Saturday, 8 February 2020

Crossed!

We are in West End, Bahamas!
Trekker docked at West End
We decided that today was the last chance we would have to cross for about another week, so we decided to poke our nose into the Gulf Stream, see what it was like and retreat to Lake Worth or Ft. Lauderdale if we didn't like the conditions. 

After waiting for a cruise ship to come through  we cleared Lake Worth inlet about 0730 and set a course for West End.  In fact, due to the Gulf Stream flowing north we were headed quite a bit south of West End.  Our instruments indicated that at it's fastest, the stream was flowing north at 4.7 knots! Swells were about 3 feet to start building to 4 to 5 a third of the way across but they were on our aft quarter or beam so we actually surfed down the face of many of them. As we reached the half way point they started to decrease. Winds started out at 18 knots out of the NW and slowly clocked around to 12 knots out of the ENE by the time we cleared the worst of the stream.  We had our working jib and double reefed main as well as the engine on most of the way across.  As the crow flies we averaged just over 6 knots, but of course we had to fight that Gulf Stream much of the way!

We are checked in with Bahamas Customs and Immigration have our cruising and fishing licences although anyone who knows us knows that we are unlikely to catch any fish, and we are celebrating with a beer and home made guacamole!

Tomorrow we rinse off all the salt!

Cheers!

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