February 2020

We spent a week and a day on South Bimini until the weather was right to sail east.  On the first day I did customs and immigration at the airport in the afternoon.  Then we started meeting all of our new neighbors; about 12 boats had arrived to the marina with us that day, and it was almost empty previously.

We spent some time marveling at the comically clear water.  It was about 10 feet deep around the docks and we could see perfectly to the bottom.  There were lots of minnows, plenty of 6" fish, and even some 12-18" ones.

The first or second day we went to North Bimini to see what it had to offer.  Louise came with to help.  The dinghy parking situation was not that good, just an aluminum swim ladder on a beat up concrete wall, with the east winds making some weird little waves to push our dinghy into the wall.  We walked around for about an hour.  Very interesting.  There was what appeared to be the power plant of the island, which I think was just a large diesel generator.  It makes sense that the marina charges $30/day for power, and we have seen some that have meters and charge $0.80/kWh (4-8 times what you might pay at a house in the US).  There were some grocery/convenience stores, some just small rooms absolutely packed full of packaged/canned food and some with a little more organization and potatoes, onions, etc.  Most prices are double that of an average US grocery store.

The no-see-ums were really bad the first two nights, but then it was pretty windy so they weren't a problem.  House flies were not deterred though!  We had to keep screens in most of the time--they block some airflow and make it tedious to go in and out.  We made a habit out of taking Louise to the beach by the marina in the late afternoon.  She would chase the tennis ball and I would look for beach glass.  The first time we went to the beach Anna couldn't find her phone when we got back to the boat.  So we went to the beach to look, and eventually I found it about 18" below the surf.  It still worked...for about two days.

I read six books in six days.  We did lots of crossword puzzles.  We watched the Vikings play (and lose) at the Thirsty Turtle, a bar a five minute walk away.  They had a pizza oven but were not able to get supplies to make pizzas before we left, still in the process of opening after renovations.  The marina had a new owner too.

One of the other boats in the marina was SV Twin (that we had crossed paths with as we approached Bimini) and they have the same model of boat as us.  This was the first time we had seen another one (excepting the one we looked at in Port Charlotte, FL when we were boat shopping, and one that we saw in passing at the marina where our boat's previous owners kept our boat) so we had a lot of fun touring theirs and showing them ours.  There are so many interesting differences!

For internet connectivity we could use the Wi-Fi at the marina office or at the Thirsty Turtle.  And probably half of the days I would take my phone out of airplane mode, resulting in an automatic $10 charge for 24 hours of great roaming connectivity (set up with Verizon ahead of time, some people were doing the same with AT&T too).  We had a Wi-Fi hotspot device with unlimited data waiting for us at Great Harbor Cay so we were looking forward to getting that.

The marina gave us a prorated price of $150/7 for our eighth night there and the next morning we departed at sunrise for Great Harbor Cay.  It was 80 miles to travel and we were going straight into a 10-15 knot wind and two foot waves.  Sometimes the bow would slam on a wave and Louise would get really scared.  Into waves and wind is not great for speed and it was a long ways so we ended up anchoring in the dark at 10:30pm.  It was an easy approach and a wide open area to anchor so not too bad.

On January 7th we left No Name Harbor just as the sky began to lighten.  As the sun rose above the horizon we were clearing the last channel markers off of Cape Florida.  A few boats were ahead of us and as we went a few more appeared behind us.  There were about 10 boats visible in total.

We held a course maybe 20 degrees south of straight towards Bimini in order to make a little headway south before reaching the Gulf Stream which would swiftly carry us north.  I don't remember the exact characteristics of the Stream that day but let's just say that about 5 miles out it became strong, so I altered course to maybe only 5 degrees south of straight east (yes, that would be 95 degrees).  I altered the settings of the chart plotter so that lines indicating both heading (direction the boat is pointed) and track (direction of boat movement over ground) angles emanated from our location marker.  It was interesting to see them differ by 15 degrees or so due to the combined current and boat movement through water.

The chief risk of crossing the Stream is that you end up heading so far south to keep from drifting north that you don't make much speed in the east/west direction, making the trip much different than planned.  This was almost not a concern for us since we started somewhat south of where we needed to be.  But still, I figured it was most efficient to get out of the Stream as quickly as possible, hence the almost straight east heading.  And after we got out of the Stream I could make up a couple of miles to the south without needing to motor against the current.  I didn't dream this strategy up on my own; it is described in the Explorer Chart books.

All the other boats seemed to be steering whatever heading would keep them on a line drawn straight between No Name Harbor and Bimini (again, not a big deal for a destination that is a little north of your start anyways).  With our almost straight east heading we drifted a few miles north of the main group of boats, crossed paths with SV Make Way and SV Twin, and drifted a mile or so north of them.  At that point we were within about five miles (I think?) of Bimini and I was surprised that the current still had not really abated.  The current ended up holding pretty strong until just one or two miles out so my plan of making up southerly distance out of the current yield any real advantage.  But we arrived in Bimini at about the same time (2:00pm?) as the other boats anyways.  (When I took the screenshot of the currents in the Windy app for this article I realized that it probably typical, I just didn't remember to look at the currents forecast that day.)

For the crossing we had a great breeze that would probably have let us sail at 5.5-6 knots but we motored at about 50% throttle too to put us at a solid 7 knots (IIRC).  When we started out in the morning there were some 2-3 foot waves coming from the north so it was a little bouncy but we did fine.  Those died down later in the morning so overall we had really nice conditions.

On the final approach to the island of South Bimini we followed another sailboat; they bumped a sandbar and backed off.  So we followed their new route and made it through the very narrow approach through the small jetties into the Bimini Sands Marina.  It was pretty shallow at one point in that channel, just shy of six feet maybe half an hour after low tide.  But we made it and docked successfully.  They had a rate of $150 for a week so we planned to stay there for that long as the wind was forecast to blow strongly out of the east for several days...and we wanted to go east!

I took a shuttle bus to the airport a couple miles away and went through customs and immigration for myself, Anna, Louise, and the boat.  Once I got back about two hours later Anna and Louise were able to finally step on shore.