Can You Hear the Jimmy Buffet? – November 17, 2022, En Route to Green Turtle Cay, Bahamas

With all the hurricane preparations stowed away again and a beautiful weather window upon us, we decided to do the crossing to the Bahamas.  We started Tuesday morning and left from Vero Beach, dropped anchor at Fort Pierce for a few hours waiting on the change in tidal surge, then left out the Fort Pierce Inlet at 3:00pm.  We had not been this route before since last year we went south through West Palm and out Lake Worth which is shorter but our weather window wasn’t long enough for us to make it down there then go out so we took the route we could fit in.

The first 4 or so hours were pretty choppy (thank you Bonine for keeping me from getting too seasick!) since we were heading south against the wind and current we hoped it would get better once we turned East, it got a lot better. It took us 28 hours, averaging 5.5 knots over 168 miles (yes, we move very slow & motored the entire way). Hitting the Bahama Bank (very shallow with debris) at dark was not high on our to do list so we scrubbed time to minimized the dark time. My sleeping quarters was the dining room table which drops down into a 5^th bed on our boat. Now how many people get to say they slept on the table last night? I think Ron got 1-2 hours of sleep max and he was beat.

We dropped anchor at Great Sale Cay about 3:00pm which was just in time for burgers on the grill and a beer!  We were treated to being the only boat here and I have to say, I forget how beautiful the water, and everything is here.  It feels really good to be back and we really could spend the rest of our sailing days getting lost in the islands here if we didn’t have such itchy feet.  It was surprising the amount of debris after the recent hurricane.  There were lots of logs, a dock ladder, and crazy amount of seaweed on the bank.

Since this was the first time Sailing Hubby let me do solo watches, I finally feel like a sailor.  In total I did three official watches:  one Tuesday from 5-8pm, 10-midnight, 4:30am Wednesday morning – 6:30am, then off and on over the course of the day when he needed a break.  He wanted to be on watch during the swiftest part of the gulf stream and when we hit the Bahama Bank, which required him to be on the longest watch from midnight – 4:30am.

After catching on up some sleep (yes Sailing Hubby went to bed at 6:00pm), we continued 8 more hours East, as our initial destination was Green Turtle Cay to check into immigration.   If we didn’t make it by Friday morning to check in,  we would be stuck in quarantine all weekend and wouldn’t be able to get off the boat.  Therefore, we were up early and headed out by 6:00am Thursday (but at least the dolphins came with us – a very good omen).  It didn’t hurt there was a small squall headed straight for us and we wanted to get going before it hit us.  But hey – we broke out the sails which helped us move a bit faster with the wind behind us.  Ah, the realities of sailing life.  Speaking of realities, I am a bit gun shy of Green Turtle since the no-see-ums were SO bad last time.  Especially after just getting eaten alive at Vero Beach.  Our mooring was right next to the mangroves, and they are vicious!  I swear I have Zika from those little suckers!  Let’s hope Green Turtle is better & we don’t get struck by lightning on the way there.  At least we were off to a good start with the double rainbow.