Bahamas, Part 1
Now for the trip that will be the
culmination of 5+ years of boatbuilding. Puttering around in the ICW near Stuart is fine, but the real reason
the boat is in Florida
is the Bahamas. I fly to Stuart, work on the boat a bit, and tow
it to Miami and Key Biscayne. The tow is uneventful except for
the severe trailer sway, which is alleviated when I pull off the
turnpike, remove the new Nissan motor, and stow it in the truck
bed.
I'm probably going to have to do some work on the trailer to get the
boat to sit further forward. At Crandon Park, I purchase a 1-year
parking pass for the truck and
trailer. The staff at Crandon Park are very nice and helpful and
even find me a mooring when supposedly none were available. With
the board and rudder up I could easily anchor just
southeast of the mooring field in about 1 foot of water at low tide,
but it feels more secure to be on a mooring.
Note to the reader: I put these pages on the web mainly so my friends
and family can see the pictures. The text is mainly for me to
remember everything I did wrong. However, it seems that some
people are actually slogging through, so I'm going to try to define
boat-specific terms as I go, at the end of each page. Also, here
is a link
to videos on youtube.
I arrive at dusk and realize that I'm probably going to have to sleep
in the boat in the parking lot and launch at dawn. I start
rigging the boat for launch as it gets dark and soon realize that the
lamps in the parking lot are about 10,000 watts and it's essentially
daytime all the time at Crandon Park. So by 1AM the boat is
ready to go into the water. I know that some people claim you can
get the boat ready to launch in 20 minutes, but maybe I just haven't
had enough practice yet. In addition, this is the first time I'm
launching the boat alone. I always feel pressure that I'm keeping
Tanya or Alex or whomever is with me waiting when I launch with others,
and I feel like I can't give them jobs to do because it would take more
time to explain than to do it myself. Nobody is going to
understand, "Find the temporary mast raising stays, clip them to the
padeye on the mast, and lash them to the mast raising loops."
Eventually I will figure out more and more jobs for Tanya to do because
she only has to be told once how to do something or what something is
named. Alone, I take my time, stop frequently to evaluate, and
at 1:30AM get the boat into the water.
Since I'll be moving the boat in the morning, I anchor about 50 feet
from the boat ramps. There are 14 ramps, so I don't feel like
I'm taking up too much space. In the morning, I motor to a beach
near the ramp to raise the mast. I prefer to do it on a beach
because I can point the boat dead into the wind, back it onto the
beach, and have it completely stable while I'm raising the mast.
To my relief, all of the slight modifications I made last time work out
quite well. I packed the mast raising loops up off the deck 1",
which allows constant tension on the temporary shrouds during raising,
resulting in greatly reduced tension in the guy doing the
raising. I increased the
height of the aft mast support, which increases trailering height but
radically reduces the load on the halyard when the mast first lifts off
the support. I used snatch blocks and the spinnaker halyard to
get 2:1 purchase on the jib halyard.
It's the easiest the mast
has
gone up yet, marred only by the same problem I had last time: failure
to get the spinnaker halyard rove.
As soon as the mast is up, I meet Bob and Jane. The first thing
Bob said after he scooted over in his RIB was, "Did you
just raise that 45-foot mast by yourself?" The first thing I said
to Bob was, "How did you know my mast was 45 feet tall?" It's
actually 44'3", but closer to 45' when you count the step. Bob
and his wife Jane are hydrographers from the Bahamas and create
charts. I bought their
overview
chart because I didn't have one and because they had up-to-date
information about different anchorages and harbors on the back, with
very accurate waypoints. Plus they were
very nice and had a lot
of good advice.
Tanya arrives, we buy and stow
some provisions, prepare the boat for the trip across the Gulf Stream.
The conventional wisdom is to never cross when there's any north or
east wind, because it runs against the stream's current and causes
short, steep, violent seas, called "elephants" because from the horizon
they look like a line of elephants at the circus (presumably the
old-school, Ringling Bros. kind of circus and not the contemporary
free-range kind).
 
After waiting around in Key
Biscayne for a few days, Tanya
and I decide to poke our noses out into the ocean and see if we
can slip over to Bimini, despite a moderate northeasterly.
Day 0
We depart the mooring and head out the Biscayne channel. I have
all the waypoints marked in the GPS but I haven't had time to get my
navigation program, GPSU, working "live" with the GPS. We don't
have any problems until we get out into the ocean. We raise the
main with one reef, and the jib, but it's blowing pretty hard. In
fact, the chop is so steep that our brand new Nissan 9.8, with its 25"
shaft, has its prop out of the water frequently. I'm glad it has
a
rev limiter. The prop comes out of the water as we crest one
wave, then we're slammed so hard into the trough that the engine is
half knocked off the motor mount, and still running. That's when
we decide to turn back, and enjoy a leisurely surf back into the
channel, despite
feeling a bit shaken. Long after the trip was over I realized
that
Florida's shallow coastal waters cause much rougher surf and bigger
waves farther offshore than I'm accustomed to in California. It
isn't unusual for the water to be 20 feet deep several miles offshore,
while the water under the Golden Gate Bridge is 200 feet deep.
Bob had a lot of good advice about crossing. He mentioned that
it's often helpful to sail the day before crossing south from Biscayne
to Elliot Key, because it gives you an 18 mile "head start" south
before the Gulf Stream. The idea is that the farther south you
are before you cross, the easier it is to compensate for the Gulf
Stream's northerly push. We sail to Caeser Creek, just south of
Elliot Key, uneventfully, except for the captain's getting whacked in
the back and head by the boom while getting underway from hove to, and
a dispute with the first mate about navigating around Featherbed
Shoal. We decide to
poke our noses out again. It's not as bad, but it's still not
good, so after sailing about 5 miles offshore, we turn back once again,
discouraged and exhausted. We anchor just north of the Elliot Key
campground, and have pasta for dinner. Elliot Key seems like a
party camp and I'm glad we're not stuck there.
The next day we return to Crandon Park and decide to check into a hotel
in Miami because the weather shows no signs of improving for a few
days. After 2 days, though, the prediction is for a light
northeasterly, then another week of bad weather, so we go for it.
Another thing I've learned about crossing the Gulf Stream is that even
though most sailors want to go to the Bahamas in the winter, it's not
uncommon for Florida to get whacked with one low pressure zone after
another during winter. Frequently there might not be a single
full day between the end of one and the beginning of the next, and even
more frequently, even if there is a full day's lull, the Gulf Stream
doesn't have enough time to settle down.
Notes
The ICW is the
Intra-Coastal Waterway. This is a series of navigable rivers,
canals, and channels that stretches down the east coast. There
are very few places where it requires boats to travel in the open
ocean. Northern New Jersey is one such place: if you travel down
the Hudson and through New York Harbor, you have to go into the ocean
after the Verazzano Narrows and around the Atlantic Highlands.
For most of its length the ICW is at most a few miles from the ocean,
and completely protected. You can get from northern New York to
Florida almost without seeing the ocean.
A purchase
is a combination of blocks (pulleys) and line that gives a mechanical
advantage. If I run a line through 2 blocks such that when I pull
on the end of the line, 2 parts of the line move through the blocks, I
have a 2:1 purchase, and twice the pulling power. A purchase
helps when raising the mast because, even though the mast weighs about
200 pounds, the line is pulling at a very shallow angle when the mast
is on the aft support, so there's about 1000 pounds of force on the
line when the mast starts to go up.
"Reeving"
means running a line through one or more blocks, so that it's in its
more-or-less permanent place. The reason there's a word for it at
all is probably because some lines are rove in a complex fashion, and
need to go in a specific order from one block to the next. My 6:1
main sheet is an example. If you don't reeve it right, it will
tangle.
The conventional way to reeve
a halyard is to tie a small line (called a "messenger") to a bicycle
chain. The end of the chain is slipped into the halyard exit near
the
top of the mast. The chain is flexible enough to make the 180
degree
turn over the halyard sheave (pulley) and heavier than the line, so
when you raise the mast, the idea is that the chain falls down inside
the mast and you capture it with a wire at the exit plate near the
bottom of the mast. Unfortunately it's usually not that simple,
because there are already several halyards inside the mast, as well as
electrical wires, so it's difficult to get the chain to fall without
tangling. You usually have to work it up and down until it's
clear,
but if you pull too hard, you just pull the chain out and it falls onto
your head. Twice, in my case.
Waypoints are points on the globe that are
identified by a specific latitude and longitude. I program them
into the GPS, and tell the GPS to point me towards the waypoint.
This is useful for traveling distances greater than you can see, and
it's useful for getting into unfamiliar harbors that may have rocks and
shallows lurking outside of the channel. The more precise your
waypoints, the better your chances are of not getting into
trouble. But channels shift, and channel markers move, so you
always want to try to check with the locals to get up-to-date waypoints.
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