Crustacean Travels

 Day 11 We slipped our lines from the Old Bahama Bay Marina and Resort We left with eight other boats past the marina break wall and headed north and east to take the channel that leads into Little Bahama Bank.  The Bank is between the north barrier islands and Grand Bahama Island. See the chart below.  The first one shows the cut we had to negotiate and the second one shows almost all of the Northern Abacos -Bahamas. Following our waypoints, we navigated through the small islands and shoals just north of West End Grand Bahama to gain access to the Little Bahama Bank.  It is another sunny day with winds 8-12 knots and seas one foot or less. As we exit the shoal areas, we head East Northeast toward Mangrove Cay, water color becomes more aquamarine with depths of mostly 10 feet.  The waters are so clear, you can see the all the way through to the bottom. We are traveling with two navigational tools, Garmin and AquaMaps as we must rely on our electronics and compas...

I am writing this blog and will add our travel day to the Bahamas on as an update tomorrow because we will be traveling eight hours and will be tired when we arrive.  So will post today and will update the same post when we have completed the crossing tomorrow late afternoon. Day 9 Spent a lay day in North Lake Worth cleaning and prepping the boat for the crossing.  Not too exciting! Since it is such a boring day - blog wise, I decided to regale you with some Bahamian geography! Here goes - The Bahamas are a collection of over 700 islands or cays which sit atop a plateau just off the east coast of Florida.  The islands stretch from West Palm Beach to the north to just 30 miles from Cuba at their southernmost point, covering over 500 miles.  The cays are low lying with few hills over 100 feet.  These cays have a limestone base which is worn by wind and water and honey-combed with caves. The waters surrounding the Bahamas vary from the Little Bahama and Great Baha...

Day 7  Our weather window looks to be next Tuesday, so we opted to stay one more day in Stuart to avoid sitting in a more open anchorage in Lake Worth for too long.  We figured the weekend boaters will be less later Sunday afternoon when we arrive at our anchorage in the lake. We spent the morning with figuring out an electrical hiccup, repairing screens, and installing a guard for our electronics in the flybridge and a radar reflector on the boat. After lunch, we went ashore to walk around the old part of the city waterfront and maybe even find some ice cream! We walked the waterfront boardwalk from the marina to the old town.  Stuart is a good sized town that serves the fishing and boating enthusiasts that live in the area.  There were lots of restaurants and cute shops as we walked the town.  Feeling a bit hungry we stopped into a pub and had an appetizer before walking back to the marina.  On the way back we make sure to see the statue of a sailfish - A...