fetchinketch

It is worth planning your spares carefully as you travel. I had the handle of a fishing reel break the other day. No big deal, replacements are easy to get. As I was shopping for the part, one website noticed that I was logged in from the Bahamas, and conveniently calculated the estimated import duty that would be due after shipping the part here.

On a part that cost BSD$50 the duty due was estimated to be BSD$114!!! Wow… From past experience we know that the Bahamas allow duty free import of boat parts, but ONLY if those parts are required to make the boat move. So engine parts, and sail/rigging parts. Everything else, you pay.

Fortunately for us, we’re headed back to Florida for a quick job that needs us out of the water. We are scheduled to lift on March 8th, at 8AM and splash back at 3PM. Then we’re back underway, headed east as soon as the weather allows.

For the past few days we have been based out of Half Moon Bay, at an island that is historically called Little San Salvador, but has been renamed by the Carnival Cruise line as Half Moon Cay. It is blessed with one of the best beaches around. The only downside is that the population of the island changes from about six every night, to about six thousand when the cruise ship arrives almost every morning. There is a complete faux village that is populated every morning by a boat coming over from Eleuthera.

Tomorrow morning we will begin moving again in earnest, back toward North Bimini where we will check out of the Bahamas, and jump off toward Florida.

It’s a hassle going backwards, but there are always things you forget, that are a lot harder (and more expensive) to source in the islands than they are in the States. So we will make the best of it and rush around getting things we missed.

For the past few days we have been anchored in Black Point Harbour next to another Super Maramu, Gleam, home to our friends Paul and Ashley Fry and their two boys.

I took Paul and his son Cason out fishing on Harmonie, to show them a couple tricks and tips. I showed them all right. We fished hard all day and we got:

We did managed to find fish, unfortunately the fish managed to take more from us in terms of tackle and hardware than we managed to take from them. It’s been a long time since I fished that long and hard with nothing to add to the freezers. But fun was had by all!

An unfortunate discovery while I was doing some routine work in the engine room: The oil in our drive system is contaminated with water. This means that the seals on the propeller shaft under the boat are leaking. This is not an urgent emergency, but is something that needs attending to. Unfortunately, that attention means the boat needs to be out of the water for a few hours.

The next place down our planned track we know of that can reliably haul a boat the size of Harmonie is in Puerto Rico, at least two weeks, maybe four, away. Our alternative is a 4 day trip back to Florida and make arrangements there. Right now, that is looking like our best plan.

We look to have an excellent weather window back to Bimini or West End in two days, and another day to check out and make our way back to Florida. Hopefully we can find a place to lift us out on a quick turnaround somewhere between Miami and Palm Beach in a week to ten days, and then back to travels…

We are done! The boat is ready, and we are ready to sail off. Our time in Florida is drawing to a close in the next few days. Our immediate plans are to head back to the Bahamas and visit places both new to us and places with which we have a good deal of experience.

Our longer term plans have finally firmed up. Yesterday we received confirmations from our insurance carrier and from the marina which we will be using as a basis of operations that will allow us to spend the summer in Grenada based out of Port Louis Marina. Grenada is a popular spot with cruising boats for the summer months since it has a reputation of being friendly, beautiful, and at low risk for hurricanes.

To get there we will have to pass pretty much every island in the Caribbean, so we will have a lot of opportunities to linger, explore, catch fish, find seashells, take pictures, and write stories. If you have been to Grenada and have recommendations or suggestions, let us know!

We need to be down to Grenada by the middle of June so we have five months to explore. We have gotten many favorable reviews from people who have spent time in Grenada, and we are very much looking forward both to our journey, and to the time at our summer destination. It feels a bit odd… it has been a while since we have had such a long range plan for our travels!

It is now Saturday evening. We’ll be packing the last things into place on the boat tomorrow, and then casting off lines on Monday morning and heading south on a short day sail to Key Biscane. We will anchor there, and wait for our weather window to cross to the islands. It is about 1400 miles as the seagull flies from Fort Lauderdale to Grenada, although we will likely do well over 2000 before we get there.

I am pretty sure that is a title I have used before. It is a way of life for people like us living on cruising sailboats. We had expected to be on our way to the Bahamas by now, but instead we are waiting here at anchor in lovely Hollywood, Florida. Trust me, there are way worse places to spend a week or two in the depths of winter.

The primary delay is for ONE more medical test to get a medical sign-off that I (Bill) am good to go. It is the expected result, and this is definitely in the category of better safe than sorry. We’ll be done with this on Feb 3.

Assuming the Doc’s are happy, our plan is to hop over to the Bahamas as soon as we can, and then continue on down the Caribbean islands. If all works out, we will spend the summer in Grenada.

We have once again put out our insurance to a broker for bids. Slowly, the market is getting repopulated as companies that ran like lemmings after the disastrous 2019 hurricane season in the Caribbean re-enter the market. Unfortunately, the new companies that have been presented to us are writting TERRIBLE policies. See here for our analysis.

As always, we have projects we are working on, because they never stop. Both the two of us and the boat are doing well.

We do see the strangest things in our travels. This time it is at the boat yard. We are at Lauderdale Marine Center and we just finished our maintenance haul out. Everything from the painting to the work on the drive train to the bow thruster went pretty much as scheduled, and was completed on time.

Usually it is the huge superyachts here that attract our attention, but we have become a bit jaded to that, and they just seem part of the routine scenery here. But this… this was different. Parked in the small boat part of the yard, usually reserved for the tenders to the superyachts was an oddball creature..

If it’s not immediately obvious… that is a submarine. For roughly $3 million you can have one too! The standard version is rated to 1000 feet, and you can upgrade that to 3300 feet for a significant up charge!

It is hard to see in a photograph, but that clear plastic bubble is several inches thick. Pretty amazing. They are built by a Dutch company; U-Boat Worx. If you have a couple million dollars in your toy budget, here is your chance!

What it is doing here isn’t completely clear. From what we can tell, it is not associated with one of the yachts here for service. I have to say, if it was MY 3 million dollar machine it would NOT be sitting on the bare pavement, and uncovered in the weather… but that’s just me.

Our trip out to the weather buoy was uneventful, and with mostly very light winds, we motored most of the way arriving midmorning. The weather was perfect for the kind of sighing we wanted to do, calm winds and nearly flat seas.

The buoy itself is not a dramatic sight, about 10 feet across and about the same high, it is nothing more than a framework to hold the various weather instruments and communication gear needed to report on the current weather conditions at this distant offshore location. But there were fish in evidence right away and schools of small tuna broke the surface feeding.

We started by trolling our lures in a circle around the buoy and were rewarded with a small yellowfin tuna, about 8 pounds. We quickly scoped out where most of the fish were holding (about 100 to 200 feet deep, and on the upcurrent side of the buoy).

We set up a drift and dropped one of the long, thin speed jigs down to the depth the fish were holding. It wasn’t long before we had another tuna in the boat, this time a black fin. It was about the same size as the first, but was not “small”, instead rather typical for this species of tuna off the Florida coast.

By now the sun is high in the sky, and the fish have gone deeper, and are less interested in food. It’s a couple of hours before we can tempt the next bite, but this one is a significantly larger fish, another yellowfin, but this time over 20 lbs. Still small for a species that can grow to over 10 times this size, but a lot of fresh ahi for our freezer!

When dark came we hove-to and drifted slowly. The fish scattered, no longer easily found on the sonar. We took turns on watch listening to the pod of pilot whales blowing, sometimes in the distance, sometimes disconcertingly close by in the dark. The wind picked up in the small hours of the morning, making fishing difficult, but sailing fast. We unfurled our sails and pointed the boat south.

At mid morning, we are sailing fast, in winds better for us than the forecast. Ten to fifteen knot, and although we are close hauled, we are going in the direction we want to go, and the seas are calm, and the boat is sailing fast and happy. We should be making Fort Lauderdale in 36 to 48 hours.

We have been working here in Brunswick GA helping other people get their Amel sailboats ready to help them with their cruising dreams, and now it is time once again to make OUR dreams a reality.

Our plan is to be moving south again, with a destination of Fort Lauderdale. We have our regular maintenance haul out of the boat arranged, and will be likely staying in and around South Florida until the middle of January when we plan to head off to the Bahamas. Plans past that point are a bit “fuzzy” and will depend a great deal on world events over which we have little control.

We are taking a bit of a detour on our route, not sailing straight down the coast, but heading far offshore, on the eastern side of the Gulf Stream. Our intermediate destination is the area surrounding a weather buoy that is anchored in water almost 1/2 mile deep, 120 miles due east of Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Why such a spot? Anything floating in the open ocean quickly becomes the focus of a local eco-system. Fish accumulate, sometimes by the thousands. What might start out as a school of baitfish that use the shadow of the buoy to hide from bigger fish rapidly grows to include more kinds of fish, and bigger fish. Very much a case of, “If you build it they will come.” Not only do they come, but they stay! We are hoping to add some wahoo and tuna to the freezer.

We are watching the weather forecasts now with care, and it looks like we will be leaving Brunswick tomorrow afternoon. We will be traveling a total of about 400 miles over the course of three days. Maybe longer–if the fishing is fun enough to cause us to linger.

Our last minute preparations are well underway. About the only major thing left is to top off the fuel tanks.