The journey home

And a journey it will be.  After spending so much time in Florida we only ended up spending 9 days in the Bahamas.  Shorter than our last trip there.  I had hoped to spend another 4 or 5 day there after Rob flew home, but David had 2 concerns, one was weather.  If bad weather rolled in and stayed a few days that would delay our journey home and we might not make it to our final destination on time.  His second concern is, the boat still needs more work done on it, and he did not want to start any repair projects while in the Bahamas where parts are scarce and expensive should he need to find parts.  Both reasons are understandable, but I was still disappointed to leave so soon. 

If you read my previous post, you know we left Marsh Harbor in the morning and made a stop in the afternoon at Moraine Cay to snorkel.  We pulled up our anchor at Moraine and headed back to the ocean side to continue heading north west to the top of the Abacos. It was after 10 pm and dark by the time we arrived near Walkers Cay.  There are 2 routes in thru the channel, one more narrow and surround by coral heads on the sides.  We didn’t pick that route.  We took the other one that was a little wider and we prayed that the GPS and nav charts would do it’s job. We set our course and hoped the autopilot would work fine, sometimes it acts up and we were hoping this wouldn’t be one of those times as it was very dark outside.  The moon was just rising and it was an eerie orange; low to the sky it wasn’t providing us with much light to see by.  Into the sea we made it!  the Garmin didn’t let us down.  David wanted to anchor not to far in, so we dropped our anchor, set it, turned off the engines and off to bed we went.  The wind had picked up while we were dropping our anchor and being close to the ocean made it quite rolly.  I was not happy about having to sleep in such a rolly boat.  After about 20 mins of my complaining, david got up, turned on the engines, pulled the anchor in and drove us 2 miles closer to Grand Cay where we would be more protected from wind and waves.  We dropped the anchor again, set it, turned off the engines, and again off to bed and this time to sleep without any bouncing around.  We were in a much better spot for the night.

5:30am and it is time to get up and get started for the next 2 days to reach land.  We decided to head north and take advantage of our time in the gulf stream and spend 2 days straight traveling.  I am not very excited about this plan.  It involves someone being awake all night to watch for other boats and that our boat is running correctly.  After less than 6 hours of sleep, I am already tired, and not interested in even less sleep for the next 36 hours.  The hope is to make it to Georgia by tomorrow afternoon.  We’ll see.  Hopefully all goes well.  The ditch bag is ready if not.

We still will have many days of travel.  The final destination for this trip is my hometown area of Maryland.  We hope to leave the boat there while we head home for a couple of months.  In June the cousins visit, and we can’t miss out on that.  We will see a lot of the south east coast along the way.  Hopefully David will agree to a few stops.