Great Abaco part V - Sale Cay

Allans Cay was intriguing but the wind was a bit strong and we had our focus on getting home to the US at this point and less on exploring.

We had a truly beautiful last day sail in the Bahamas. Couldn’t have asked for better weather. Strong consistent downwind, sun with light puffy clouds, minimal waves… sigh… I’m going to miss this.

There were 4 other sailboats at Great Sale. The weather windows for crossing had been few and far between with the recent uprising of squalls so we weren’t surprised to see so many others staging for a crossing. Our last Bahamian sunset, probably for a very long while.

At 6:30 AM we listened to Chris Parker the next morning. Squalls in the northern Bahamas were diminishing today but down by Georgetown and Turks & Caicos told another story completely. Ongoing squalls throughout the day with gusts in the squalls up to 45 knots. Yikes, no thanks. Our wind forecast for the next 48 hours looked like it had weakened overnight unfortunately. Our sail was looking more like a motor with each weather update.

We had 120 nautical miles to cover from Great Sale to Fort Pierce Florida. And we did it in 21 hours.

The first 50 miles are in the outstretched Bahama bank with depths between 12-18 feet. Once you cross outside of the banks, open ocean takes over – sea monsters thrive, mast crushing waves pace the wild seas, and cargo ships are blindly roaring up and down the gulf stream. But it’s okay, we’ve got this, we’ve traveled the open ocean before and crossed the gulf stream once…. Really, we were set up for another run of the mill overnight. We watched the weather like a hawk a week in advance, we checked the boat over – oil checks, cleaned haul, rigging was good and we had a benign weather window. Nothing to fear but fear itself.

The next 70 miles include a 30 mile spread where we’ll cross the gulf stream and grab a 2-4 knot boost northward. We left at 2:00 PM and had a great 8 hour sail. Around 10 pm large oncoming storm clouds worried Mike (who had first watch). The wind became light and inconsistent and Gaia acted more like a cork in a bathtub being swayed back and forth rather than a sailboat cutting through waves with a purpose. Mike took down the sail and thus began the motor portion of our passage. I took over for the next four hours and I don’t recall it being particularly fun. We now entered the gulf stream and the ‘washer machine affect’ was in full swing waves sloshed from two different directions rocking us back and forth uncomfortably. I saw 3 or so cargo ships and a couple of sailboats taking the gulf stream North. Around 5 AM Mike took over again and brought us into Fort Pierce. I warily watched, having not actually slept during my downtime. It was beautiful but it definitely had a distinct American feel to it; large buildings and abundance of cars and hotels…all the amenities you could ask for and more.

We were back in the United States. Hey We Were Back!Read more