The Bahamas Started out with a Bang

Jupiter Beach, FL 12-5-21

Sally’s View

As usual, nothing goes to plan. It started pouring rain as we untied and headed to the fuel dock and then down to Lake Worth. We left about 3:30 in the afternoon with a plan to sail overnight to get through the Gulf Stream. In theory this will not be an issue. The good news is the rain is supposed to stop about 7:30 and all will be well. And if that isn’t enough, we start off and now the GPS isn’t working. Well after we got through the intercoastal (where you need it most), it finally started to work. The curse of the finder has continued for us. Now we are going to Lake Worth to and anchor and wait til we leave at midnight.

Ron spent all day renting a car again to drive down to Fort Lauderdale. He worked on trying to get the Satellite phone to work last night and again this morning, with no luck. The Fort Lauderdale store was the ONLY one that had the battery in stock. Well thank goodness he found one but he said traffic was a nightmare since someone in front of him hit an orange barrel and traffic freaked out. But it’s done and we are on our way. Funny, a $30 battery cost us $150 with car rental. I wish it had broken yesterday when we still had a rental car but oh well.

More tomorrow on how our plan worked. We spent the night at Sail Cay, which was beautiful, and we had it to ourselves. Since Ron had a stressful day looking for the battery, we hit the hay.

Ron’s View:

We quickly realized as we got south in the ICW it was a train wreck and once we hit Stuart, Florida all the cool cruisers were replaced with the asshole sport fisherman. They would pass so close and fast that the wake they generated would knock everything inside across the room. I imagined using the flair gun to discourage this behavior, but I would of ran out of flairs in the first 5 minutes.

I always imagined bringing the boat to West Palm Beach. I love that place and how cool would it really be? Well to answer that it sucked worse than I could of imagined. Just imagine navigating all these asshole boaters that have more money than brains. Each bridge was on a time schedule, so you had to time it to make the opening and then some bridges only open on one side. With the 63′ mast we had to go through the high side, which most often resulted in a game of chicken with one of the asshole boats. Let’s just say there was a lot of new words created during these events, and I was perfectly happy sinking one of those boats then rip my mast off.

Our time at West Palm was quick. We spent two days to finish provisioning, and a last minute panic trip to Fort Lauderdale for another iridium go battery (my cheap replacement was well shit). We need the iridium Go to work since that is our only means to get weather and communicate with the outside world when there is no cell coverage. Zero chance we could cross to the Bahamas with a nonfunctioning unit since there no way to fix once we arrived in the Bahamas. There is not much there these days after Hurricane Dorian.

We left Loggerhead marina at 3 pm on a Monday to stage at Lake Worth for our jump. It was dry all day but at 3pm, the sky opened and the hardest rain we have been in started. Fun, going down the ICW in the rain, but bonus, no asshole boaters.

Once in Lake Worth we saw at least 100 boats waiting to make the jump, The weather window was about to open, and you only want to cross when it is nice, and the wind was right. Chris Parker’s weather report mentioned that Monday night could be a good crossing night, but Tuesday might be better. We decided we are not getting younger, and let’s go. If we waited it was just another wasted night and we were as ready as we would be.

We anchored in a very crowded anchorage, sadly I picked a spot that after we anchored put us right over a possible obstruction under water. Not a big deal until you pull your anchor, and it is tangled in whatever is on the bottom. I envisioned pulling my scuba gear and untangling the chain if needed. Worst case we just leave a day later. With this idea in the back of my mind, and the added drama of the day resulted in zero sleep. We planned to leave at 11pm and I hoped to get at least a few hours of sleep. Nope!