Crustacean Travels

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...

  Day 5 We woke to a foggy morning, released our lines and moved up to the Moore Haven lock which will raise us two feet to the level of Lake Okeechobee.  We are traveling with two other Looper boats this morning. A bit of history-  The Okeechobee Waterway was opened in 1937 to allow commercial traffic to get between the East and West coasts without having to go through the Keys.  Also a 1928 hurricane devastated the Lake Okeechobee area highlighting the need for flood control.  The waterway provides both a canal for commercial traffic as well as a series of lock and dams and canals to assist with flood control. Back to our trip.  The first 12 miles we travel East Southeast around the rim of the lake to the channel at the entrance of the lake near the town of Clewiston.  We enjoyed listening to all the bird songs and watched a beautiful foggy sunrise. The rim route has a earthen mound from dredging on the mainland side built for flood control and on th...