I Can See Clearly Now

The last few days have been beyond beautiful. Crossing the gulf stream for the first time was incredible. Not many people get to say they’ve done it before, i’m glad i’m one of them.

My favorite thing about crossing the gulf stream? Doing it while eating my favorite food, chocolate ice cream. Dad and I are addicted to ice cream and knew we couldn’t last 2 months without having some, didn’t even make it across the gulf stream to be exact.

We had a plan before we left to do a watch system, 1 person rotates on while 1 rotates off, always having 2 people on deck. With a family the loves to sleep, that didn’t work out quite as we wanted. Dad ended up pulling almost an all nighter. He woke me up around 2:45am to give me a shift. From 3-5:30am I was awake, dodging freighters and keeping a close eye on the AIS. There is a lot of traffic, even after you cross the gulf stream.

We saw some weird things during our passage. One for sure was 4 cruise ships all anchored together just before the banks near Bimini. With COVID being a significant issue, there are obviously no cruises happening. So this leaves a ton of cruise ships with nothing to do in the middle of the Bahamas. We swear we heard music blasting from a few miles away.

Mom and I also spotted a yellow object in the distance around 9am. At first we thought it was an old life raft. We then discovered it was just a huge floating piece of foam left over from hurricane debris. The environmentalist in me fought hard with dad to go and pick it up, but he said it was too big to get on board. So we were forced to leave it behind.

Mid afternoon we stopped for a break to shut the engines down and go for a quick swim. There is no way to describe it expect I could hear myself breathing it was so quite. Looking around and seeing absolutely nothing in sight is wonderful. It makes me feel so calm and at peace with a world that is so screwed up at the moment.

So far all is well and we are currently anchored off of Chub Cay. Going to shore soon to clear customs as we ran a few minutes short of the office closing yesterday afternoon. We’ve seen sea turtles and so much wildlife already, sure to be many more sighting to come. I’ll keep you updated, talk soon.