Checked the weather the next day and sure enough, another big blow coming in a few days. Lynn and Larry have guests aboard who flew in to Staniel Cay , which is about 13 mile south of us, so they are kinda stuck here as they need to drop them off on Sunday. We, on the other hand, are ready to make the trek northward to get somewhere protected. Awe also need to get closer to a crossing position so we are ready when there is an opportunity with favourable conditions. Regardless, we gotta get outta this place!

https://youtu.be/Q3mgapAcVdU?si=SOgcNpLViZplKJq4

Looking at the forecast, we use the Windy app, and it appears there are favourable light winds from the south from Wednesday to Saturday. After doing some course plotting it appears we could make it to Grand Bahama Island in 3 days in 3 @ ~60nm legs. Long days but good conditions. The wind, albeit light, and waves would be going with us so we could make some pretty good speeds between 6.5 - 7 knots.

We broke the news to Lynn and Larry but they had already guessed we're likely gonna make a break for it. Their boat is much more sturdy in a big blow due to its size but even so, they would be coming with us if they could. So we spent the last day, in excellent sunny calm weather, snorkelling and lounging on the beach. We had a bonus of seeing a very large, like 7' across large, eagle ray jump completely out of the water just beside the boat! We had a teary good bye to our friends as we had spent almost 3 months with them. We were so happy to have them act as our tour guides through the best part of the Bahamas.!

Adding to all this we needed to have a place to land and managed to get a slip back at the Ocean Reef Marina where we spent Dec -Jan. This is a great place to re-provision and stage for our trip back across to Florida. With 60+ nm to the Rose a island anchorage, just east of Nassau. So it's gonna be anchor up at 6 am so we arrive at our destination in daylight.

https://youtu.be/MPxFEg4Yzk8?si=Gj_MeXRdD-8W_Vmi

This is a typical example of the charts in parts of the Bahamas not lining up with reality. Add the tide range which could be a couple of feet +/- of water and…. you get it! The 21.6 figure mid screen on the right is the depth reading from the boat transducer and the small boat icon on the screen is the actual gps boat position, in this case showing we're on the 6' depth contour! That's why we run 2 chartplotters with different map software and use both our eyes and our rock finder thingy (depth transducer) to find a safe path through the chaos!