Crossing the Gulf Stream, February 18, 2022

      Much like circumnavigating Diamond Shoals off Cape Hatteras, crossing the Gulf Stream is the kind of slightly tricky voyage that can sometimes be absolutely disastrous.  When the winds oppose the mighty currents there, it can generate enormous swells that will toss you around like you are an insignificant speck on the ocean, which you pretty much are from the Gulf Stream's perspective.  It can also flow at rates nearing 5 knots which would reduce our boat speed to nearly zero if we were fooling enough to try to head upstream.  Because it brings along warm water and warm moist air, it can also form its own weather system.  

     Fortunately, you can buy expert weather advice that will tell you when conditions are good to cross.  Its a balancing act, because you almost never get the perfect balance of wind, weather and sea state.  We do use a guy named Chris Parker, who is pretty over cautious and generally keeps you out of trouble.  Finally, the day came where he said we should get up and go, so we prepared to do so fairly early on this fine Friday morning.  We had called ahead to a nearby marina to arrange to be able to fuel up on their dock, so that we could leave will full tanks.  As we sprung into action, I hailed them on the radio to advise them we were on our way to fuel up and they said, "Well, now we can't do it.  Can you try back around 1pm?"  Of course, I couldn't, so we decided to just suck it up and go without filling up.

     It also turns out that another perfectly valid way to tell when the weather was cooperative was to look around the anchorage.  If all the other boats are pulling up anchor and heading out in the morning, its a good day to cross.  

Traffic jam at the bridge opening

     We joined an absolute parade of boats heading out of Lake Worth Inlet towards points east.  Once we cleared into the ocean, the faster motorboats tended to head more or straight at their destinations, where most of the slower sailboats like us aimed further south than the wanted to go, since they knew that they would end up getting pushed a great deal north by the Gulf Stream.  We had made the decision to use the relatively good weather to make a longer journey and jump all the way to Chub Cay in the Berry Islands.  This mean another overnight passage, but honestly by now those feel quite routine.  We expected to have a decent angle to sail or at least motor sail, so we cruised along as quickly as we could.  It turned out that when we tried just sailing only for a time, the current was just pushing us way to far north, too fast.  As ab result we ended up motor-sailing so that we could just power our way past the strong current.  You can see pretty clearly where the current really kicked off and where we decided to put on the engines before we were swept up to Bermuda:

You can see the really fast northerly movement when we were on sails to the left
Also not the relatively slower northerly movement to the middle of the screen
The line to the right of our ship (the triangle) is the direction we were pointing.

    Over night we weren't too far from Freeport and a continuous line of cruise ships passed by us heading that way.  Apparently they don't want to get there too fast because they were moving much slower than when I saw them leave Cape Canaveral.  At one point my cell phone beeped and Verizon helpfully offered special cruise ship internet rates.  I could even hear a band playing on one of the ships.

The ships are blindingly bright.  They aren't this blurry, however.

     I had been wondering how I would know when I was out of the current and could make our planned turn to the south.  I asked our weather forecaster to estimate where the stream would end, but again there turns out to be a better real life to answer the question.  You just look for the line of container ships steaming south.  They run just barely to the east of the Gulf Stream.  It was a little bit choppy in the Gulf Stream, but once we cleared the Gulf Stream and turned into the relatively protected waters of the Northwest Providence Channel things calmed down rapidly.  The wind was against us, but we were in the lee of the southern Abacos and the seas were almost nothing.  The last 6 or 7 hours we were heading down the Berrys in waters maybe 15 or 20 feet deep and it became completely calm.  I even got to sleep for some of it.

     We had really hoped to go to Great Harbor Cay, but they were completely sold out, so we headed for Chub Cay instead.  We knew that they weren't very keen on providing service to the boats that anchored off-shore, so we arranged to stay in the marina and pretended not to care about the price.  It was really good after taking basically two months to work our way down the coast to finally arrive in the Bahamas.  Lisa had managed to take care of our documentation online so that the process of clearing customs and immigration was essentially a formality and finally, finally our winter in the Bahamas was officially on.

My beautiful wife posing in front of my not-quite-as-beautiful boat.