Sailing Ohana

Our final voyage in the Bahamas was crossing the Great Bahama Bank overnight. It’s a beautiful crossing that we did last season, and the water is less than 20 ft. deep the whole time. We decided to do it overnight so that we could enjoy a day snorkeling on a reef that looked like it might be interesting, then spend the rest of the day and night at Honeymoon Harbor next to Gun Cay. Tommy and I each took a long shift then anchored at 4:00 am and slept until we started moving again around 9:00. We approached the reef with large waves on our stern so they didn’t feel like much, but when we considered jumping in or dropping the dinghy, we realized it was way too rough. None of us were willing to go through the hassle, so we kept on going.

Arriving at Gun Cay to end our time on the boat felt very fitting and sentimental… It’s where our Bahamas experience really started last season, where we anchored with SV Adiona and saw sharks and rays, and where Jackson chose the conch for his horn. We snorkeled around a small cay next to Honeymoon Harbor, and swam in the crystal clear water. Spencer and I jumped off the boat and he practiced his beautiful dives. The boys and I took the dinghy to the beach to pet the rays and see the baby sharks. We planned to come back in the morning with some fish guts that we were saving to use as bait, so that we could feed the rays. I took photos of the same spot we explored last season and marveled at how it feels like that experience was a million years ago, and how much we’ve changed since then. I had the feeling of looking at a place with different eyes than I had before.

We had a cozy night on the boat, turned on the a/c, and watched a movie. We were glad that we had closed up the boat for the a/c when the storms rolled in and it started raining. Tommy and I were awake a lot of the night, watching crazy lightning outside, and storms on our radar. We put the dinghy up in the middle if the night, just in case. Luckily the worst of the storms hit about 1 mile south of us and blew past us. It was scary and when we looked at the forecast, we could see that these storms would be kicking up between us and Florida every day and potentially night. We agreed that there would be no way for us to cross overnight as we had planned, because traveling with squalls like that is hard enough in daylight, and nighttime was a handicap we didn’t want to add. We talked to the boys and decided to go without taking down the dinghy and going to feed the rays.

The morning was calm as we motored a short distance to South Bimini to check out the shipwreck of the Sapona, a concrete-hulled cargo steamer that ran aground near Bimini during a hurricane in 1926. https://www.bahamas.com/natural-wonders/sapona-shipwreck                                               The snorkeling was interesting… A good amount of coral has grown on the concrete and there are many large schools of fish, turtles, and rays. We were getting ready to swim back to the boat when several tourist boats pulled up, yelling and shrieking and playing loud music, and we knew it was time to go.

We unceremoniously pulled up the anchor, and while the boys did their online school, we sailed West, to Florida. It was a relatively short passage, only about 8 hours, because Bimini is pretty far West, and also we had the Gulf Stream in our favor. There were huge storms that built up over Fort Lauderdale and we actually had to show down in order to time our arrival in-between the storms. We were glad that we weren’t navigating that at night!

We arrived at the marina a little anxious because it is one of the most difficult to maneuver in, due to strong currents and very narrow passages between rows and rows of large, $million+ boats. Once we worked our way in, we found that there was another boat in our assigned slip that our contractor uses for boats they’re working on. It turned out they had been delayed by the storms and they sent us to the slip they had originally planned to go to, and we agreed to just switch in the morning. But there was a boat in that slip, too.  Fortunately Just Catamarans (the contractor) called and gave us directions to an open spot nearby, where we could stay for the night. It was a stressful re-entry to the US, but we made the best of it and got a good night’s sleep. The guys from Just Cats came and moved the boat and secured it for us the next morning while we were making breakfast, and I almost hugged them.