Friday 1st& Saturday 2nd December

At sea.

Miami to Chub Cay, Bahamas.

25 24.629 N

77 54.303 W

Happy wedding anniversary Kay & Martin, we hope you share many more.

Well the day has finally arrived, the wind has turned to the southeast and the seas are supposed to be 2 - 4 feet in the Gulf stream. We spent the morning doing a final load of laundry, filling the water tanks and readying the boat for the trip south to the Bahamas. After a last lunch at the habour restaurant we finally left the harbour at 16.00hrs - into a setting sun. Waved goodbye to the Florida coast line and settled in to the trip across the water. NEVER believe a weather forecaster. The winds picked up to 15 - 20 Kts on the nose so we couldn't even put up the jib to help us along and the seas were at least 5-8 feet. The constant throbbing of the engine and the thumping of the waves gave me a migraine and I was doing only the minium amount of watchkeeping - just enough to allow Gerry to catnap for a couple of hours at a time. On reaching the Bahama banks we dug out our Quarantine flag and took down the Stars and Stripes - we were offically out of the USA! We approached the narrow entrance to Gun Cay/ Cat Cay at 05.30hrs, it was still dark and not the ideal time to be going through a narrow, unknown passage but at least there weren't any other boats around to confuse the issue. Needless to say we managed to negotiate the cut without incident and then plugged in the waypoints for our ultimate destination of Chub Cay. As Saturday dawned and I began to feel a bit better we were astounded to find that there wasn't a single boat in sight in any direction and it remained that way until mid afternoon when all the big fishing boats began to speed past us on their way south. I kept asking "are we there yet" but didn't get a satisfactory answer until about 20.00hrs. We had arrived, again in darkness (thank goodness the moon was pretty close to full)at Chub Cay. We intended to anchor outside of the marina for the night and then check in in the morning. We dropped our anchor in 2.5 feet of water - we'd forgotten how shallow the Bahamian water gets! and sat watching ourselves swing for a while whilst eating a hastily prepare dinner (which was understandably fantastic). Then we realised that we were rolling very badly from side to side, to the extent that things were falling off of shelves - things that hadn't fallen off on the rough trip over! Gerry ended up putting a bridle on the anchor chain and winching it in until we were bow into the swell. This worked really well and reduced the rolling to a minimum. After a much appreciated hot shower we fell into bed and slept like logs, I think if we had dragged anchor during the night we wouldn't have really cared!