February 12 - 17 CROSSING THE GULF STREAM, THE “BANKS”, AND ANDROS ISLAND, BAHAMAS

First land passed after crossing Gulf Stream, lighthouse on Gun Cay



Relaxing on gulfside beach in Marathon before setting off for the Bahamas

February 13 After yesterday’s uneventful day sailing and then motoring to Rodriguez Key (I have to mention the beautiful turquoise color of the water all day in Hawk Channel) we are up at 4:30 am today and find that the wind is now changed and is coming from the north. We have been warned innumerable times not to sail to the Bahamas if the wind is NW, N, or NE! Seven or eight other boats are calling on the VHF radio in the dark, talking about what to do. The north wind could make the Gulf Stream almost impassable with huge waves and buffeting winds. The Gulf Stream always flows north and can be between 2-7 knots of current. In the end six of us decide to try it. “You can always turn back” is our thought. However, the one boat that we have designated as our buddy-boat, SERENADE, feels strongly about not going and so we are parting ways, and we feel badly about that.

The start of our day at 5 am is difficult because of the dark, but we are for a while able to follow the first 5 boats through the opening in the reef outside of Rodriguez Key. After that it is a great trip, as the sun came up around 6:30 am, the north winds were light and the waves in the Gulf Stream were small. We altered our course from heading for the southernmost entry into the Bahamas Bank so that we’d follow a boat from the group what was going to the middle entry (Gun Cay and Cat Cay) and the rest headed for Bimini, the northernmost entry in this area.

By 4:00 pm we reached the cut between the cays and entered the Bahamas Bank. We had decided to find the Customs station at Andros Island, on the other side of this part of the Bank. So all we need to do at this point is anchor for the night and then sail for Andros tomorrow. One little challenge lay before us, however, as the Bank in this area is very shallow (no where on the Bank is it deep, averaging between 4 - 14 ft. at low time). We inched our way through the beginning of the channel that our chart suggested, but went aground at about 5:00 pm. After a half hour of gently running the engine we did get off and gingerly moved the boat to 8 ft of water and anchored just before sunset. We now know that if our depth-sounder starts reading 6.1 ft. that we are about to hit bottom -- which luckily is all sand here.

Just as it gets dark we hear voices and see a light maybe a mile away -- another boat anchored on the Bank. Otherwise there is nothing around for miles. We are about 5 miles east of Gun Cay and Cat Cay at this point.

Feb. 14 Valentine’s Day After checking the charts we can see that we will be on the Bahama Banks all day and won’t reach Andros until tomorrow. The weather is warm and sunny and the water is crystal clear and about 10-13 feet deep all day. We motored in the morning, sailed slowly in the middle of the day and then motored again in the late afternoon as there was not much wind. We have seen a few sailboats in the far distance and one or two motorboats pass on our course but that is all we see above the water. Below is sand, some grass, starfish, and some small shiny fish that jump out of the water and skim the surface for about 2 ft before diving back in. It is like dropping RISING TIDE into a stretched out version of Snow’s Pond back home. We anchored at the end of the day for our second night on the Bank.

Feb. 15 For another sunny, warm, light-air day we travel to Morgan’s Bluff on the northern end of Andros Island. To get there we are in the Tongue of the Ocean, which is in the middle of the Bahamas and is 600-1800 meters deep. This was a shorter trip, about 6 hours, and Ken saw Customs when we got there and anchored. After that we exchanged our quarantine flag for a Bahamian flag, flown above our U.S.flag. Morgan’s Bluff is a small town, seems to have about 4 small buildings and a park that they use for their annual regatta. Further out on the back side of the bluff is a dock for water tankers that come from Nassau to fill up with Andros water and take it back to Nassau. Our second day on Andros we watched a gang of local boys prepare to go out for some diving, then sailed to Fresh Creek which is 2 towns, Andros Town and Coakley Town. The wind kicked up and we had a lively sail down there, another 6-7 hour sail.

Fresh Creek is also small and there is only room for shallow-draft boats to anchor. We are therefore docked at a small marina along with about 7 sailboats and 7 power boats. It is windy and clear. We will probably stay here one more day until the wind dies down to medium strength. Our first night here we were given fresh fish from the local guy cleaning it for the power boat owner who caught it. We watched 3 bull sharks circle near the fish-cleaning station. Other activities in town are a factory that makes batik fabric and clothing, and several bonefishing lodges that cater to fishermen who fly in to fish for the week. Between the 2 towns there are about 5 restaurants, and 3 small grocery stores, plus 3-4 other small stores. We are happy that the marina has wifi so this information can go out and we can check our email! We are planning to switch from phoning to email and texting as phone charges are very high here.

Our introduction to the Bahamas and Andros Island has been great and we look forward to more interesting days in the Exumas where we will be heading next.

February 4 - February 11 REUNIONS AND GOOD-BYES

Pelicans waiting for fish scraps as a charterboat captain cleans the day's catch in Key West.



"Diver Dave" (that's what he's called!) preparing to put a new zinc on our boat prop before we go off to the Bahamas--another important but difficult detail to attend to.

Feb. 4 We spent the time since out last blog (we’re still in Marathon) fixing and tweaking things on the boat: adding a salt water pump so we can conserve fresh water, correcting problems with our alternator that were not addressed earlier, adjusting the wind vane. We played some tennis on the city courts. And we attended another Bahamas information meeting. Because of the cold and windy north winds there are many boats who are here waiting to leave, for either the Bahamas, the west coast of Florida, or south into the Caribbean and Central America.

We found some people from Lubec, Maine who we had “met” earlier in the trip. They had helped us when our boat was dragging it’s anchor and had secured it to another boat in St.Augustine. We only saw them in the dark then, but now we got to see them in the daylight and they are an interesting couple, sailing right now with a 20-something son who is a soccer player and former steeplechaser in college. We also found an earlier-in-the-trip Canadian couple who took 3 weeks off to return home for the holidays. They are now back on their boat and sailed into Marathon this week; Ian and Marlene on GUST ‘O WIND are both retired school principals.

The highlight this week was a gathering on our boat with several other cruisers. It was cold so we had soup and French bread and we all sat down below rather than in the cockpit. Two of the attendees were Chris and Kevin from upstate New York, who we met very early in our trip, in Chesapeake City in the C& D Canal.

There was also another bus trip to Key West, this time for me and Susan, from SWAN. Susan used to live in this part of the world so she was a great tour guide. We went to a realtor’s Open House, a fully renovated shot-gun-style cottage in the middle of town. And we talked through many of the residential neighborhoods checking out the details on the house facades and the gardens .

Feb. 8 Today Chris and Kevin on ANDROS sailed out, bound for Key West. The next day Barry and Susan on SWAN, our pals for the past six weeks, left Marathon for the west coast of Florida. The day after that we met the owners of about 7 other boats who are leaving for the Bahamas later this week, at a gathering planned so we could meet and exchanged information. Although it is still windy, the cold weather has moderated and it looks good for a weather break. We need winds from the south so that we can count on the Gulf Stream behaving (translation: no big huge waves) since getting to the Bahamas means crossing the 30 mile wide (or so) current.

Feb. 11 Today is the busy day doing last minute shopping and preparing to sail to a small island (Rodriguez Key) off the coast of the upper Keys, where we should have a good shot at crossing the Gulf Stream on Friday. We hope that in the Bahamas we have access to the internet -- and have time to access it in between all the fun we hope to have!! -- so keep tuned but I expect that blogs will be fewer for the next 2 months. Our long-range plans are to head back to the U.S. in mid-April but as you may have seen from our past exploits on this trip, all this is subject to change.

January 26 - February 3 PART OF THE CRUISING CROWD

The "cruising crowd's" dinghies, this time in to watch the inauguration at the marina



Sponge fisherman near Big Pine Key

January 26 The cruisers here in Marathon are a pretty homogeneous group; they are for the most part retired-age couples, a good number of them have one small dog, they are often staying here for weeks or months, they mostly are on sailboats, they like to share tips on saving time and money, they are from Eastern Canada or Eastern U.S. This is our “crowd” for the time being.

A few exceptions to this make things interesting, so when a boat from Luxembourg or Australia enters the harbor, everyone pays attention. There are a few boats with children (one is even a boat from Australia with children!). Some boats have, in addition to their country flag, flags that tell more about them. We have Justin’s Tenth Mountain Div. 2-4 flag he sent us. One boat has a 6 ft. Pittsburgh Steelers banner and a Steelers flag, another flew his U.S. flag upside down during the week of the inauguration--that caused a bit of an uproar!

We also compare notes on dinghies, our transportation to shore. One might be only 5 ft. long (ours is small but is 10 ft.), another might have 3 golden retrievers in it with the owners, another couple might be kayaking to shore in 2 kayaks, one each with a dog standing on the kayak deck. Other things to notice are how the dinghies are lighted, what registration numbers are on them, the size of their outboard engine or if they are rowing.

Our latest quest is to find two specific boats: we heard there is a boat from Marblehead here in the harbor, just arrived, and also were told by the marina staff that there is another Maitland owner here somewhere. This is how we fill our days for now, waiting for both the weather to turn in our favor and for all the boat projects to be finished so we’re not trying to fix too many things in the Bahamas.

January 29 We took a side trip out of Marathon, west to Big Pine Key. There are less cruisers there -- we only saw 6 or 7 boats anchored in the channel. It is shallow at the entrance and again about mid-channel, and we got stuck on the bottom a few times but we did get ourselves off the sandy bottom and proceeded to anchor near a wildlife refuge called Coupon Bight. There was a beautiful sunset there our first night, and the stars were spectacular as it’s wide open with very few shore lights, and during this time only a crescent moon detracted from the stars’ lights.

We didn’t go ashore, but dinghied into the Bight and watched a sponge fisherman pull up black sponges from the bottom there in shallow water. He said he would sell them and they would be used for cosmetics, fuel filters in planes, and that Australians liked them for grooming horses. We also saw a large frigatebird that was gliding/fishing near our boat (the bird book helped us to identify it as a male Magnificent Fridgatebird). The rest of our time in the Big Pine Key area was spent staying on our boat as a very windy storm blew through the area and stayed for 2 days. It was a good time to catch up on crossword puzzles and naps. We also watched a beautiful 35 ft. varnished powerboat go back and forth past us. It is THE TRUMAN, and is used to take passengers and employees out to an exclusive island resort (no bridge or other shore access).

February 1 Traveling out the Newfound Harbor Channel to leave the Big Pine area we were escorted by a half dozen dolphins. I think I got them on video since they hung around for quite a while. The weather was still windy, but even worse wind is predicted in a few days, so we decided to go back to Marathon and the nice protected harbor there. That night we watched the first half of the Superbowl at a waterside restaurant and the second half in the city marina with our “cruising crowd”. The next night a bad gale did blow through along with thunder and lightening.

Projects for each of the next few days are to fill up on propane (our fuel for cooking), diesel (fuel for the sailboat engine), gasoline (for the outboard), water for our boat‘s watertanks, fix a few more small things on RISING TIDE, and stock up on some more groceries and supplies. It looks more sure that we will be heading for the Bahamas now, we’re just not sure when the weather will cooperate. We also have to head back to the northeast before we head due east for the first of the Bahamas islands. Right now we are about 110 miles from the closest Bahamas island; we also have worked our way so far southwest that we are about the same distance from Cuba, maybe even a little closer.

PS Forgot to mention last week that our son Pete turned 25 on January 19th!

January 17 - 25 MOVING AT LAST

Coconut Van in Key West



Parting Shot of Friendly Strangers at No Name Harbor -- I love these bikes!


Jan 17 We got the final parts installed and paid off the diesel mechanic. We’re fairly satisfied with their work and VERY happy to have the engine running again. For our last day in No Name Harbor we took 2 bike trips (we each did one) to get supplies. Had a celebratory lunch at Boater’s Grill in the harbor. Dinghied around to say goodby to people on boats that we had gotten friendly with. Then after dinner on our boat we went ashore to dance one more dance at Boater’s Grill, to lively Cuban music, and buy a flan and Cuban coffee to take back and savor for dessert!

After two full days of sailing we arrived in Marathon in the middle of the Florida Keys. The accommodations for cruisers there are legendary, as they have moorings (rare down here), tennis courts, laundry facilities, weekly potluck dinners, seminars for cruisers who are planning to go to the Bahamas, etc.

We have met up with our Canadian and Mattapoisett friends and there are also several boats here from Scituate, and maybe another 10 from other Massachusetts towns. We arrived about the same time as another Tayana 37, TRANQUILITY, from Block Island, RI.

We watched the inauguration of President Obama at the Marathon Marina with about 80 other cruisers. Lots of applause from the cruising group!

Jan 24 There are many helpful facilities near the marina in Marathon but it seemed that there was not the contact with nature we have had at other stops. So we took our dinghy and a couple of our friends and traveled down the fairly shallow Sister River that leads south out of the harbor. We were in company with some kayakers and canoeists and many birds. Where the river joins the ocean we beached the dinghy and walked along a nice beach, one with many tiny shells and tiny bits of coral. We watched a wedding set up in the park near the beach, and then sat on a side beach that faced the river and enjoyed the beer and snacks we had brought. A nice break from the bustling mooring field in the harbor.

Our batteries are staying topped up thanks to getting a last-day charge from a borrowed generator in No Name Harbor and to the new solar panels that are working very well. This mundane fact is actually very important to us and allows us to not have to pay the bigger rates to stay at a marina and charge up there.

There aren’t as many Spanish/Cuban-speakers here in this part of the Keys. There are several government properties with tall radio towers. We are speculating that this is a monitoring area for illegal immigrants. Marathon has it’s own “Bridge to Nowhere”, one we hailed to get opened to enter the harbor, but we can see that is blocked from any traffic. The key on the other side does not appear to have any, or at least not many, buildings. We heard that there is a political reason for the city to maintain the bridge and employ a bridge tender on a bridge no one seems to use.

We took a bus to Key West, about 50 miles, and walked around there for a good part of the day on Sunday. There are still some sailors left from Race Week which ended on Friday and there was a Disney cruise ship in at the dock so those passengers were out and about along with us. There are definitely a few characters out there also. Of course we had to have a slice of Key Lime Pie before we left.

The weather in Marathon has been cooler -- I know, not bitter cold and miserable like in New England -- but it is comfortable and there are no bugs at this time of year. We are still evaluating our options for the Bahamas. Stay Tuned!!

JANUARY 11 - 16 ONE MORE WEEK IN NO NAME HARBOR

Various scenes from January in Key Biscayne

January 11 Time for puttering, reflection and mini-exploring: that’s what you expect to have time for as a retired and cruising couple, right?

Discoveries:

Miami cyclists, hundreds of them, are using the Rickenbacker Bridge to Key Biscayne on Saturday (the east-bound side of the bridge is closed to traffic) and they are stopping for water, OJ or Gatorade at the outdoor breakfast place we are at.

There are still lots of paths to explore with my bike; on one trip I was invited to join a “Biking and History of Key Biscayne” group (this one was a corporate group) as they peddled through the State Park.

The Park has prison vans and high school students in buses that come to help keep the place clean. (They seem to keep these groups on opposite sides of the park!)

We are enjoying the Cuban food -- this week it was the small round beef snack pastries -- and the Cuban coffee.

Dolphins still come through every once in a while and when one catches a fish it seems to come to the surface to show it off.

It’s fun to walk to the beach, buy an ice-cream cone (we have no freezer on the boat), and make a phone call home.

When you buy solar panels the sun stops shining! Before Monday, when we went to Miami to buy solar panels from a low-cost warehouse there, we had constant sunshine. Since then, it’s been cloudy half or more of the day.

You can live pretty well without power on the boat. Without the engine we have no batteries and we have to keep what is left in the batteries for the fridge. The solar panels will keep them charged enough to run the fridge. So we have used a crank-power radio, an oil lamp and flashlights, our Sunshower to heat water for showers, and our propane stove to heat water for dishes, etc. The Park provides a washer and dryer and restrooms. While we’re at the restroom pavillion we plug in our phones and laptop there to keep them charged.

We’re motivated to be able to read and understand some Spanish. We bought a Spanish/English dictionary in Miami. We’re asking lots of questions.

Jan. 14 This is the day the mechanics brought our parts back and re-installed them. Barry and Susan came back from other parts of Biscayne Bay and helped us to move the boat to the seawall. However, there is still one part that hasn’t yet been rebuilt (Ken was mad!) and in the end it is taking until the 16th to get the engine completely back to working order and with several parts new or rebuilt.

Plans for the future are to probably catch up with Barry and Susan and also with Addison and Pat in Marathon (in the Florida Keys). Some advice we have gotten is to wait for the “winter” weather, long periods of northerlies, to end before heading for the Bahamas. We have never been to the Keys west of Marathon, including Key West, so that would be an interesting destination.

PS Justin got back to Louisiana at Fort Polk this week, 13 months spent in Baghdad and almost 5 years spent in the Army. Thanks, Justin, for doing your part in our country’s defense. For the future there are plans to ski in New England, then ski in Argentina in their winter (June & July), then start grad school in public lands management.

JANUARY 2 - JANUARY 10 LAYOVER ON A TROPICAL ISLE (AND A $2 BUS RIDE FROM MIAMI)

Three views of No Name Harbor, Key Biscayne

Jan 2 After 2 nights in lovely Hurricane Harbor in the middle of Key Biscayne (a small key, about a 35 minute bike ride from end to end), we moved to No Name Harbor on the southern end of the island. At No Name we would be in a State Park with restrooms, a self-serve pumpout station, bike trails, and two small restaurants. At Hurricane Harbor we had no landing spot to leave our dinghy, only a small bridge to drop someone off at. The homes around the harbor were beautiful and sunsets were magnificent.

Our first night in No Name Harbor we decided to take advantage of the restaurant right at the head of the harbor, Boater’s Grill. There was live music, the food was excellent, most of the patrons were Spanish-speaking, and before we left we joined half of the diners and all of the wait staff in dancing and a conga line.

Most of the tables at Boater’s Grill are on a porch so music wafts across the small harbor. The next day, Mariachi music started in the late afternoon. Meanwhile we had called our daughter Tammy in Santa Fe to find out the Spanish vocabulary we would need to politely get our waiter’s attention next time (although they all spoke English as well as Spanish).

Jan. 5 While running the engine at idle on Sunday afternoon it suddenly started acting erratically and then died. Ken worked on it and decided that if we could get the parts, we should replace the ancient fuel pump and while we were at it we should also get a new alternator. He called around on Monday morning and found a Perkins engine dealer in NW Miami. By 11 am we were on a bus to Miami and then metro-railed and bused some more to the location. We got the parts and lugged them back, reversing our morning trip and successfully returned at about 5:30 pm. Of course we needed some sustenance then so stopped at Boater’s Grill for sangria.

The next day Ken installed the parts, but there was still no response from the engine. And because of running our lights, refrigerator and trying to start the engine, the batteries were getting dangerously low. To make a long story short Ken got a promise from a local mechanic to come on Thursday morning to look at the engine and borrowed a generator from a boat in the harbor to help get the batteries back to partial power.

Barry and Susan on SWAN came back to see us in No Name Harbor. They promised to stay until they could help us move our engine-less boat to the seawall in the harbor where the mechanic asked us to have the boat. Moving RISING TIDE caused the highlight of the week -- getting caught in a squall while just reaching a curved part of the seawall and having to tie-off quickly in a shallow area there. The curve of the concrete wall and the shallowness caused us to tip dangerously as the tide went out and the boat hull leaned toward the concrete. We had every fender possible on the seawall side of the boat, and we had an anchor pulling us (hopefully) away from the wall as the tide continued to go out. On top of this drama, another boat in the anchorage started dragging anchor in the squall and the occupants were down below and didn’t realize what was happening. Susan noticed first and Barry took up the call to alert the crew (four French Canadians). All four Canadians were soon yelling in French as all four of us were yelling in English and their boat was about to hit the seawall about 40 ft. from our boat. We got their fenders and lines tied on pretty quickly and they only suffered a few scrapes; it could have been worse!

Jan. 8 At 5:45 am, about an hour and a half before sunrise, we got up to reposition RISING TIDE now that the tide had come in. Miraculously out of the dark came a rowboat with Barry and Susan. They made easy work of getting us back to deeper water along the wall.

Later in the day, the mechanics gone and the engine several parts lighter as they found what needed rebuilding and cleaning, we again quietly moved RISING TIDE back to be on anchor near the mangroves on the other side of the harbor. Again we were helped by our associate crew Barry and Susan. They then sailed out on their quest to find a source of cooking heat -- propane -- back on the mainland.

Even though we are most likely going to be waiting almost another week for the parts to be reinstalled we are lucky to be where we are. The weather has been perfect every day (except for the squall) and we are within biking distance of most supplies we need. This town has an interesting mix of Floridians, Cuban-Americans, tourists from all over the world, boaters, displaced New Englanders, and tennis players (the tennis center here is the site of the fifth largest professional tennis tournament in the world, although in fact checking this I see that the Sony Erickson Tournament which is supposed to be the one held here is now held in Qatar). The ocean beach was voted in the top 10 in the country. From our anchor we can see large iguanas, manatees, dolphins chasing fish, ibises.

Jan. 10 Today we received a phone call from Justin in Germany (he is on his way home -- yay!!) as we biked to breakfast on the other side of town and joined almost 100 bicycle riders who were using the outdoor restaurant as a pit stop on a Saturday morning ride. Ken had rented a mountain bike the day before at the State Park and they nicely let him keep it for 24 hours (not just the one day that you usually get with a rental). We had gone on a bicycle exploration yesterday on the other end of Key Biscayne and onto the next key, Virginia Key.

This week has been a roller-coaster but it has been made reasonably comfortable by friends, location and weather. We may even be traveling to Miami again on Monday to use up some of our layover time!

December 27 - Jan 1 WARM THOUGHTS FOR OUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

Leaving the dock in N. Palm Beach, AQUILA in background -- another Tayana 37

Christmas Key Biscayne-style


Dec. 27 Cell phones are wonderful and are worth every penny of that monthly bill as we travel. We may not be as connected when we get to the Bahamas so we are appreciating our contacts we can make now. For those of you we have been in touch with lately, we want to reiterate how nice it has been to hear your voices. Hopefully we’ll get to some additional calls this next week. We also use our phones to call ahead to marinas and other resources in new places. We are still feeling our way around -- almost like a blind person -- in all these new places, so extra contact information from shore side locations in helpful.

In Pompano Beach this week we met up with an old friend of mine from Boston University. Digna, who now works at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, drove with her sister to a bridge in Pompano Beach that neither of us was familiar with and by using our phones we got connected and then took our dinghy about ¼ mile to where RISING TIDE was anchored. Digna did play around with me for a bit at the bridge, telling me she could see me in the channel but not telling me exactly which bank she was on or which side of the bridge. She had me going in circles! We had a great visit.

Dec. 28 After spending one night on anchor in a channel on the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale we then spent two nights in Lake Sylvia (my sister’s family, the Sylvias in Rochester, should go there) in a more central Fort Lauderdale location. We took other channels to get to restaurants and grocery stores by boat. We did some walking too, but the trips down channels and under low bridges was different. Ken collected some trash in one channel since we knew there was a dumpster at the end we could put it in. We were told later that there is a regular cleaning schedule for the city waters and a special boat with a paddle-wheel-type arrangement to collect debris.

The coconuts fall in the channels and fool us as they look like balls or floating trap buoys. We had fun watching large iguanas that hang out on many of the docks and lawns close to the channels. Some are green and some are orange or grey. There were different sizes but some were more than 2 feet long. There are also parrots here -- noisy especially when many of them are in the same tree.

Fort Lauderdale is not just a place for wildlife; we saw so many private yachts, of the size that they would need crew, and also many businesses that cater to private yachts, selling uniforms, food, equipment, arranging employment, etc. A monthly newspaper with about 60 pages reports on news for captains and crews.

Dec. 30 We are enjoying wonderful weather, warmer than usual for this time of year, and almost no rain. Although we haven’t been to any beaches yet or been swimming, we are loving it. We left Lake Sylvia and sailed outside in the ocean to Miami, in pretty decent wind and very little chop. It took most of the day and we ended up in an area called Marine Stadium, facing the Miami skyline. This area has been used for waterskiing shows; there is a large grandstand and a long oval-shaped stadium. Jet skis and waterskiers still use the outside perimeter leaving plenty of room for anchoring in the middle. SWAN with Barry and Susan are here too and for New Year’s Eve we enjoyed dinner together and then watched fireworks at midnight over Miami!

The water is a turquoise color here and I went swimming to check the hull of RISING TIDE (we hit something coming in to Miami in the entrance channel). The hull looked OK and I enjoyed the clear, warm water. We also picked up mail here, at Key Biscayne, a bike-ride away over a bridge.

Our next few days will be spent in Hurricane Harbor, Key Biscayne. There are two large parks to explore and it is a good spot for getting more information about the Bahamas trip since we are now less than 50 miles from Bimini or Cat Cay.