Snorkeling for conch in Green Turtle Cay

Jeannie and our good friend Didgie "snorkeler extraordinaire", she found 6 conch 
hmm chowder or fritters ...heck both

West End

We arrived at the West End of the Bahamas the other day and cleared customs. Fairly easy and straightforward. We have a fishing and cruising permit through early July 2012....

We are tied up next to Susan and Ray, beautiful setting.

Across from us is NV with Bo and Oswe. They will travel with us for the next week then they are off to the Virgin Islands for the winter and the Med in the Spring.

Just to the side of NV are Rose and Brian aboard My Therapy. That gives us four vessels in our small convoy.

The winds have kicked up again and yesterday we stayed in the marina. While still windy the sun is out and the divers are heading out.

The local vegetation is wonderful.

We are departing a bit late this am. We need to go through Indian Key and want the tide to rise a bit to get through some skinny areas. Tonight we will anchor in Great Sale, a trip of about 46nm. We should arrive before dark. The water depth will slow us down a bit in certain areas where we do not want to squat the stern. There we will average about 7-7.5kts otherwise we will run 8.5kts. The winds are 15-20kts from the NNE and will give us a chop on the banks. The next day we will anchor out in Green Turtle Cay and wait for the winds to die down to make passage though Whale Cut, which can be difficult at certain times. As we look at the weather forecast, Tuesday may work. We will be prepared to go at the first opportunity.

For now, we have adjusted our clocks and we be on island time Mon.

Be sure to track our progress on the SPOT tracking

We crossed over to the Bahamas yesterday, a fairly uneventful ocean trip. We are currently at the West End having cleared customs. Had hoped to travel today but high winds kept everyone in port. The plan  is to be off to an anchorage at Great Sale tomorrow? Winds should still be up there with a stationary front to our south but will make the decision in the am. Mid 70's here, officially on island time!

Honey Fitz

We have been at the Rybovich North marina and yard which is located in Riviera Beach just north of Palm Beach. There is a larger marina just down the waterway in Palm Beach but that is fancy, for the mega yacht crowd. We came here because a friend had his boat hauled for maintenance and it was a very convenient place to gather and wait the weather out for a crossing  of the gulf stream to the Bahamas. It is important to time the weather this time of year because any winds from a northerly direction in opposition to the gulf stream current can make the passage very uncomfortable if not unsafe.

Earlier last week we had a tropical depression off shore generating large waves and a cold front from Canada adding wind whipped waves on top.
Not a good time to cross, many boats have been sitting it out waiting for a weather window where the winds change direction, preferably to the south and die down a bit.

Our weather window arrived on Tuesday with a wind change from the south and the winds dying down a bit. Our initial plan had been to depart this morning but one of the boats we are traveling with had to be hauled and have the seals to the shafts checked. We decided to wait a day and see if they can get repaired and we all travel together. The weather will begin to worsen late Thursday and into the weekend as another cold front approaches the area and when it will settle down again is unknown. Tomorrow is the day we will cross.

We will make a short trip to the Old Bahama Bay Marina.
This is on the west end of Grand Bahamas. We will stay the night and clear customs departing the next morning. Our goal is to go to Marsh Harbor but we will stop and anchor in Great Sail and Green Turtle Key along the way, hopefully a fun and relaxing trip.

While we were at Riviera Beach and Rybovich we enjoyed the sights and sounds of a busy port and yard. We had great entertainment with the local pelicans.

There was good fishing in part of the marina for the local pelicans and gull who were competing for the local cuisine.

We have never seen this behavior before but when a pelican dives and catches a fish a gull would land on him to grab some goodie if they can.

This ole boy decides enough of this nonsense I am outta here with my fish in my gullet!

He did keep his fish however

So it times to settle down for a nice nap

Seabright is tied up behind NV, an 80' Outer Reef

Our sister ship Copeing is tied up to a dock on our starboard side. We all hope to depart together, our little convoy along with one other boat called My Therapy.

Tied up across from us is the Honey Fitz.










The Honey Fitz served five presidents from Truman to Nixon who had it decommissioned and sold. The new owner is having it restored and you can see she looks great. The hull was completely redone and sparkles while the interior restoration is now underway. The name Honey Fitz is what the vessel was called when JFK used her extensively.  

Horses you say

We had really really very nice weather in Charleston SC for the time we spent, temps in the upper 70's to low 80's with little humidity. Great sleeping weather with lows in the 60's, very near perfect in our opinion. I tried to take advantage of it and worked a lot outside and a few inside chores.  Jeannie returned from the west coast on a Wednesday and we rented a car to get additional provisions. We were looking to buy stuff like paper goods, frozen foods and basic staples; things that will last and are less expensive here than in the Bahamas. We made a pretty good run and were looking for places to store things by the end. I think we are sitting a little bit more in the water as a result. We will not starve, that's for sure.

As good as the weather was, I guess all good things come to an end. The day we left a cold front blew through and the wind picked up and the temps went down. We pulled off in a rainy mist and warmer clothes, the weather gods were certainly saying time to go and find warmer weather.
We have been having remnants of tropical depressions and cold fronts from Canada. The result of all of this is rough waters offshore  with an occasional break for a day or two. One of our favorite internet sites for weather is the Ocean Prediction Center along with National Hurricane Center, both give you a great over view. Mike's spaghetti models is another great site for a good overview.

Here is the wind and wave map. The waves along the eastern seaboard can be great one moment and awful the next. The seas are fairly shallow along the eastern seaboard allowing the waves to pile up and become steep and short. These are not rollers per se that you can ride up one side and down the other. Recently we have had big lows pressure systems far offshore generating waves which were then added to by local cold fronts moving through making it possible to wave on top of the rollers.

I

In addition to internet based weather we have on board XM Weather which is a satellite based weather service. To the right is a color pictorial of the waves along the east coast of Fla. The reds are wave heights of  12-19 ft and the yellows are 9-12 ft. While on the west coast of Fla the wave heights are a more civilized 1-2. What makes these waves more pronounced on the east coast is a combination of north-north east winds against the north flowing gulf stream in addition to the offshore lows. We also use a couple of IPad weather sites include my radar and National Buoy data ( both internet and Ipad app)
Bottom line: not a fun place to be.

As we traveled down the ICW we found a large contingent of boaters who would rather be traveling in the ocean rather than in the ditch, as the ICW is often referred to.  We like our boat because it gives us the option of either riding outside in the ocean if we want or inside when the weather is bad, both in comfort and safety, while our draft lets us travel in some of the more shallow spots.

We have a love hate relationship with the waterway in GA and parts of SC. There are big tides and shallow spots that you can only travel with a mid to high tide.  Yet some of the anchorages are really quite beautiful. We decided our time going south would be anchoring in some of the creeks. The first one is south of Beaufort  SC in Cowens Creek. This is just south of Paris Island the Marine basic training facility.


We were originally planning on using a Active Captain recommended anchorage but because of the wind direction we decided to move a bit further

up the creek to get a bit of of the lee of a small island.
One of our great pleasures is spotting the great
the great variety of birds. Here is a "little blue" heron in the low country marshes.

Surprisingly we have seen more eagles on this trip than all the previous ones combined. This one is an immature bald eagle.

We crossed the Savannah River by going through the bridge you see in the foreground and as we  approach, the commercial traffic comes first, in this case a large cargo ship  going outbound for the ocean.  Hard to show the scale properly but this is a big ship in a narrow but deep channel.

Our next anchorage was in GA on Cane Patch Creek. Again we went in a bit further than the recommended anchorages  to get some wind protection. In this case we found a large stand of trees amongst the marshes that gave us a wind shadow from the NNE. You can see the original anchorage in the left lower corner and the one we dropped the hook in in the center. Plenty of water with a depth of high tide of 20 ft. We put out 150ft of chain to give us a 7.5 scope at high tide. We also place our snubbers down to the waterline all to keep the shank angle of the anchor under 9 degrees. We have a lot of faith in our Rocna anchor and always pay attention to the needed amount of scope.

We traveled to St Andrews Sound on our way to the first stop in Fla. This sound which is quite large has the ICW going out into where the mouth and ocean meet. Many boats were taking a longer and slower route through the marshes as an alternative to the ICW. That was because the tide was going out and the wind was in the opposite direction so the waves, while not large, were turbulent; the best analogy is like a washing machine.  The depths here are quite shallow and the conditions were not the best but it is quick and we had some spray, otherwise uneventful. What we got as a reward was to see the wild horses on Cumberland Island, what a treat? There were easily dozens grazing along the shore line....An awesome sight!

Here the shrimping fleet is catching one of our future dinners. We always travel with pounds of fresh/frozen shrimp that we get locally. We think of it as edible ballast.





Cumberland Island is the farthest south we can go until November 1st. It is our navigational restriction from our boat insurance due to hurricane season. The day we went past it was the 1st of November!
We are Bahama bound.