Oil

Well the oil spill has us firmly detoured to St. Petersburg. We will be keeping the boat here at a nice downtown marina til the oil spill has been cleaned up enough to get home. We will be renting a car tomorrow to head to Pensacola to take care of some business. Our trip is over for now. Back to reality!

Update

Just passing cayo Costa.  Headed to Venice tonight then on to st. Pete tomorrow. 

Naples

We are about 3 miles offshore of Marco island.  We had a quicker run across Florida bay this time.  God says we will be to fort myers beach by 6 am.  Night sailing is great what with how hot it has been during the day.  The water temp is up to 92 degrees. 

7 mile bridge

I still don't like going under bridges with 2 feet to spare.  65 foot bridge.  63 foot mast. 

North!

Well we are leaving the keys this morning.  We will take 20 hours or so to get to fort myers beach. 

Back in the USA.

We made it to key biscayne last night after a long slow gulf stream crossing.  We were fighting the current and the wind and the seas and only making 3.5 knots at times.  Today we are headed to rodriguez key to anchor for the night then back to marathon tomorrow.

Not all lobster and mahi!

Mmm ramen.

Bimini part 2, the reckoning,

Well we are back in Bimini. Our Bahamas tour has come to an end. We will stay here at the Bimini Bluewater Marina one more night. It is a very cheap place but nice enough. I wish the places in the keys were this reasonable. Tomorrow we will head back across the Gulf Stream, the current that flows up the west coast at about 2-3 knots. On the way over to Bimini from Florida we took advantage of the current but tomorrow we will be fighting it. We will head straight for Miami and probably anchor behind Key Biscayne tomorrow night.

After leaving Nassau we went the 35 miles to Chub Cay in the Berry Islands. There is not really a good anchorage there so we stayed at a very nice marina called Chub Cay Marina. We had a 60 foot floating dock slip that made our boat look small but it was quite easy getting in and out.

This morning we began our crossing of the Great Bahama Bank at 5am. We had to make the 85 miles to Bimini before sunset so we could make our way into the harbor. We made much better time than anticipated and motor sailed the whole way across the bank. The Great Bahama Bank is a large area, about 80 miles across, of really shallow water but with no land in sight. It was about 20 feet deep the whole way across but the water clarity allowed you to see the bottom the whole time. Upon entering the bank we were in 1200 feet of water that abruptly shallowed to 12 feet!