Y’all, I wasn’t sure we would make it to the Bahamas, but we did it!

We had a lot of help from our friend Dan who came to do the crossing from Florida to Grand Bahama with us. He arrived and we put him to work immediately. Did Dan have any boating experience? No. Did we teach him everything he needed to know? Also, no. We made everything up as we went along and thankfully we picked a perfect weather window to make the crossing. It took us 21 hours total. We started in Stuart, FL the sailed South to West Palm, FL and then made our crossing to West End, Grand Bahama.

After a few days of putzing around Grand Bahama we dropped Dan off in Freeport and picked up Emily. Grand Bahama Yacht Club was home for a little longer than intended, but that gave us a chance to swim in the shark-free pool, do laundry and attend a local fish fry. I should mention, there are a lot of sharks here. So far I have seen 4.

Our crossing from Freeport to Chub Cay with Emily was not as smooth as the first one. We endured 19 hours of rough seas. All three of us puked at least once, some of us (me) vomited a lot more, but we survived and Emily was a trooper. Of all of us, she was the least sick and the most fun.

There is nothing on Chub Cay except a tiny airport, a marina and a resort. We walked around all of it and the rest of the uninhabited island. For the majority of our time at Chub Cay we were getting bounced around at our anchorage, but we toughed it out and managed to have some fun despite our unsettled stomachs.

Jumping in the water proved to be the best cure for seasickness and seeing a shark was excellent motivation to climb back onto the boat. I managed to get a video of the shark that we saw in Chub Cay. I think it was probably about 5 feet long and Emily and I were freaking out a little bit as it swam directly towards us for what felt like an eternity before getting much too close before changing course and dissapearing into the blue.

Here’s a picture of the shark that scared us. I know. That shark looks tiny and far away. I showed Emily the video and she said, “What is that, a shark for ants?”

I learned two things about myself. One, I am a total wimp and two, I love a well-timed Zoolander quote.

Around midnight we left our washing machine of an anchorage and headed for Nassau despite not being able to find any marinas that had room for us. By 7:30am we were in the vicinity of Nassau with nowhere to go and waiting until 8am to roll around so that we could start calling places up again.

There was a lot of tension. Our dinghy motor stopped working while we were on Chub Cay and one of the oarlocks came off again after some vigorous rowing. Basically our dinghy barely functions as a pool floaty, which makes getting to shore from anchor difficult. Somehow we needed to transport Emily and her luggage to shore before her flight. We also needed to get Emily to a COVID testing site so that she could get back to the states.

Strangely, Emily was not tense about the situation at all. We called one final marina at 8:30am and they said that they would call us later if a slip opened up. Naturally the only thing left to do was snorkel our problems away.

As the procastinators that we are, we sailed over to Rose Island and spend from about 10:30am until 2:30 snorkeling and doing beach stuff before the adulting, “no really, we should figure out what we are going to do,” voice started to settle in.

The anchorage didn’t have any wifi or cell service, but about 20 minutes after we picked up anchor Mark got a call from a marina. We rolled up to Nassau Yacht Haven Marina about two hours later. Emily got a COVID test done at the marina and security arranged a taxi to get her to the airport the next morning.

I’m not sure how any of that worked out, but somehow we managed to have a ton of fun and do all of the adulting that we needed to. Island time works in mysterious ways.

We still need to fix our dinghy motor, but we did it once, we can do it again!