I know that there has been a lack of posts lately, but that is because we have been doing 'normal' things and have gone to places that I have written about before. There are some events coming up, with perhaps a surprise or two, but meanwhile I thought I would go back in time and post some of my cruising memories from a long time ago. I wrote these back in the summer of 2019, when I thought I would join the Writer's Circle in Hope Town. However, all that changed with Hurricane Dorian and my ramblings have sat in a document that I found on my computer a few days ago. I went to my photo albums (remember those before digital? 😉) and took photos of the photos to add. It will take several days to list my stories, since they are fairly long, but here is the first one that I hope you enjoy...
Our first time crossing the Gulf Stream was on our Caliber 28 sailboat named Celebrity.
We had waited awhile at Peanut Island in West Palm Beach for the right weather to cross to the Bahamas, but the cold fronts just kept on marching. Finally, a one-day weather window was predicted before the next front arrived. We left the inlet in the middle of the night and our trip was across the ocean was uneventful and calm. That is until the sun started rising and we saw our first land in the distance. From now on we will heed the saying, “red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.”
Unlike the easy entrance from the ocean to what is now called West End’s Old Bahama Bay, back in 1986 the entrance to the marina called Jack Tar Village, was behind a cut from the ocean to the shallow sand banks, with the entrance on the shallows. When the wind and seas picked up, the waves broke all the way across the cut, so it was hard to know where the deepest water was.
Just before we approached the cut, the cold front hit us and the west wind made the waves quickly build to about 8-10 ft. Our timing was only about an hour off, but conditions changed significantly in such a short period of time. We turned around and headed into the waves to assess the situation as we were climbing up the waves and then falling off the other side, slamming into the troughs. We could not determine where the unmarked channel was into the shallows, but did see a U.S. Coast Guard cutter in the distance. Dave radioed them to see if they could help get us through the cut, but since they were not authorized to do this and had to stay in international waters, all they could do was to stand by in case we had any problems. I suppose it put our minds a little more at ease that if we didn’t make it and capsized, they would come a runnin’! Thankfully, within about half an hour, the wind eased just enough after the initial cold front blasted us and we could see one little spot where the waves weren’t breaking. We turned around and headed downwind again, surfing through the cut and into the calm shallow water. As we entered the marina channel to clear Customs and Immigration, there was a local Bahamian man fishing off the end of the jetty. He waved heartily and yelled, “Welcome to the Bahamas, Mon!” That was one of those ‘oh my gosh, we made it moments’. What a relief and such a memorable start of many adventures to come.
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