Ep.37 Southern Cross
18 November 2024 | Lake Worth Staging Area
Bill Bernaerts | overcast but warm

Had a good night on the hook and took the dinghy ashore for the last minute grocery top up. The landing spot that used to be available has now been fenced off with nowhere to leave your dinghy so I dropped Sam, Lynn and Larry off and waited for my marine Uber call for pickup. Got some lat minute boat projects done in the meantime.
The Bahamas has a quick checkin app that you can input all the data about your boat, your crew and whatever you are carrying. you can then pay for your cruising licence and when you go to checkin upon arrival, it is supposed to be pretty quick. The down side, it took me about 3 hours to get the system to accept our info when I input it the other day but it was all there today when I went in to update our arrival date and time. So, fingers crossed it works tomorrow. I do have a paper copy of our cruising permit though and an email receipt for our payment so we should be good to go.
West End in Bahamas is 58 nm east of Lake Worth. The only problem is the Gulf Stream runs north for a good portion of that journey at anywhere from 1.5 - 2.5 knots so we will have to actually steer a bit of a southern cross of our target to take that into account. Otherwise, we'll be blown way north. Our cruising guide has a table that provides magnetic steering courses based on your starting point, destination and cruising speed. So for Amaruq I went with 6 knots as a start so we need to steer 19 degrees south of our target and we should get there in just under 10 hours. If we can make better speed, then the offset can be reduced. Our chartplotter will track our progress and I will log our position each hour to see how it all works out.
We're going to shut diwn our Starlink during the crossing as it is only supposed to be use within 10 miles of shore under the plan we have. It's supposed to work in the Bahamas as well so we'll keep our fingers crossed when we turn it on that it comes back online for us. If not, I Likely won't be posting any new blog episodes for a couple of days.
https://youtu.be/Bw9gLjEGJrw?si=tP4moJA7JVJFASX4
This photo is of the weather forecast for tomorrow with wind speed , direction and wave size, direction and period. It doesn't look too bad and if we're lucky we may even get to sail part of it! Anchor hoist is 3 am as we don't want to be arriving in the dark as Bahamian aides to navigation are not as good as in Canada and the US so I've learned. So, we're going old school...watching out for bad stuff visually!
(Dr. Evil’s version of the dolphin dance.)
https://youtu.be/pZkGe5j-h_4?si=RSEuPVtmzqWYA_Z9
Cheers, and thanks for following along!