Turning for Home

We have gone as far east as we are going to go this year. That was the Glass Window Bridge between North Eleuthra and South Eleuthra. It was a natural arch a hundred years ago and was used as a bridge until the arch collapsed. The Bahamians have gone to great effort to span the gap with a series of man-made bridges, each of which gets trashed eventually by a hurricane. The current bridge is only one lane wide but very heavily built. Since there's little traffic and rebuilding the bridge is very expensive in terms of Bahamian GDP, this makes sense. Everyone just drives down the middle of the two-lane roads anyway ;) .

 

 

But that was it. We need to get back by mid-May and it takes a surprisingly long time to move 300 miles through the islands and banks of the archipelago. This is due to no easy straight lines from point A to Point B here and having to wait for the weather to cooperate. Fortunately, that is more common when going west than it is when going east. The spring trades are beginning to appear, which are 15-25 kt steady winds from the east south east. You might think that was ideal, just hop on and ride downwind, but its not that easy. Catamarans don't like going dead downwind. It is hard to get the main sail out far enough to one side to fully catch a wind from dead aft. And when you do, the is a high risk of waves pushing your stern off to the wrong side, filling the sail from the back and producing a “crash jibe”. So we have been looking for routes that will take us back at angles to these winds and avoid the continuing cold fronts that just don't want to quit. It has been quite a winter for everyone on the East Coast.

And the route that makes sense runs from Eleuthra via Current Cut Settlement (yes, the current is so fierce they named the town after it)  to Royal Island to wait for a weather window to make the big jump directly to Bimini. Since we are headed to the Keys and then up the west coast of Florida, we considered tackling the reverse of the route we took out, running directly from Marathon north east past the top of Andros to Chub. But Chub has a poor anchorage, and reversing the route means fighting our way straight back into the Gulf Stream, a fight we weren't going to win. So, from Bimini we can shoot due west to Miami or run south with “one foot on the beach” of the Bimini chain to get south without mashing into the Gulf Stream.

The beach and Cerca Trova at the anchorage for Current Settlement

Hi ho, off we go, for home and hearth and family.

 

Sun setting over Eleuthra, now behind us