No Bad Days - Kyle

Florida and The Bahamas  Mar 25 to April 15 2014

They say that life happens while you are making plans. I had been making plans to go kayak sailing in Mexico this winter, but various and sundry situations had me postpone that plan until next year.  Late March came and things were looking quiet for the next few weeks at Casa del Ramona so I accepted an offer to join my friend Diny sailing on her boat in Florida just in time to cross with her to The Bahamas where she planned to spend the next several months. I flew to Miami and took the commuter train up the coast to West Palm Beach where her boat was in the water. Her plan was to work our way down the coast about 45 miles to at least Fort Lauderdale where it was a better place to take off and give a better angle for crossing the Gulf Stream to The Bahamas. We spent a few days there at Palm Beach waiting out some nasty weather and doing a few odd jobs on the boat, including trouble shooting and changing the oil pressure switch on her brand new engine, and fixing a leak that was a bit worrisome in the bilge. 

Diny and I met sailing in Mexico a few years ago and we have very similar styles of sailing and traveling. She is a retired nurse, very adventerous, travels all over, likes roughing it, doesnt let much of anything bug her, cheerful in rough conditions,  and enjoys poking around in wild and obscure corners of the world.  We get along great.

All systems finally looked good so on Sunday we launched and sailed with a nice wind behind us and a bright sunny day all about. We sailed about 25 miles and dropped anchor just off a pretty beach to spend the night, expecting to move on to Ft Lauderdale the next day.  Right as we were dropping anchor a boat of US Border Patol agents pulled up and asked us if we were legal. Upon assuring them that we were, they bid us a fine evening and roared off to go find the terrorists. 

This morning we pulled up anchor off the beach and sailed on down to Fort Lauderdale. It was a very fun and satisfying trip, so much so that when we arrived we took a  few laps around the harbor under full sail just for fun.  We came in and anchored in a little lagoon surrounded by billion dollar houses with yachts to match. I cant believe the amount of money here. Everywhere you look is a lakeside mansion and mega yacht to match.

Diny`s boat, named Adventure Quest, is a Balboa 26, very similar to my No Bad Days. It is a classic "good ole boat", has seen a few rough years but since she has owned it over the last few years she has done a lot of work on it to get it ship-shape and comfy. She has spent the big part of last year sailing the Florida Keys and will spend this year in the Bahamas.  They are a group of about 650 islands, 55 + miles east of Florida. They were a British colony and in the 1960s they became an independant nation. The crossing over there from Florida can be a peice of cake in good conditions but horrible in bad conditions. The Gulf Stream flows north about 3 miles an hour and when any wind blows out of the north the ocean kicks up a nasty chop so we are looking for a 3 day window of forecasted south, west, or east (anything but North!) winds to allow a good safe crossing.

The weather is looking good for a crossing to the Bahamas tomorrow afternoon. It should take about a day or two. Standby for news 

Apr 9. A lot has happened to catch up on here. We made the crossing to the Bahamas several days ago. We launched at about 5 PM and sailed all night, ariving without incident 24 hours later. the passage is about 60 miles.   We took turns at the helm, about 4 hours each at a time, while the other slept below.   the tiller pilot was working well, so the main job all night was to keep lookout for other ships. We saw a number of them but no close encounters.  We had  a good moderate steady wind from the east the whole time, our course was NE, so we were on a close hauled tack most of the time, making as good as 8 knots somes times. amazing in such a small boat.  Other times we were as slow as 1 knot, and could have turned on the motor but we preferred to sail as much as we could instead. Diny and I are very compatible in that decision. many sailors refuse to go less than 4 knots ever and turn on the motor whenever sailing is less than that.  We enjoyed a nice sail. One odd thing about sailing at night is that perceptions are very scewed.  You can only see what is right close at hand to the boat with no distance perspective . Sometimes it felt like we were going very fast, seemed like there was a good wind , sails set right, seemed like a good stern wake, but look at the GPS and we are only going 1 knot.  Other times, in the day, it seemed like we were barely moving but the GPS said 8.  Very odd.  We made our landfall within about 4 miles of where we planned, at the town of West End on Grand Bahama island.  We settled in a nice protected anchorage where we stayed for a few days resting. We checked in to Customs there, a simple process.  The Bahamas  islands spread over many hundreds of square miles of shallow ocean bank, where for vast areas the sea is less than 15 feet deep. Around many of the islands the water is only a few feet deep and approaches and anchorages must be carefully charted and planned to avoid grounding and damage.  Fourtunately, modern tools like the GPS and depth sounder make it much easier. I am amazed at the old timers who only had rough charts , anecdotes, a hand thrown depth line, and a sextant to get occaisional location fixes . They were amazing back then. And they lost ships on the reefs regularly too I guess.

We had some weak wifi internet at West End and I was trying to check my emails  and let people at home that we completed the crossing safely and i got a warning from Gmail that my account had been suspended for some unknown reason. they had some crazy system of recovering the account by asking me all kinds of crazy questions like what was the date i set up the gmail account (????), what were the email address of several people I had last communicated with(????), what was the first phone number I ever had (???). Crazy stuff. I got every one wrong and flunked the account recovery test.  They then had a system where i could submit a request to recover the account and they would review it and send me an email to some other address (which I do not have), so I gave them Dinys, but we have not had any internet either since then so I may not know the result until I get back to Florida! Crazy. As soon as I get back I am going to terminate everything I do with gmail and use some other service. 

  

We left West End sailing NE with a nice gentle breeze for a mid point island called Mangrove Cay.  We anchored there for the night but it was so shallow everywhere and weather was calm we could have anchored anywhere we felt like it anywhere out there.  The next day we were headed for another  interim point Great Sale Cay, but as we approached  there by mid day we decided to skip the mid point and turned north and head directly to our destination,/Double Breasted cay, a series of rocky islands, lagoons and reefs. We anchored outside but when the weather shifted that night we moved in to a more protected anchorage. A storm front had been predicted and came in right on time 2 days ago, with rain and strong winds. We stayed on board as going anywhere in the dinghy would be a bit tricky. The winds are just now starting to soften a bit and tomorrow looks better for doing some poking around, snorkeling and fishing.

We took the opportunity of  the down time to upgrade a few projects on the boat.  We made a reefing system that will be safer for Diny when she is sailing alone, and she learned how to climb the mast using some climbing gear I brought her. She needed to re-attached some lazy jack rigging up high  so she made good use of the ast climb  training up there.  We read a lot on board. I brought my Kindle and have been feasting on Jack London and Joseph Conrad. We do not have any internet on board, only if we get wifi at some town we visit.  Reading, Guitar playing and cooking fills our evenings. The other night a couple from a neighboring boat, Dean and Nina from Willow Alaska, came over to visit. Dean had a really cool 3 stringed dulcimer and we had fun playing songs we both knew.   Food on board is very similar to what I eat at home. Bread and peanut butter and yogurt for breakfast. Cheese sandwich and apple for lunch.  We have a simple alcohol stove and cook up big pots of potatos and eat them for days. Add onions, garlic, canned chicken one day, eggs, or cheese the next. Diny made a traditional Dutch pot dish called hutzpot, which is a super good mustard potato salad.  We anchored near a sport fishing boat and they gave us a big slab of yellow fin tuna that we barbequed and gorged on for almost 3 days til it was gone. (we have a little cooler box that runs off the solar panels so leftovers can keep long enough to get them all eaten. 

We get weather reports from several sources, but we cant always get connected to them consistantly, We have an SSB receiver and can sometimes listen in to the daily cruiser net and hear a report there.  Sometimes we can get radio from Nassau or even Florida. Diny has a satelite phone that she can connect to download GRIB weather files which seem to be the most reliable but she only has limited minutes on the phone so we check it only every 3-4 days and get the 5 day forecast. She is also getting pretty good at watching the barometer rise and fall, watch the clouds and compare it to her cloud chart and come up with a pretty good prediction.

APR 10 the storm seems over today. seas and winds are calming.  We moved over to a neighboring island, Grand Cay, and hung out there for a few days. Seems like I just got here and already we are planning my trip home. It is Thursday and on Sunday I need to catch the ferry out of Freeport on Grand Bahama cay back to Lauderdale.

Grand Cay is actually a series of 3 islands, Little Grand, Big Grand, and Grand.  Big and Grand are uninhabited private islands, but there is a Bahamian settlement on Little grand.  And it is really little. the whole island is only a few hundred yards long, and half that wide. There are no roads and no cars. There is a wide concrete sidewalk  that ran the length of town, and few people had golf carts to drive around in.  Most everyone walked.  About 500 people live there, houses are small, they are jammed in tight,  and it is pretty "3rd world".  The people are poor, but they seemed to have a good simple life. They certainly were friendly.  Everyone we met was eager to visit and help. There is a school, a little health clinic, 2 churches, a police station, only a few small cafes and grocery shops with pretty limited selection.  (We met a yachting tourist who thought he had broken his leg and the clinic could not diagnose it. He had to take a boat to Freeport to get an Xray.  Turns out it was not broken, just a bad wack)  The town seems to revolve around "Rosies Place", a sport fishing complex of docks, a few motel rooms, and a bar\restaurant where everyone hangs out.  Rosie is a local guy, and he owns most of the commercial business on the island. I never ot to meet him, and no one seemed to have anything bad  to say about him, but it seemed like I sensed a bit of resentment whenever they would refer to something on the island as "Rosie Owned". Maybe it was just my imagination. 

The island is solid rock, with no soil to speak of so there is no gardening at all. Not even any chickens. We thought surely someone would have chickes but no. Even eggs had to be brought in, like everyting else).  There are are a few scrubby bushes and grasses that grow in the cracks,  and it is really dry. Even though it rains a fair bit, it just runs off into the ocean.  Fresh water is provided by a giant desalination plant, and fresh water is precious.  No wasting water there! (we here in Utah could learn a thing or 2 from them!)  There are no big resorts on the island. (no beaches=no resorts I guess)but being on the edge of the deep water there is a lot of sport fishing there.  Almost everyone make their living from fishing or supporting the sport fishing tourists. 

Seems like we just got here and already I needed to be planning my trip back home, which could well take several days. it is Thursday, and I had a ticket for the Freeport to Ft Lauderdale ferry on Sunday, then a plane to Utah on Tuesday. We heard that Rosie makes regular runs in a very fast speed boat from here to Freeport  every few days, next on  Sunday (we were told) .  If so, we will head over to Walkers Cay (5 miles away) until Saturday for some snorkeling. If not, we need to start leaving right away in Dinys boat heading back to Freeport today to allow for conditions and get me there on time .  Everything on a sailboat out here is a matter of "if" based on "conditions".    "If this.... then that....".  Everything is conditional, with 2-3 back up plans.  I may name my next boat "If Then"

Diny and I were wandering around the island and met a funny little guy named Leslie. He was very shy about his name "it's a girl name" he said. he showed us a place to eat that had no sign, just a house and the lady, Valerie, made us some awsome conch and rice and fried plantain. Then when we mentioned that I was planning on taking the Rosie boat to Freeport he said "oh no, the weather looks bad,he may not go, but take the mail boat , it is going tomorrow (Saturday) and will go no matter what. " Plus, since I would get there a day earlier that I needed to, he said I could stay in the crew's cabin that night and save the cost of getting a room in Freeport.  Leslie said he knew the owner and it would all be OK.  OK, so we made that arrangement.  We pulled over on to a little table and  I jammed on my guitar while Leslie did some rasta rap stuff along with me.  Diny filmed it all. watch for it at Sundance. 

We had happy hour with a cruising couple we had met,  Glynn and Eilene from Nova Scotia Canada.  they were living on an old catamaran that had been fixed up here and there with scrap wood and junk steel from various abandoned ships and random spare parts. They had a great little cockpit table they had made out of junk material. It was so refreshing to meet cruisers that were OK doing that and didnt feel that their boat had to be a spectacular show piece.  We felt right at home with them! He was a wildlife biologist in Canada, and had good stories to tell.

The next morning early I bid a fond adios to Diny and paddled the dinghy over to the mail boat dock.  It is more than mail boat, it is a big 85 ft drive-on cargo ship with 4 big diesel engines. The local owner, Ed Cooper,  has the contract with the government to run the mail to Grand Cay and anything and  everything else needed on the island comes along for the ride.   People were loading up  frozen fish they had caught to sell in Freeport.  Others brought their propane tanks to him to have filled.  One of the deck hands, a young fellow named DiAngelo,  had been gathering scrap metal from all over the island and the boat was almost half full of that: old batteries, engine blocks, pipe,  old outboard engine parts to sell to a scrap dealer in Freeport.  He said it would net him about $400!  there were about a dozen passengers.  But it was definately a cargo vessel, not made for passenger comfort.  People stood, or sat on one rough wooden bench, or milk crates. I dont think the boat had any chairs. Just milk crates. Good enough tho.  We pulled out pretty much on time and cruised across to Freeport on Brand Bahama cay. It took about 6 hours. About half way across the captain served everybody plates of rice and pork he had been cooking up in the pilot house. It was amazing good, and certainly unexpected.  It was a calm day, and a lively game of dominoes was started on deck by  some of the the men. (Domines seemed to be the past time of most of the old fellows on the island. We saw them playing on almost every porch in the heat of the day). They had a table set up on deck and sat on milk crates.  They invited me to play and I was schooled real fast. No money involved but lots of very good natured teasing about letting the others see my pieces. They said "If you dont learn anything else here, learn how to rack your pieces" (3 in one hand, 4 in the other, held at an angle towards myself so the other folks cant see them)  I won one game when the other last player for that round could have blocked my last move but he put it on the other  end instead and let me play my 4 (which he knew i had., because I had not learned good racking yet...) to win.  We approached Grand Bahama island from the north, but Freeport is on the south side. The island is 60 miles  and 10 wide and going around is a major problem so we steamed in and across in a canal system called Lucayan Channel that crosses Grand Bahama island to Freeport. That was pretty interesting. It was man-made, dug and dredged, about 50 yards wide,  fairly deep for good sized  boats, and the edges were lined with concrete. I guess there was a low bridge further along which prevented big boats from going all the way across. (I later saw a new looking sign announcing the construction of a big new tall bridge for the main highway crossing the canal, but nobody I talked to knew anything about it.)  Every mile or so there were side channels that went several hundred yards in for pulling out of the main channel.  We saw no other  boat traffic,  (but I knew the Rosie boat would come there later also).  The area around was rocky slab, covered with scrub bush and  pine trees for miles. They seemed to grow out of solid rock. very amazing that anything at all could grow there, on that limestone slab,  but it was growing pretty thickly. You would have a hard time walking thru it.  It looked ripe for development, which was the plan, but here 35 years later, I guess nothing much had ever happened there. Just the canal. and us  We tied up to some trees in one of the pullouts in what seemed like the middle of nowhere,  next to a dirt track , and people started driving up the little dirt road and collected passengers and frozen fish.  Soon the boat was empty and  it was the just the 3 crew and me. We spent the afternoon just bumming about.  I played my guitar and visited with them . DiAngelo's dad Richard was the other crew, along with Ed Cooper the owner.  DiAngelo was a nice fellow, about 20 something, shy and seemed like a hard worker. When he wasnt working the boat he was out collecting scrap metal and catching fish for the market. He won quite a few of the dominoes games.  he said he would like to have a child some day ("Just one, no more").  He dream was to go to live in Africa. "the Home land"  he said , but it was interesting that he didnt seem to know much about it. Just that he was black and felt that that was where he should be.  He said that Leslie had told him to watch out for me

I spent the night in the crew cabin with DiAngelo and Richard, there were 6 bunks, 2 rows 3 bunks high.  There were only 3 of us so there was plenty of room. The cabin is a small metal room, no windows or AC, stuffy, and being right over the engine rom, it smelled of diesel fumes all night.  They had to keep the engines running to keep the freezers cold so there was a steady roar all night.  I got used to it quickly and slept well until about 4 AM when it stopped and everyone woke up. Some repairs were made, the problem was fixed, the roar and rumble resumed, and we all went back to sleep.

The next morning I had to find a way to the ferry terminal, several miles away. I had all day to get there, but didnt know if I would have to end up walking so I got going on the project right away.  A fellow soon arrived in a pickup truck full of groceries to load on to the ship.  We all formed a line and passed over countless bags of rice and  cases of Coke. The Staples of Life on Little Grand Cay I guess. I asked him if he could drop me at the airport nearby where I figured I could catch a shuttle or a taxi on to the ferry. He said "I am going to the ferry now. that is where I work my other job. I will take you there". His name was Alvin but everyone called him Yellow, because his skin tone was lighter than everyone elses. he was an interesting fellow.  Married, 3 kids,  good job at the ferry terminal as a porter, loading luggage on and off.  But he had  started the delivery business trying to get ahead.  Besides the pickup he had another bigger truck he ran all kinds of stuff all over the island. He hoped someday to have 4 trucks and a few employees.  We got to the ferry terminal before his shift started so we sat there a while by the pier and I played some songs on the guitar. he asked for some Kenny Rogers. I used to know all of those good old tunes, The Gambler, Lucille, Ruby, Coward of the County, but they had drifted way back to the nether parts of my brain and it took a while to dust them off and get them back into Playback mode.  His wife pulled up in her car  with 2 of the kids ,  bringing him a big platter of  rice and chicken and beets, which he graciously shared with me, and I shared one of my beers with him.  What a fine fellow.

My ferry started loading about 5 PM and it was such a disaster in crowd control. It was a nice new modern building, but with no organization for managing the masses of  people. The area was small, and jammed with many hundreds of people.  You had to push thrugh the crowd of people already checked in to get to  the counter to get your ticket, then push back throught the crowd to the other end of the room if you had to check your bag, then back again to the ticket counter area where the loading door was. no lines, just masses of people. Those of us there already checked in had to "part the seas" for the late comers to get to the ticket counter (and being already jammed in tight  there was nowhere to part to!) , of course towing huge piles of baggages, then part again for them to go back the the baggage check area.   Then they called for "First Class boarding" and we all had to part again for First Class people from all over the mass to push thru to the boarding door.  There was no PA system and a lady with a small voice was making the call, so everyone would shout relay the message all over.  It got to be pretty hilarious and went on for almost half an hour, with always one more late First Class goofball answering the call and we had let the seas part yet again.  Finally when they made another call for first class we all shouted in unison  "NO!!!!!"  They then opened the door for us cattle to load. The crossing to Ft Lauderdale was quick, 3 hours, compared to our 25 hours a few weeks ago, but I have to say I enjoyed the sail much more. 

It took forever to get thru customs and I got to my motel room late that night, and bummed around town for another day until my plane left.  I had a brutal delay in Houston which put me home in SLC about 1:30 AM.  The end of a wonderful voyage.