Monday 8 June 2015

 March 22, 2015

Before we left Gun Cay in the morning, we toured around the anchorage trying to spot Stingrays that are written about in the Cruising Guides but we didn’t see any.  Our plan was to time our departure so that we would arrive in North Bimini at slack tide.  All the marinas are located on the east side of the island between the island and a mud flat, which is exposed at low tide.  The three foot tide coming in and out of this narrow channel creates a very strong current that changes direction four times a day.  Our trip to North Bimini was sunny with calm seas and very light winds and we had to motor all the way.  We arrived at Brown’s Marina late morning where we planned to spend the next four weeks. 

Once we had cleared Customs and Immigration, Bimini was ours to discover.  The Island  of North Bimini is only about 7 miles long, with only 2 roads, the Queen’s Road and the King’s Road that run most of the length of the island.  The Island has 2 towns Alice Town and Bailey Town, except for the signs saying that you are entering the town, it would have been impossible to tell which you were in.  The traffic on the Island runs the full range from golf carts to full size garbage trucks that are all travelling on a road that is the width of 2 golf carts.  If you are walking you had better be prepared to get well off to the side as they don’t give pedestrians much room.  They also drive on the opposite side of the road, so we always seemed to be on the wrong side at first.  
The islands only source of income is tourism, with the main focus until recently, being sport fishing as they are located close to the Gulf Stream.  In the last few years there has been a large condominium complex built on the north end of the island complete with a casino, mega yacht marina and soon to be completed large hotel.  This is serviced by a high speed ferry that runs between Miami and Bimini. 

We spent our first few days on the island exploring the different shops trying to find where we would be able to go for supplies.  The island has several grocery stores none of which could supply us with all the things we would expect to find in a grocery store in Canada.  This meant we had to find which store carried which products and also plan our shopping around the once a week island supply ship. 

At first it didn’t appear to be a lot to do on the island but as we explored and slowed down to island time we found loads of things to do when you factor in walking everywhere and the hot weather. 
  • Our first take away meal was from ‘The Taste of Home Bakery’ in Alicetown and we were invited by the lady who operated Jontras Grocery store across the road to join her and eat in the grocery store out of the flies and heat.  It was fun as we were included in the conversations with the local people as they came and went from the store.
  • We got a ride on the Tram that was used to transport the people from the resort on the north end of the island down to the towns on the south end for shopping. We wanted to see the resort and casino that we had heard about.  What we found was a gated complex with a subdivision of condos with perfectly manicured lawns, a yacht harbour that was set up to cater to the mega yachts, and a casino that was empty except for the employees.  We caught the first tram we could back to the south end of the island. This was not our idea of the Bahamas.
  • We had read in the tourist information about a museum called the Dolphin House.  We went to see and found a museum, gift shop and motel rooms all built by the owner Ashley.  The Dolphin House is one one of those places you would expect to see on a TV show about incredible homes.  The building was the standard concrete block construction seen everywhere here but he had stuccoed the outside of his building with conch shells, sea glass and ceramic tile all of which he had found on the beaches or diving nearby.  This unusual exterior was matched on the interior with things he had collected or been given such as licence plates for every state in the US as well as most of Canada, and a complete 20 year collection of National Geographic Magazine.
  • Talking to the dock master we found that we could buy lobster tails off a fishing boat that had just come in.  The Freedom Rider was a larger fishing boat that would come into Bimini when the weather was too rough for them to be out fishing off the Bahama Banks.   At $20.00 a dozen you could get tired of eating lobster ;) .  All the lobster that is caught is speared so any lobster that are too small for export are sold from the boat on the island.
  • We have been hearing a really annoying tune being played each evening near our Marina.  This would last for about 15 minutes and then the music would disappear.  We found out after several days that it was an ice cream truck.  Ice cream was something we hadn’t had in some time and the music stopped being annoyance and something we started  to look forward to hearing.
  • Our first trip to the beach, we saw 2 Stingrays swimming at least a hundred yards off shore (the water clarity is just incredible) as we watched, one of them flew completely out of the water.  What an incredible experience seeing something that large, powerful and beautiful doing something we weren’t expecting to see.
  • Between the beach and the road back to our boat, is a small building called Sherry and Erik’s Sunset Beach Bar, which makes some really good and powerful rum concoctions.  We stopped in one afternoon to try them out and asked Sherry where we could find some shade to sit and enjoy our drinks. Her answer was that we could sit on the deck around the beach side of her building or we could sit with her in front of the bar.  We chose to sit with her and had a great visit with her and several colourful local individuals that hung around there.  Sherry had just reopened recently after being closed for cancer treatment, when Dave questioned her about her health care and her treatment, she lifted her top and pulled her pants down enough to show him the scar. He was speechless.  A wonderful lady and a must place to stop for a drink on North Bimini.
  • On South Bimini a professor from the University of Miami has set up a lab to study sharks.  Bimini’s  closeness to the Gulf Stream makes it is a good spot to find and tag many of the different species of shark.  The lab is staffed by grad students and they will give tours of their facilities.  We took the water taxi over to see and were taken out to pens that they use to hold sharks for study and after listening to a talk on the work that is being done here, we were allowed to pet a Lemon Shark.
  • A marina down from where we are staying has set up a cage, that for $100.00 you can get into, while they feed very large Bull sharks in the water around you.  The second option here is to stand on the dock and watch the guy feed these huge sharks for free staying dry and $100.00 better off.  We took the second option, eight to ten foot Bull sharks are really something to see that close up. 
  • Before we left Bimini, we needed some rubber gasket cement so we went to  Moonglow Battery and Tire.  We ordered it and were told that it would arrive on the mail boat on Thursday.  When we arrived back, no one was in the store but we could hear a TV in a room off the store and knocked on the door.  When the owner Sol opened the door, the walls of the room were covered with trophies which looked like something from body building competitions.  We asked Sol about them and we found out that he had won competitions all over the Caribbean, was a member of the Bahama’s Sports Hall of Fame  and at 78 years of age, was training to possibly compete in a senior’s body building competition this summer.
  • After our first 2 weeks on the island watching a lady serve take away lunches out of the trunk of her car, we got up enough nerve to try it.  The food was incredible for $9.00 each we ended up with enough food for our lunch and the leftovers were enough for supper.  That day, she had a choice of 3 styles of chicken, either coleslaw or mac and cheese served on peas and rice.  We managed to go a second day when it was pork chops or ham steaks and we left with the same opinion as our first meal -great food served Bimini style.

After almost 4 weeks on Bimini we hadn’t run out of things to do and see but it was getting to the time when we needed to find a weather window to get us back to Florida. On March 22, 2015 at 6:45 AM we left on a slack tide and pointed Time 2 Go towards Fort Lauderdale.


The Dolphin House, Alicetown, North Bimini

Art work inside Dolphin House

Mermaid corner in the Dolphin House


Shark Research Lab on South Bimini

Petting a Lemon Shark



Bull shark feeding at Bimini Big Game Club

Beach on North Bimini

Sherri and Erik's Beach Bar

Cary the Coconut Man preparing a coconut for us

Tuesday 10 March 2015

February 24, 2015

We left Florida University Cove, in the morning January 27 and  started south.  Our main goal being to find a pump out as our holding tank was full.  This should have been easy with all the marinas in and around Miami but several we tried didn’t work, or the facilities were only for guests at the marina.  So we continued south to No Name Harbor on Key Biscayne where we knew they had a free pump out, hoping that it was working. The trip south down through Miami takes you by the downtown area of Miami and past all the cruise ships.  There were six giant cruise ships there when we went by.

Key Biscayne is at the south end of the city of Miami and we were heading to the southern end of it.  In the north end is the Olympic Sail Training Centre.  This is where teams from all over the world come to train in the smaller racing sailboats and catamarans.  Now you would think this would be something neat to see as they race around Florida Bay and it would be, if there was only one race going on at a time.  The reality is that they had a least three races in different classes going on, on different courses at the same time.  These racers are well aware of the rules of the road that make big boats give way to little boats and showed no fear of tacking and heading straight for us.  We performed several evasive maneuvers and one 360 to prevent running head long into them before we had gotten south of their race area.  Not fun.
We arrived in No Name Harbor in the middle of the afternoon after emptying our holding tank (thankfully it was working).  We dropped the anchor in a very crowded anchorage.  No Name Harbor is a very popular spot for people waiting for good weather to cross to Bimini and there hadn’t been any good weather windows for a while.

We used our first day here to restock our supplies and fill our water tanks.  There is one washing machine and one dryer here and they are always busy.  We got a bit of a break as one person found a four foot Iguana trying to stay warm near the dryer in the laundry room.  It seemed to slow people’s urge to have clean clothes.  We were able to get ours done sooner making sure the door stayed shut to the wildlife.  

Dave had been noticing the bilge pump running more than usual, so he pulled the cover off the engine and looked in the back.  What he found was a small amount of water coming through the hull.  So he decided to try and put an epoxy patch on it until we could get to a marina, where we could get hauled out and a permanent repair done.  

We left No Name Harbor and headed north towards a marina, north of Miami, that was advertised in the guide books.  This took us back through the sailboat races, bridges and back to Florida University Cove to wait for our appointment to be hauled out.  While waiting, Dave called and found out that there was a great number of hidden costs and getting hauled out was going to be extremely expensive, even without repairs.  We decided to cancel our haul out at this marina and try someplace else.  We called Jay, our friend in Marathon, to ask if he could recommend any reasonable marinas.  He suggested Key Largo Harbor Marina.  We turned around again and headed south to No Name Harbor.  When we arrived back, we noticed that the bilge pump was running every 7 minutes, instead of 40 minutes before.  Dave called Tow Boat U.S. and arranged to have us towed to Key Largo Harbor Marina.  We left No Name Harbor  about 5:00 PM and arrived at  Key Largo Harbor Marina just before Midnight not a fun trip.  We were pulled out of the water Monday morning and found the weld around the strut holding the cutlass bearing had cracked.  It turns out that there was a slight bend in the prop shaft and the vibration from it caused the crack. So 2 weeks later a new prop shaft, cutlass bearing zinc anode and a whole lot of welding later we were back in the water. We had to wait here for another week and half till we got a weather window to cross the Gulf Stream to Bimini.

February 23rd the weather looked good for crossing , we got up early and left about 5:30 AM and headed down the canal. We got as far as the entrance to the channel and came to an abrupt stop, apparently they have 16’ in the canal and only 5’6” at the entrance at low tide. After a leisurely breakfast we floated free and started our trip to Molasses Reef and on to the Gulf Stream. The trip across the Gulf Stream was a lot different from last year as we were a lot farther south than our destination so we felt the effects of the Stream for most of the day. Normally with our boat we are happy to be doing 6 knots but with the motor running a nice breeze in the sails and the Gulf Stream , we saw as high as 9 knots on our GPS chart plotter. Our late start was going to put us into Bimini after dark and the current would be very strong. We anchored at Gun Cay in Honeymoon Harbour just south of Bimini 12 hours and 77 miles later. 


Anchoring in Honeymoon Harbour was very rocky ( missed the small print mentioning the surge in the anchorage). We left late in the morning timing our arrival in Bimini for slack tide ( the time between the tide going in and when it starts to go out) this made for an easy time docking at Brown’s Marina on North Bimini. Anyone who has tied to the dock in Little Currant in the North Channel on Manitoulin Island would be able to relate as the currant was very similar. After clearing through Customs and Immigration we have officially have arrived back in the Bahamas.


Miami skyline from the ICW


Olympic Sailing Teams practising in Biscayne Bay 

No Name Harbor on Key Biscayne

Our new prop shaft and bullet proof strut

The original African Queen completely restored and offering cruises out of Key Largo

New friends we met at Key Largo Harbor Marine

More new friends we met at Key Largo Harbor Marine
Everyone was so helpful when we broke down

Arriving at North Bimini channel. Back in the Bahamas :)

Friday 20 February 2015

January 26, 2015

In early December we travelled down to Indiantown and Time 2 Go.  We wanted to be home for Christmas and still be able to take off cruising early in the new year, so the trip was a work week.  Time 2 Go was moved to the work yard on December 9th and we spent the next week cleaning, polishing, painting, fixing and stocking up, before flying home on Dec. 16th.  

After a great Christmas with family, on January 8th we left Port Elgin in typical Bruce County weather (white-outs, closed roads and knee deep snow), we headed to Niagara to visit family before flying out on January 10th to West Palm Beach, Florida.  

On Monday January 12th, Time 2 Go was moved from the work yard to the water, where we started our final preparations.  By Friday we were feeling comfortable with the boat and ready to go.  The following morning we left Indiantown and headed for the mooring field at Sunset Bay Marina in Stuart.  The Intercoastal Waterway can get extremely busy, with very big and very fast boats on the weekend.  So our plan was to spend the weekend in Stuart, buying more provisions and visiting the Farmer’s Market in old downtown Stuart,  before proceeding on.  

On Monday we left Stuart and started south, our planned destination was Peck Lake.  Peck Lake is an anchorage off the Intercoastal Waterway that has easy access to a really long ocean beach.  The temperature in the low 60’s and high winds out of the north, made our decision that Monday was not going to be a beach day, so we continued on to the Lake Worth anchorage.  Our plan was to go offshore to Fort Lauderdale, rather than the ICW, but the continued high wind speeds from the north are forcing us to travel the ICW south again.  The stretch of the ICW from Lake Worth to southern Miami is noted for the large number of bascule bridges that only open at a set time.  We remember these bridges well from our first trip south.  It felt like we were constantly racing from bridge to bridge to make the next opening.  We were not looking forward to this again.  On our first day travelling from Lake Worth to Boca Raton, we did 12 bridges, all opening at a set time.  The surprising thing was, it was slightly easier this year, as we had recorded the times before on our last trip through.  We ended our day anchored in Lake Boca Raton, a square lake surrounded with high rises, definitely not like a  North Channel anchorage .
Eight bridges the next day got us to Lake Sylvia, an anchorage in Fort Lauderdale just off the ICW.  We spent the weekend here hiding from all the weekend boaters on the ICW, catching up on shopping and doing odd jobs on the boat.  While we were out, we found a store called Sailorman.  It is a combination of used boat parts, new stuff and just plain boat junk.  Dave had fun. 

Monday morning we still couldn’t go off shore so it was back down the ICW again.  After 4 more bridges we were nearing Florida University Cove, an anchorage we had wanted to check out, when a Severe Weather Warning sounded on the VHF announcing a severe storm for our location.  We barely had time to clear all our stuff from the cockpit and had just started to put on our foul weather gear, when it hit.  The rain came down like a wall of water and the wind was so high it heeled us over as if we had all our sails up.   Thankfully it only lasted about 5 minutes.  We  made it safely into the anchorage and dropped the hook, feeling less exposed to the wind.  This is a really nice anchorage, on one side is the Florida International University and on the other, Oleta State Park.  It was relatively quiet and the only high rises were in the distance.  

Ready to leave Bruce County

In the water in Indiantown

Antique bikes at the Stuart Farmers Market

The Stuart Farmers Market

Lake Sylvia sunset, a great location to watch Cruise Ships coming and going