Chub Cay- Miami

We moved to the “normal” anchorage first thing because the wind had moved round. Two reasons: one we wanted to use the marina facilities; two we wanted to be nearer the snorkel/dive site.

It was one of those days unfortunately. We tried and tried to convince ourselves that we could safely snorkel in the wind conditions. Chris even went on a recce in the dinghy but quickly turned back. We couldn’t use the beach because it was private. We couldn’t find an alternative beach in the pilotage. We did have a good lunch at the marina, however, so all was not lost!

I was bitterly disappointed that we couldn’t give the kids this last opportunity. I was bitterly disappointed to be leaving the Bahamas. Which is ironic because in the Caribbean I’d really felt there was little reason to spend any time in the Bahamas – all the history and culture was in the Caribbean – and I had been deeply worried about visual piloting. Ultimately we’d had the best time in the Bahamas and I had no desire to move onto the US.

I also had no desire to tackle the Gulf Stream with the forecast winds. We had two options: wait till about 5 or 6 days hence when things might be better or go NOW! But not exactly NOW because we’d arrive at the cut at the wrong time. NOW was in fact 11pm – in the dark. This was possible because our route out of Chub Cay was lit by red and green beacons. It was an incredibly risky option because we’d be crossing 2/3metre depths in the dark. Theoretically this was OK because we had GPS, charts and a recommended, surveyed line to follow. In practice, we all know that’s hoo hah.

We got started at 11 but it always takes longer to get going than you could possibly imagine and we didn’t actually up-anchor till gone 12 – which could put a possible strain on the Gulf Stream crossing. Alex, bless his cotton socks, arrived at the helm station as we were upping anchor, wide eyed, yet determined to help. He held Big Bertha, our million watt torch, and directed it at boats around us so we could avoid hitting them on the way out! Unnervingly for him because, as our anchor came up, so did a barracuda’s guts!!!!!!!!!!!!! Job done, he looked at us solemnly and said, “Can I go back to bed now?” and stamped back to his cabin. Alex is a weird mix of emotions and work ethic... in this case, he’d made a commitment quite outside our expectations and been totally serious in meeting it.

I took an initial deep water watch; Chris took the watch that took us into the shallows. He woke me once it was light enough to see what we might ground on. We were running very close to the surveyed line but I had to call Chris twice when we got into situations where we had .5 m under the keel and no apparent route forward. When we got to the cut, we could again see no apparent route through it – the sea was very active as was the wind and it was very much touch and go. All hands were working at maximum adrenalin as we had to lose the Genoa at great speed and breath “up” rather than “in”.

Once through the cut, the focus changed to navigating the river that is the Gulf Stream. This moved us north at 2-3.5 kts depending where we were. We had an Easterly wind which gave us a push across the stream but the wind was forecast to get high and move to the south during the passage. We needed to get to Miami before the winds conspired with the Gulf Stream to give us high waves as well as high winds – and of course we wanted to get to our next marina before dark. In the image you can see the red line showing where the boat is heading, the green line where the boat is actually going and the blue arrow showing the “current”.

As you can see from the “Sunset over Miami Skyline” pictures – we didn’t quite succeed. I was on watch before we both had to navigate Government Cut into Miami and there were a number of times when I looked behind at the waves we were running in front of and nearly lost my nerve and called Chris. I was extremely glad that we had chosen the marina right at the beginning of the Miami basin because we were both tired when we tied up to the dock.

But that wasn’t the end of the day. The harbour master had put us starboard side to at the end of a dock which didn’t have adequate or adequately positioned cleats to keep us in place given the wind and current. Eventually we worked out a way of using the neighbouring pilings and the dinghy to mimic a 4 piling dockage which held us off any sharp edges!

24 hours after we’d started we had a beer.