much... we met some friendly and interesting people there, and we had a good time while doing nothing... we met a fisherman named Dave who sold us snappers for $1!!! We met a singlehander named Jerry who had small 27 footer and was just cruising on $500/month! We met another singlehander named Dave who was sailing a 31 foot catamaran and had done this trip about ten times already!  Anyway, there was not much to do in Chub Cay and we wanted to move on, so as soon as the weather cleared up, we weighed anchor and set course for Nassau.

Our trip to Nassau started rather eventful, our navigation lights did not work!  I was not going to head back just for that, so I managed to jury-rig some nav lights with some broken portable ones I had from a previous boat, a flashlight, and some duct tape!

The weather was calm and the light breeze was on the nose at first, but as the morning sun rose, the wind started shifting to the north just a bit (exactly the opposite of what the weather forecast mentioned) and I was able to motorsail most of the way to Nassau!

As soon as we reached Nassau we saw Dave from Miou (pronounced like the noise cats make) the catamaran, he had left after us, and passed us at night, having reached Nassau about an hour or two before us.  As soon as we saw Miou, we heard Spice hailing us on the VHF!  Dan (from Spice) had speculated that we should be reaching the harbor around that time and was trying to find out if we had arrived, he must be some sort of psychic.  We sailed into Nassau Harbor and right through the cruise ship docks into the Harbour View Marina where Spice and another boat we met in Bimini were staying.

We have been spending plenty of time walking around town, visiting some interesting spots, and procrastinating on boat projects... We will probably be staying for a week or so around here... then on to the Exumas.

Crossing the banks and Chub Cay

This afternoon we finally reached Chub Cay (pronounced chub key), this is about 80 miles from Bimini... most of it directly against the prevailing seas and winds...

We had waited for a "weather window" in Bimini for about 12 days and I suppose we were getting a bit anxious to leave, Bimini is a nice place and Browns Marina is very cool and affordable but we wanted to see some more progress...

We left Bimini on Sunday afternoon and "staged" ourselves on the west side of Bimini (protected from the prevailing winds) so that we could save some time on the whole passage.  We left our weighed anchor around 4:15 AM on Monday and started navigating by GPS until we rounded a rock on the north end of Bimini which also is supposed to have a light (doesn't work) and headed east towards the northern end of the Mackie Shoals on the Great Bahama Bank (a huge stretch of shallow featureless sea mostly about 20 feet deep), we had probably something between 15-20 knots on the nose the whole time, the chop built up about two feet, often in a particular wavelength that simply stopped my boats progress to about 2 knots... I only carry about 14 gallons of gas on my boat so I was a bit concerned from the start about our range... I ended up using about 10 gallons the whole way, and that is because I decided to go slower than our friends on Spice and Chevere which could do better speed.

The trip has the following four waypoints: North Rock (Bimini), Mackie Shoals (Great Bahama Bank), Northwest Channel light (Banks), and Chub Cay (Berry Islands).  We couldn't make all of them in one shot so we decided to anchor for the night near the Northwest Channel light.  This was the right thing to do because we were exhausted, we could not see anything (7:00PM on a moonless night), and we didn't want to end up on the reefs near the channel that leads the bank's water into the Northwest Channel.  However, this decision of anchoring on the banks lead to the WORST night I've ever spent at anchor... we had sloppy, iregular, two-foot chop, we were near a highly transited channel, it was pitch black, our boat was rocking and rolling very bad, and everything onboard had this saltwater mist that makes everything permanently damp... The wind also picked up during the night and made the chop worse, I was even considering weighing anchor and going back to Bimini (which most likely would have ended this whole trip)... The next morning the wind started to settle down to about 10-15 knots, it also shifted a bit and made our leg to the Northwest Channel partially under sail, and then, from then on, once on the Northwest Channel, we were able to sail in deep water with longer period waves which did not stop us as much for a while... until we got anxious to get to Chub Key and rest.

Chub Key is an expensive private marina that is most likely not interested in having non-members rent fees for a few days... the service is poor, the amenities available to us non-members are very sub-standard, and I now understand why I rarely see cruisers recommend it... anyway, after such an awful night, we feel great to be tied up to a dock and not have to rock like crazy on heavy chop.

We will now be waiting for a new weather window to go to Nassau, some of the boats that left on Sunday from Brown's Marina in Bimini are already on their way there.

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!

Miami - Getting ready to go

Miami

Yesterday was my last day of work, I am now officially on vacation.  Our boat is on the hard at Manatee Bay Marine in Key Largo, we are getting the bottom painted and installing a new VHF+AIS receiver.  Our mainsail is at the loft getting some reefing points added, we have yet to buy a dinghy and a few other important things for our trip.  I'm pretty sure many of the items in my to-do list will just have to wait.

Our boat, Seas The Moment, is a 1982 Catalina 27 Standard rig, we hope she will be able to take us safely across the Bahamas and hopefully much farther!  We have owned her for a little over a year and she has taken good care of us so far.  She seems to be solidly built and her previous owners have taken very good care of her.  This is our third sailboat and we bought her from a good friend who decided to move back to Peru, we were looking for a boat because we didn't feel that the boat we had at the time would be a good fit for extended cruising.  We were looking for something small, comfortable, in good shape, easy to repair, and with a big bimini (something our previous boats did not have!).  We found Seas The Moment and it fit all of our criteria, so we made a deal!  We have not spent as much time sailing this year as we would have liked but I suppose we will catch up on all this soon.


We have been flirting with the idea of sailing south for a while, it seemed like an impossible dream to pursue (time, money, common sense, etc), but lately everything seemed to fall into place and we have decided to try it out.  If successful, we are hoping to go as far south as Cartagena, Colombia, but for now, we are focused on getting our boat back and making it to Bimini, Bahamas.  For the last couple of years I have been devouring all of the literature on making this trip, we know it is not an easy or comfortable trip, especially for a small, fin keeled vessel with an outboard, but we believe that as long as we are patient on the weather, we should be able to make every leg of the trip in safety and comfort.