Crossing the Gulf Stream

---

Writing a travel blog is a new experiment for me so please bear with me.

I arrived at Eagles Nest in Coconut Grove Marina about 3:00pm on Sunday. In order to get an early start on Monday, Terry has decided to move the boat out to Key Biscayne. So I unpacked, we cast off and left the slip with barely a bon voyage!

Found a good place to anchor off Biscayne and settled in to getting familiar with the boat. She is in great shape and looks very seaworthy. We awoke before dawn, hauled anchor and headed East. The Gulf Stream can be a challenge under the wrong conditions (high northerly winds, big seas). But, the weather gods blessed us with almost perfect conditions. It is about 35 miles across and we barely felt a ripple in calm winds and 1-2 foot seas.

For someone like me who has never been on the "banks" it was a real surprise to finally reach them. Crossing the stream, the water is 6-700 feet deep. As we passed through the "cut" between Gun Cay and Cat Cay in Bimini we were suddenly (and I mean suddenly) in 6-7 feet of water! And the crazy thing (for a Caribbean sailor) is that that depth is maintained for hundreds of square miles in all directions. So we continued heading east for another couple of hours. I finally asked Terry where we planned to anchor for the night (we were many hours from the nearest island). He looked at me as if I were an ignorant school child and said: "Anywhere we want". We pulled off to the side of the main channel a few hundred feet, dropped the hook in 10 ft of lovely sand and that was it!

Our near term goal is to reach Nassau but it is too far to make in one passage. So, Tuesday morning we hauled anchor and headed for Chub Cay where we will spend the night. Tomorrow morning we travel about 35 miles which should get us to Nassau in about 7 hours. The weather looks really good so we are expecting a friendly passage.

More next time!

---

Photos

Sunrise over the Gulf Stream
You can see how calm and peaceful it was