Bahamas Journey - Update 1/27/24
(Below is the text of an email we sent on Jan 27 to friends and family)
As most of you know, we've been taking trips down to Fort Lauderdale since early November to work on the boat, do some shake-down sails, and generally get ready for living on our boat for a few months. We left Denver on January 17 for our final pre-sailing prep. Jen had her annual girls' weekend (in Fort Lauderdale this year) for the first few days and Steve had two of our friends (Mat Gothard and Jim MacDougall) on the boat to help with some projects. Everyone left on Monday Jan 22 and we spent the next few days provisioning (buying food and other items), doing final boat projects, and getting ready to depart for Bimini in the Bahamas.
We left our dock in Hallandale Beach at about 1AM on Friday morning, made our way up the ICW, and left Port Everglade (Fort Lauderdale) for Bimini at 2:30AM. We arrived at Bimini at 1:45PM. Overall, the crossing went well (although the Gulf Stream is no joke). Sea states (and winds) weren’t perfect, but we made it (with a very salty boat) to the dock at Bimini Blue Water Resort. Docking was quite the spectacle. A very small slip (at most a couple feet on each side) and solid wind pushing us into the dock. Let's just say we have our first minor boat rash on Second Half, complete with some bruised egos.
Steve checked us into Immigration and Customs (a short walk from our dock) and we had a nice seafood dinner. Today we're spending some time planning for the next few days, cleaning the boat, and getting caught up on email and other stuff. We think we'll be moving off the dock to an anchorage further up along Bimini for one or two nights before heading out for our next destination. We may meet up with some friends for dinner (from Cruisers University who are crossing to Bimini from Key Largo this morning) and then we have a little bit of weather coming through on Sunday night, so still deciding when we'll leave Bimini. We'll keep everyone updated on what comes next!!
Below are links to photos and other information
Predict Wind - SV Second Half: Our PredictWind tracking page is up and running. You can follow where we are and current conditions and we will post text updates on this page as well.
Google Photos: Bahamas Journey Part 1 (Prep - Bimini): This album contains a few photos from our prep time and also photos from our crossing and our time in Bimini so far. We'll keep adding to this album until we move on to the next step in our journey (TBD)
Facebook SV Second Half: For those of you on Facebook, you can follow or friend this page and we'll post updates there too.
Hope everyone is having a great weekend - we love you,
