The Bahamas - Part 1, Bimini
April 3
The Bahamas has been the most memorable leg of my expedition so far.
It began with the crossing from Miami to Bimini, in the Commonwealth of the Bahamas. It is the island chain closest to the USA. On a 2-dimensional map, it is about 50 NM on a heading directly east (90o) across the Florida Strait. To insure a comfortable and safe ride, you pick a weather window that considers the usual for winds, waves, tides, and swells, plus adding the Florida Current which is the beginning of the Gulf Stream. The water flows about 4 knots in a northerly direction, so if you travel at 10 knots on a 90o heading you will miss Bimini by 20 NM to the north with no land in your near future.
An open water transit needs to meet WW’s target of 12-2-2, which you may recall is ≤12 knots of wind, ≤2’ waves (0.75 m), and a wave period (frequency in seconds) >2x the wave height in feet. At sea, we add ocean swells, another type of wave, that also need to meet the >2x period-height criterion. Swells are generated by far away storms, the wave-lengths tend to be longer with variable wave heights, and they can arrive from a different direction than the local wind and waves. In addition, there are the tides that can create currents to push or pull your boat as well as amplify or suppress waves. One more factor; particular to the Florida Strait, if the wind is from the NE, N, or NW it will be fighting the current creating substantially larger waves than forecasted for the weather. Simply put, it gets complicated. Experience has taught me that open water passage predictions have wide margins of error, even for the most experienced captains and weather services.
Our crossing went very well. The wind was from the SW, the waves and swell were 2-3’ high on long periods >5 sec from the SW, and we cruised at 15-18 knots (which allowed us drag a fishing lure). Our most challenging moments were giving way to the container and Disney Cruise ships. We adjusted for the current and landed after 4 hours just north of the entrance to North Bimini’s protected channel. It was a bit eerie when WW’s depth finder couldn’t find the bottom passing over 835 m of water on the charts. Some theories put Atlantis somewhere down there.
We docked at the Bimini Big Game Club with the yellow, quarantine flag flying, and I meandered down the street to the Immigration Office. Brian had to wait onboard for the captain to file the paperwork. The office was tucked away in a concrete bungalow and about as informal as you can get. From there you walk back to the Customs Office, similarly nondescript and informal. It was clear that nobody was going to board us searching for illegal fruits and vegetables. I had already registered our arrival online which made both offices very happy.
We celebrated our arrival with a late lunch on the restaurant deck overlooking the marina. There are signs warning against swimming in the marina. When our lunch scraps went over the rail and a fish feeding frenzy erupted, it included at least two big Bull Sharks (Carcharhinus leucas). They were well known to the wait staff who also warned about swimming in Bahamian marinas. I also ran into more of Ernest Hemingway in whose wake I am serendipitously following - from my early travels in Cuba to Key West and now Bimini.
After celebrating, we returned to the boat to discover that our bilge pump’s fuse had burned out again, even with the oversized 10 amp fuse. That required some late night, headlamp work down in the engine room to check that we would be okay until the morning – no rest for the wicked. The next morning was spent ‘cirque-du-soleiled’ in the engine room working out the bilge pump issue. That’s the term I use to describe the contortionism that is engine repair for WW. We discovered that the outlet hose was nearly blocked with oysters and barnacles. The blockage of water from the pump was blowing fuses, and finally burned out the pump in my hand. You can’t run a boat without functioning bilge pumps (WW has two), despite the opinions of my boating friends in Chicago.
I sent Brian off on foot to check the three ‘marine’ stores for pumps and parts. We converged on store three, the Bimini General Store, which was a tangled collection of hardware bits that required owner Ellie, five generations on Bimini, to interpret and search. At the age of 90ish (she didn’t say for sure), she was vibrant with wonderful and humorous stories recounting her life and Bimini. She had a hearing aid that she cursed as useless since it arrived from the mainland. Brian saw that it was similar to his own and proceeded to clip the rogue and impeding wire that required trimming for the unit to fit and work. We think she was happy about Audiologist Brian’s work, but she didn’t like that I took their picture during the operation. I should have asked permission, but I got caught up in the laughter of the scene. She scolded me like I was one of her grade school pupils (one of her former lives), and laughed with comments about being a movie star and that “…I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck”. I apologized. We hung around for as long as we could. We got hose, clamps, and a pair of beach shoes for Brian that emerged from somewhere, and then hurried back to the boat and work.
Brian had found a pump, but it wouldn’t fit in the tight space of the bilge. I had a lower flow pump in my redundancy collection (stuff I keep on board for emergencies, a.k.a. Boy Scout Allen) and we spent the best part of the afternoon fitting the new pump, hose, and wiring into the cramped space. I eventually unfurled myself from the engine room and we headed out for dinner.
We met a couple of local captains on the dock who showed me the preferred route and things to watch for on the next boating leg east to Chub Cay. I asked about the weather for the next day: “…should be okay, [long pause], ya, think it will be alright”. It wasn’t a ringing endorsement of the planned trip, and in hindsight I should have been more in-tune with that tone.
Stay tuned for more of this tangled tale.
Allen
Chub Cay, The Bahamas
