We left Marathon's Boot Key Harbor anchorage Thursday morning, ran all day inside the reef up Florida Keys' Hawk Channel, exiting into the Florida Strait of the SW North Atlantic around Matecumbe just before sunset, heading directly for Bimini. Well, directly if you count steering 40 degrees or more to the right because you are being "set" northward so hard by the Gulf Stream's current. Our course for Bimini was 054 degrees True, but we had to steer 094 degrees magnetic to do that!

The good part about this was we timed our exit from the shelter of the reefs so that we would not have to dodge crab pots in the dark :-) The other good part was, the waves stayed as they had been predicted 0-2 feet. Part of the night was more like 2 feet, but a lot of it was under 1' -- pretty awesome! The wind was supposed to clock southward, but it did that a bit slower than expected, so although we started out with jib and engines (it was not a strong wind, but it was in a good direction) we were making 6 - 6.5 kts, hitting 7.2 for a while when the wind was just right. Thanks to the intense northward set of the GS, eventually we had to take in the jib in order to make good 054T. But once we were more than halfway across (say 20 miles from Bimini), the current started to diminish, a phenomenon helped by the southward flow of the Bahama Banks emptying out for the morning's low tide, so we were able to point more NE, which allowed us to bring the jib out again.

OK, out there where it's 248 ft or more, you do not have to dodge crab pots. You do have to dodge fishing lines occasionally, and cruise ships, which is really not much of a contest: they move more than 20 kts, and um, we do not. The cruise ships are a little silly: the first day is a stop at Key West, and from Miami (departure) to Key West is such a short hop for these monsters that they spend almost all of the night just motoring up and down out in the Gulf Stream. It's not safe or reasonable for them to arrive at KW in the dark, so to have a lovely morning arrival they patrol like gaily lighted wedding cakes all across the route of any vessel headed for the Bahamas. Gaily lighted, enormous, thousands-of-tons wedding cakes that move much, much faster than the rest of us. Brrr!

The water temperature in the Gulf Stream was 76 to 77 F, where it had been 73 off the Keys. But perhaps because of the intense sky glow from Miami that was visible almost all the way across, we did not see phosphorescence this time.

False dawn began about an hour before sunrise. The waning crescent moon was up, so once Miami's glow wasn't illuminating our sea, the moon was. We arrived in Alice Town and cleared in around 9:45 EST. Derek took us for breakfast/lunch after the clearing-in (which took nearly an hour, he had to wait for the official to return from her own breakfast) at Captain Bob's.

We took a walk and paddled our feet in the surf on the ocean side of the island (all the docks and anchorage are on the inside, facing the banks), bought a few groceries, and Derek dove on the prop to remove a piece of polypropylene line that had gotten caught on the prop in the channel on the way in (it was not wrapped firmly around the prop, thank goodness!), then took a nice shower.

This will be a minimum stop in Bimini (where there is also minimum phone availability: we walked all over the place and found numerous phones, most of which did not work, others of which did not take any credit cards but only BaTelCo cards, hence the Bimini Minimi), only overnight so that we can get fuel and rest up, then we head across the Bahamas banks to Chub Key and the Berry Islands for a few days. UPDATE: weather will not permit it; the banks take us two days to cross and although today's weather will be fine, we can't cross banks at night without risking the boat on a coral head, and overnight much windier weather is moving in. So we're sitting tight in Bimini at the anchorage until the front has passed.

We may not have good connectivity again until we reach Nassau, so in the meantime, you can get position and status updates from us here: our SPOT locator page. That should work no matter where we are, so we will simply update it to let everyone know where we are. We are thinking of you all, and I will add pictures to this post if I can this evening! Bandwidth is hard to come by.