We spent one night in West Plam Beach, and the next day I rowed Theone into a nearby boat ramp to head into the city to pick up our packages from the UPS store, and to get our last minute groceries. The weather window was looking ok. But more than that, it was looking pretty ugly for the rest of the entire forecast (about 10 days), so it was a now or much later kind of window.
We had originally planned to leave early in the evening, but getting provisions took longer than we hoped, and there were some thunder storms rolling through (lots of lightning and a few bursts of a lot of rain). So we waited unitl just before midnight to leave, which turned out to have worked really well. We raised anchor and motored out of the Lake Worth Inlet.
The crossing was pretty uneventful. The rain clouds pretty much all cleared up, and we sailed on a little bit of wind to start, but that quickly ran out, and we mostly motored across. The gulf stream is interesting and we ended up pointing the boat somewhat southerly in order to make it straight across (east). The gulf stream runs at about 2.5 knots of current straight north, and so you either need to cross from south of where you want to end up, or go slowly countering the current. It would have been a quicker crossing if we had left from a more southerly point, but we happened to be in West Palm when this weather window appeared, and so we decided to just go for it.
Leaving so late in the evening we had all night to cross and we made it over by mid day to check in. There were a handful of boats doing the very same crossing, and they were all much quicker than us, so we ended up arriving last in line. We slowly sailed the last bit of the crossing before coming into West End, and everyone had pretty much cleared out of customs by the time we got there.
Check in went smooth enough, and we had our cruising permit in hand. We headed out to anchor at Gin Sur Mer, which is a canal that was dug for a development that ended up going bust it seems, and never finished being built. But there is a nice very protected area to anchor at. The anchorage was busy with a bunch of kid boats that had made the crossing (part of why we wanted to make this crossing as well), and we got in and anchored in among all the boats there. And with that we are officially in The Bahamas!
We had a little get together with the other boats and relaxed swimming about in the anchorage. We haven't entirely decided where we are going next, we'll have to see what the weather brings. That night we also finally opened a bottle of wine our dock neighbours from home gave us on the day we left. We managed to save it this long somehow, and it seemed fitting to finally open it after making it to The Bahamas. Thanks for the winek if you are reading this!
It seems somewhat silly that it took us 154 days to get here, but the journey in this case is certainly part of the adventure!
