Six Months in a Leaky Boat!

We found SID -- Our first human contact since we Left Bimini. A sailor for 40 years I quickly made a fool of myself saying 'you must be on that catamaran' He replied 'its a trimaran. Can't you count to three?'




Sid is a very colorful character who makes friends fast. He came by that evening with an offering of rum and a 10cm stack of photographs, mostly of his girlfriends & gold mining operations in Costa Rica.





The next adventure took place smack-dab in the middle of the Grand Bahama Bank. This is an expanse of shallow ocean roughly 70 miles across. So it's a long sail. We decided to cut it in two parts and anchored for the night right in the middle. At about 2am we woke to the sound of a large engine getting closer. We looked out the window and saw the front lights of a biiiig boat. It took a minute to sink in that this thing was heading right for us. It was so close (about 100ft away) by the time we realized this that we didn't even have time to call them on the VHF or get in the dingy for that matter. There
was a mad panic to find the strobe lights to signal them to change their course. They missed us by 50ft, and I was shaking like a leaf. We still don't know if they even saw us or if we just got lucky. Had they hit us we would have sunk in about 30 seconds, leaving us drifting around, 35 miles from the nearest land.




So as you can see we are on our way home, having just had a successful passage across the gulf stream. It took us 16 hours and we went almost 100 miles! We averaged 7 knots the whole way which is quite good, as 5.5 or 6 is usually our top speed. It was a good crossing but exhausting.



We slept the next day for a good few hours to recover. Karl took the dog to shore for a pee and ended up rescuing a couple by towing them to shore after they had drifted away in the strong current. They offered him some cold beer as a reward and he came back to the boat beaming, and keen to go party on the beach. We spent the evening drinking with our new Floridian friends, living the riverboat fantasy.