Total Miles Traveled 6440 since departing Green Turtle Bay, KY
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We really enjoyed our three months’ stay in the Bahamas, meeting new friends and exploring the many islands, anchorages, and beaches. According to some of the boaters we met, this was one of the best winters in the Abaco’s for the past 15 to 20 years.
Our
cruising plans were to leave the Bahamas during the first week of March, but
cruising plans always change. Our delay started with Monica catching a respiratory
infection that was spreading through the Marsh Harbor area. We tried cough syrup, antihistamines, and vitamins
without success, so after a four hour wait at the walk-in clinic, she was
diagnosed with bronchitis. She started
the meds and after a few days, the severe coughing and congestion began to
decrease. As luck would have it, when
she started feeling better, I started coughing and getting sinus congestion, so
another trip to the doctor for me.
We took a taxi to the doctor and the Bohemian taxi driver told us about the Moringa tree. It produces seeds that he eats three of every morning and claims he never gets sick. He had a bag of them and offered a couple for us to try. He said said I'll take you to one of the trees and you can get some for your trip back to the states.
- Seven times more vitamin C than oranges
- Ten times the amount of vitamin A found in carrots
- Seventeen times more calcium than milk
- Fifteen times more potassium than bananas
- Nine times more protein than yogurt
- Twenty-five times more iron than spinach
And that’s just scratching the surface of the purported benefits of moringa seeds.
https://www.doctorshealthpress.com/moringa-seeds-benefits/
We stopped by a tree on the way back and collected several pods of seeds for the trip back.
We finally started to feel better and were able to start our 160-mile journey to an area where we could wait for an Atlantic crossing to Florida, but the weather was not cooperating. We had several days of 25-30 mph winds with higher gusts, so leaving the marina was not an option.
On March 13th, we cruised 93 miles to an anchorage at Great Sale Cay, we only had a two-day window of good weather before another front was passing through with high winds so a long day was necessary.
We
cruised 58 miles on March 14th to an anchorage at Ginn Sur Mer, a 2500-acre
property on the “West End” of Grand Bahama Island. This was the site of an ambitious project to
provide a mega yacht marina with 900 slips, a hotel, a private airport, golf
course, casino, a grand canal throughout the property, bungalows, and single-family
homes. The project was announced in
2007, and an impressive deep water canal system was added with access to the
Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately for some unknown
reason to me, the project was stopped and has been sitting idle for several years,
making it a perfect protected anchorage for boaters transiting the Atlantic Ocean
to and from the Bahamas.
The
two-day weather window we had to get to this anchorage was accurate. We anchored here for 9 consecutive days with back-to-back
weather systems passing though making the Atlantic too rough for us to
cross. Fortunately, we have a portable
water maker on board, so we had all the provisions we needed to anchor as long
as necessary.
On
March 24th we cruised 72 miles across the Atlantic Ocean to and anchorage
at North Palm Beach, Florida. It was a
little rough, not the perfect crossing for us, but doable. We were exhausted, a nine-hour cruise, then
entering a busy port inlet, but finally dropping the anchor in a nice residential
bay where we anchored in 2017.
About a half hour before dark, a law enforcement boat arrived with lights flashing and sounding his siren. I was relaxing on the flybridge and when I stood up, I saw him approaching our boat? He informed us we could not anchor overnight, that the city passed a non-anchoring law in this area, and we would have to move. I explained that we had anchored here in the past without any problems and that we had just made a 9-hour crossing and would appreciate it if we could stay overnight and leave at first light the next morning. He said it is the law, and we would have to move. There was no posting around to indicate anchoring was not permitted. He waited with his lights flashing until we prepared to boat to leave and weighed anchor, then followed us all the way out to the main waterway with lights still flashing. We anchored about 2 miles away just before dark.
On March 25th, we cruised 46 miles to the Saint Lucie Lock. After passing through the lock, the Corps of Engineers provides 8 boat slips with power and water, and a park campground. The lock is located on the Okeechobee Waterway stretching across Florida from Stuart to Fort Myers.
