We finally made it; we left and arrived yesterday December 6, 2012 in Bimini in the Bahamas. This was just a 45 miles trip, but a very imported one, we left and we crossed the Gulf Stream. For anyone not familiar with the Gulf Stream: The Gulf Stream, together with its northern extension towards Europe, the North Atlantic Drift, is a powerful, warm, and swift Atlantic Ocean current that originates at the tip of Florida, and follows the eastern coastlines of the United States and Newfoundland before crossing the Atlantic Ocean. The process of western intensification causes the Gulf Stream to be a northward accelerating current off the east coast of North America (copied from Wikipedia). Northerly wind will make this crossing very dangerous for smaller vessels like Island Girl. We had only a very small weather opportunity according to the predictions. We decided to stop in Bimini to wait for better weather and to relax for some time to recover from all the hard work of the past weeks and all the tension to get everything done in time and also to get through the process of retirement with all the bureaucratic processes.
We both ended our careers and said goodbye to our friends and co-workers at The City of Miami Beach. During the week of Thanksgiving we enjoyed many lunches with our co-workers. That same week we started the moving process. Friday after Thanksgiving our friend Scott Thomas helped us move all our furniture to our rented storage space. We spent another week cleaning out all the closets and storerooms in our condo. We sold our car and donated articles that we no longer needed. We moved all the items we believe we needed onboard Island Girl. Since Dorothy and I like all kinds of stuff this is always a problem; we take too much and in a 38 foot Island Packet that becomes a problem. Since we are not intending to sleep in the aft bedroom, we turned that into a storage room where we store necessary items such as extra sails, our spinnaker, panel covers for our cockpit area, the snuba system for surface diving and safety equipment. The remainder is "convenience stuff" that we probably get rid of during the trip. Since I do all the repairs and maintenance on the boat we also carry a lot of tools (probably also too many). Our standard joke is, if Island Girl is still floating we are fine.
During the last engine test we came to the conclusion that we needed new batteries. We have a house bank of 3 batteries, a dedicated battery to start the main engine and one for the generator. To replace all 5 batteries for marine applications is a costly affair that I did not include in our budget. We chose the best which will give us some more battery power. Due to the different connections the installation of these batteries took an entire day.
We followed the weather predictions very closely and a favorable weather window opened up from Wednesday to Saturday which should give us time to reach Nassau in The Bahamas. Unfortunately that window was reduced to Friday and that would not be sufficient time to make this trip. However, we could easily make the crossing to Bimini. We left Thursday morning at 1:45AM and made it to Bimini at 11:15 AM. The ocean was great until we came in a big squall that caused the wind to turn to the NE up to 25 KN. That made the Gulf Stream very angry with very rough seas up to 6 feet by my estimate and rain. The ocean remained rough for another 2 hours but the remainder of the trip to Bimini was with very flat seas and calm wind.
Now we are in Bimini and really enjoying ourselves. We slept for 12 hours straight and are getting all the tension out of our bodies before we move on.