McCraw Sails: Bimini, Bahamas!!

We pulled anchor fairly early. We weren't in a particular hurry, but we knew we had a rather tedious day in front of us - many, many bridges needed to be opened for us.

You know the drill - call the bridge tender and let him know you need the bridge opened.

Some of the bridges open on request as you approach. But several on this particular stretch only open on the hour and half hour. This makes it tedious to figure out how fast to move the boat to make the next scheduled opening. Two bridges in particular are timed such that you must maintain 6.5 knots to make both of the bridge openings in sequence. Since we had a current against us, we would have had to run both engines at full power to make that speed. So we decided to spend an hour slowly going between those two bridges instead of 1/2 hour. Good choice, was quite relaxing to putz along at about 3 knots.

Coming up behind us (faster bigger boat) was the Lagoon Purrfect that we had met in Green Turtle Cay last year. Nice folks. Chatted with them a few minutes as they whizzed by. Will likely run into them along the way in the Bahamas.

By the time we got down to Palm Beach Duane had researched the offshore weather a bit more - and the decision was made - there was a nice weather window that we could go south during the night Thursday to Miami and then head over to Bimini at about 2AM. (We need to be farther south to counter-act the gulf stream effect).

We circled Peanut Island a couple of times - peeking out the inlet to see if the waves looked tolerable. I was inside doing all our customs paperwork since this was sortof a last minute decision. We had our Covid tests and the clock was ticking on our 5 day window - so we just decided to go for it. Busy area.

The inlet was not too bad. Just a good up & down roll.

Near West Palm Beach - I won't whine any more about the wave action....but photos are notorious for "flattening out" waves. There were large rolling waves - that lifted the boat up from behind, then the boat just sortof sogs down into the vacant space. Not pleasant. But the boat handles it well and no harm done.

Pretty sunset.

This was midnight between Ft. Lauderdale and Miami. Pretty skyline, the photo certainly doesn't do it justice.

We were treated to the most spectacular sunrise about mid-way to Bimini!

And there was a good bit of shower activity. Glad we have good radar - this cargo ship appeared out of the cloud bank exactly where the AIS and radar said it was!

Arrival at the Bimini channel was a welcome thing! I was so tired of all the movement. Ahhh, back to that pretty water!

At the dock for fuel - we raised our "Q" quarantine flag since we haven't cleared customs. We made fairly quick work of that since the Bahamas has a new online system. It's a little cumbersome, but after only 3 phone calls, we got it all worked out and paid our $600 for our cruising permit for the year.

Off to immigration first - at "the pink building".

Then to the Big Game Marina for customs. Nice setting...

After visits to both the customs and immigration offices, we're all set. Time to raise a new Bahamas courtesy flag on the halyard!

All legal now!

I forgot to mention earlier.....we kept having a bilge pump alarm go off. Duane had just recently installed the alarm buzzers and one of the bilge pumps is a little finickier than the other. The starboard pump turns on momentarily for apparently no reason. So we weren't concerned. But when we got in the rough seas, the alarm was coming on frequently. Nothing to do, we peeked in the bilge and nothing unusual was there, just a little bit of water like normal. So we endured the alarm for the next 12 hours. Not pleasant. (We could have turned the pump off, but didn't really want to do that since it is a very important safety feature!) Eventually Duane braved some investigation - remember, it's hard to stand up in the boat without holding on to something. And it's dark.

Anyway, after all that lead-in, he eventually found that the wet exhaust muffler had rusted thru and was leaking sea water into the bilge. Slowly, hence the infrequent alarms. So, now we have a repair we need to do before we move on. (Remember - cruising is really just fixing your boat in exotic places!!)

So after clearing customs we set out on the bikes to the hardware store. JB Weld may be the solution for a temporary fix. This hardware store is old-fashioned and is packed with all sorts of supplies.

By this time, we were parched. Up the hill to a shack that sells beer and food. I wanted conch fritters but they were out. We settled for some yummy fresh french fries (Kris, you would have liked them!)