Let's Catch Up World - Part III

OK, I may get carried away once I start writing.

April - Weeks 3 and 4

The time spent at Black Point was pretty anti-climatic. We did discover a fantastic bakery there. Lorraine’s Cafe and Hide Tide Cafe were both owned by the same family. Lorraine’s mom baked the bread herself. When you ask to buy some bread, they send you to her mom’s house behind the cafe. She’s a wonderful woman, and her house smells like a dream.
I spent a lot of time focused on work that week, and getting things set up to hand off to my successors so we didn’t really get a lot of time to explore, snorkel or dive.

Highborne Cay to Rose Island

I was paying careful attention to the weather and the following Saturday we were on our way back north. We took raised the sail while we were still at anchor, and once the hook was up, we immediately started heading north. We took a longer day (all of 6.5 hours) that Saturday, skipping past the Shroud Cays and the park, and picking up a mooring ball at Highborne Cay. The next day, we sailed to Rose Island and anchored there for the work week. This would be our staging point for the jump to the Berry Islands.

We were afraid this anchorage would be really crowded but it wasn’t too bad. We did get a lot of charter boats that would come in for the day or a single night, but these were boats with a professional crew hosting events, so it was pretty routine.

We had a good weather window the following weekend and sailed from Rose Island, back to Bond’s Cay. We were a little surprised (and a little unrealistically disappointed) that there was another boat already there, but we were only there for the night anyway. The next day we raised anchor and headed back to Cistern Cay, our first stop after we cleared into the Bahamas four months and a small eternity ago.

This is also the place where my resignation would take effect on April 30th. We were waiting for a weather window to allow us to run up to Grand Bahama Island, near Freeport. We’d taken on fuel at Highborne Cay but we were able to sail so much of the way that we wouldn’t need to take on fuel until Grad Bahama. We got off anchor and spent a night in Great Harbour Cay marina to top off our water, pick up some provisions, and stretch our legs a bit.

Our next trip would take us to Grand Bahama Island for the first time. It would be much of a stay but it was new to us. No longer working also had the benefit of removing the artificial time-constraints to travel. We were free to move whenever a window presented itself and we felt like moving. This was an amazing sense of freedom that I would quickly come to take for granted.

May - Weeks 1 and 2

We finally made the jump on May 3rd for Lucaya, Grand Bahamas. Our actual course was not that direct. We had good, steady wind but a lousy point of sail because the wind was coming from the southeast, almost directly over our stern, so we were forced to jibe for about half of the trip. This basically means that instead of heading directly for where we wanted to go, we had to progress at an angle to it. This is easier to show than explain. Jibing tends to be a more violent maneuver than tacking, the difference being, when you tack, you turn the bow of the boat through the wind, and there’s a moment where no wind is in the sails. When jibing, your stern passes through the wind, and there is never a moment when the sails aren’t in the wind. The result is that as soon as the stern passes through the wind, the boom immediately slams to the other side of the hull, which can be pretty jarring, especially in significant wind.

Making forward progress by jibing

It slowed us down, but we still made good time and docker around 3:30pm, which was pretty good. We stayed overnight at the Grand Bahama Yacht Club. This let us top off on fuel and we got to eat the first pizza we’d had in 4 months. It was amazing pizza. Or we just hadn’t had pizza in so long I thought that. I going with both answers.

We spent a lot of time looking at the weather. In fact, we had been tracking the offshore reports for the past 10 days. We had originally thought we’d stage up at West End, on the farthest west tip of Grand Bahama, but in the end, we felt like the weather had shifted enough that we were either going to need to go the next day or wait until the end of the week. We were waiting to leave until around 2:00pm for a couple of reasons; first, tide would be with us as we left the channel pushing us out to the open water, and second, the trip was going to be something like 13 hours and if we left too early, we’d be trying to enter the Ft Pierce Inlet and anchor in the middle of the night. Having never been there, that just seemed like unnecessary risk for no gain. Getting off the dock seems to be an eternal challenge for me for some reason, the wind always seems like it’s blowing me onto the dock no matter what, but we managed it this time without too much banging of the stern.

The good news was that we were nose to the wind leaving bell channel so as soon as we were clear of the reefs we raised sails and started heading west.

The Gulf Stream was strong that day

Everything was going a treat. The wind was being a bit of a slacker, we were hoping for a little more than 10 knots, but we knew it was going to pick up later. Life was pretty good! It was about the time that we rounded West End and started leaving the shadow of the island that things started to change. The wind picked up a bit, as expected, which was good. We also knew there was a slight chance of scattered showers or possible thunderstorm, which wasn’t great but not a huge deal. The seas were about as expected wave-wise, maybe 3 feet. We could see a sailboat way off in the distance, north of us, looking like it was heading in towards Grand Bahama Island. But as the minutes rolled by, I noticed that it looked a little unfocused. It didn’t take long for me to realize that it was raining way over there.

As we got close to where that red mark is in our route, looking at the clouds, it quickly become clear that “ a chance of thunderstorms” had turned into, “buckle-up buttercup, this is about to become an E-ticket ride”.

There was lightning going on to the northwest-north of us, and to the south you could see sheets of rain. We were somehow caught between the edges of these two storm cells. This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how mother nature wanted to play with us.

We quickly shut up the boat as the rain began. The wind was coming out from just off the our port quarter, blowing just over my right shoulder as was at the helm station. We didn’t have the genoa up, just the main, which was good, because this mean that the apparent wind speed, which is what the sails will be reacting to, was about 5-7 knots less than the true wind speed since we were running away from the wind, and we were getting gusts of 25 knots. There was no way we were going to be able to reef, or even safely get out onto the deck, and we ran a real risk of damage to the sails if we couldn’t reef and the winds were that high.

We danced between clouds and lightning for about an hour and then as suddenly as it started, it was over. We adjusted course, pointing back to Ft Pierce, and continued on our way.

We spent a couple of days at anchor in Ft Pierce, long enough to eat out, pick up some necessities, and then headed up the ICW for a few hours to Sebastian. It was a little surreal making the trip north up the ICW revisiting Sebastian. It seemed a lot less eventful this time around. It was definitely less crowded.

We stayed a night in Sebastian and motored north the next day to Cocoa where we anchored on the north side of the Jimmy Buffet Memorial Highway, right across from the entrance of the Canaveral Barge Canal. We arrived in the late afternoon and were planning to stay there a couple of days to wait on a weather window but we rapidly changed our minds before we’d spent 24 hours there.

The next day was a nightmare of lovebugs. They came out during the late morning and early afternoon the next day. There were so many of them that you could barely see the cockpit floor.

We still needed to wait for the weather window before jumping back out into the Atlantic, but it was worth moving the boat just on the offhand chance that we could reduce the number of bugs. So we cleaned up as best we could when evening came after the majority of them disappeared, and the next morning, we were up and moving. We motored across the canal and anchored on the Banana River.

This anchorage turned out to be great. We had one other neighbor, there were falcon launches to watch, and best of all, no love bugs. Miracles do still happen.

For those that don’t know, there is a lock at Cape Canaveral that grants passage from the Banana River to the Atlantic Ocean. We were very excited about going through a lock for the first time. It’s the simple things in life. The plan was to go through the lock and take a marina slip the day before we left, and use the marina as a staging point to jump right into the Atlantic the next day.

We stayed there a few days waiting for our weather window, and, as planned, we made our way to the lock planning to get into the slip as soon as they would allow us to dock. You see, we’d been watching the weather and wanted to avoid pulling up the anchor or docking in the rain that was scheduled to come through.

Everything was going according to plan. The rain hadn’t started but we’d already gotten the anchor up and were holding position waiting on the lock to open. I was a little concerned because the wind was kicking us around much harder than I’d expected. Turns out that some significant wind was preceding the rain. We spent the time waiting on the lock opening to decide which side of the lock we wanted to tie off to. I’d originally thought the south side but that would have made it a pain to tie off. There was no one to help so Debbie would have tie off the bow, and I’d jump up and get the stern tied off once she had the bow secured. So, in my infinite short-sightedness, I thought, we’ll just tie off to the north side. The wind would be working with us instead of against us. This was as far as my pea-brain reasoned.

Getting tied off was pretty easy task. This was so easy even we could do it. It was a bit anti-climactic, honestly. We just had to man the bow and stern lines and loosen them every minute or two as the water dropped. Before you knew it, it was time to leave. Or at least attempt to. My pea brain hadn’t thought far enough ahead to realize that 18 knot winds were going to be pushing us into the wall. It wasn’t until I sat down at the helm that I realized, this may have been a very bad idea. No help for it now, just have to push on through!

Debbie pulled in the bow line, I pulled in the stern line, jumped into the helm seat and realized that I had no idea how to get this boat off the wall. In addition to the wind, there’s a suction created in the lock that pulls the boat to the wall as well. I attempted to walk her sideways to absolutely no avail. Meanwhile Debbie was madly trying to push us off the wall. She was engaged in heavy breathing exercises to maximize her strength. Or that may have been her just screaming at me. It was hard to tell because I was busy exfoliating the port stern against the lock wall. I was helpfully removing barnacles for the Corps of Engineers at the same time.

After about 90 seconds of Debbie, myself, and the boat screaming at me, during which time I’m quite certain the lock operators were kicked back with a bowl of fresh popcorn, We got off the wall in time to exit the lock without taking out the gate.

Now, we just had to get the bridge to open up for us. So, we radioed the bridge that faced us as soon as we cleared the lock that we were requesting an opening. The bridge operator informed me that as soon as it was safe to do so, she would. You see, there was construction happening on the bridge. The construction was on the south side of the bridge, which was locked in the down position.

This is what its supposed to look like

As a result, we were informed that only the north side of the bridge would be opening. And just to add to the fun, since I was trying to hold position in the canal, the wind decided to turn it up to 11, and the rain was beginning. Good times!

We eventually got the bridge up, made it through, and started trying to call the marina to get a slip number. Fun fact, the marina was on lunch break, so no one was answering the radio. Meanwhile, the rain was coming on like it was the dateless kid during the last dance of prom. The wind had also decided to crash the party. We made the command decision to just get the boat on the dock, and they could move us later if they felt like it. Debbie was up there desperately trying to guide me in while I was trying to dance with the engines against the wind, current. I was really wishing I had tiny windshield wipers installed on my glasses.

For the record, running your diesel engines at spinning at 1600rpm in an attempt to overcome the current while still trying to gently dock is not as easy as it sounds. Debbie was, once again, a champ. Drenched in rain, guiding me in, she got the bow line, came back and got the stern, and we finally got snugged up against the dock. Debbie went inside to get dry while I walked barefoot and drenched to the marina office to let them know what was going on. This only took a few minutes and soon enough I was back on the boat. About 20 minutes later the rain slowed to scattered sprinkles and the wind took the rest of the day off.

Despite the sound of a thousand nails on a chalk board that exfoliating the boat caused, the damage was actually quite minimal. Maybe that will be our first boat project where we work with gelcoat.

The marina was actually quite nice and we really liked the place, and we met a nice Canadian father and son duo who came in a couple of hours after we had. They were having some issues with their electrical cord so we lent them a spare pigtail so they could top off their batteries. They, too, were headed north, and asked our opinion on ICW routes to get avoiding sailing around the outer banks. They were concerned about their 6 foot draft. We departed at almost the same time, and tracked their AIS signal for quite a while before losing them.

Our next leg was an overnight to Jacksonville, FL. Well, not quite Jacksonville, we were really headed to the town of St Johns, which is about a 5 hour trip down St Johns river from Jacksonville. I had a couple of work colleagues that we wanted to try and visit if we could. Family commitments meant we wouldn’t see one of them, but we were about 10 minutes from Ivan’s house. He invited Debbie and I over for dinner, where we met his wife, kids, and they’d prepared a lot of traditional Serbian food.

I cannot tell you how fantastic a time it was. Thank you, Ivan and Ivana, for hosting us.

The biggest downside was that our anchorage was a little nerve-wracking. The river was insanely low and what should have been 5 feet was only 2.5, so yes, we were sanding the bottom of our boat a lot when we left. The only good news is that the riverbed was pure, very fine, silt, which meant that we were literally plowing furrows through it. Not something I want to do again.

We only stayed a couple of days at St Johns. We picked up fuel on the way out of the river, only had my intentions questioned by 2 professional captains, and generally made it out with no incident.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sticking around.