Fort Lauderdale towards Beaufort NC End of Day 1

These Blog entries are edited versions of the messages we sent back as we completed the passage.  They were sent by radio using a laptop that controls a modem and the HF/SSB radio, using the SailMail system.  We sent the messages daily to my daughter Charlotte and she then forwarded them on to a list of family members.

2359hrs (EDT, GMT -4) 20 May 2020

Dear All,

Departing Fort Lauderdale. Seventeenth Street Bridge in the rear-view mirror…..

…..and a whole line of departing boats ahead

The weather in the western Atlantic is all messed up at the moment.  Tropical Storm Arthur and a couple of other depressions are disrupting things to the point that the forecast doesn't show a good weather window to set off transatlantic from Fort Lauderdale for the next 2 weeks.  Chris Parker, the weatherman, has suggested that we move north to Beaufort in North Carolina because he believes that when things start to settle back to the normal patterns we'll be able to leave earlier from there.  So, we left Fort Lauderdale this morning and we are riding the Gulf Stream north towards Beaufort NC.

Florida coastline

11.4kts over the ground, when we were only doing
 6.5 to 7knots through the water.  Not a bad push at all
and, unlike the tidal flow in the English Channel,
 the Gulf Stream just keeps going in the same direction

There is hardly any wind so we motored for several hours but are making great progress because we are getting a helpful 4.5 knot push north from the Gulf Stream; our speed over the ground has been up as high as 11.4 knots!  It's lower than that now because from 1830hrs we were able to switch the engine off and just sail.

Very gentle motor sailing

We had a good stop in Fort Lauderdale, staying on the dock of friends who are the OCC Port Officers for the city.  The weather was pretty miserable with lots of thunderstorms and heavy rain during our stay but that's why we took shelter there.  Fort Lauderdale was our port of arrival into the USA so we cleared immigration, which was very easy, and customs with a little more difficulty.  But we came away from the latter with a US cruising permit valid for the next 2 months which means that we can cruise up the coast and not have to visit any more CBP offices until we plan to leave the US.  All we have to do is to remember to call in to CBP each time we stop somewhere.

Eventually all of the instruments will match the new one on the right

Perfectly positioned close to shops and with the loan of a car, we were able to buy in some fresh food to keep our stocks up, and also some new instruments for BV (we are gradually upgrading the system to the newer NMEA2000 network standard).  So, all in all life on board BV is good.

Love to all,

Reg and Nicky

Passage statistics:

Position at midday 20 May: N26 13 W80 00

Position at midnight 20 May: N28 11 W079 43

1030hrs to midday distance: 9.6 nautical miles (average 6.4 knots)

1030hrs to midnight distance: 87.5 nautical miles (average 6.5 knots)

Total miles covered:  87.5 nautical miles

Approximate distance to go (GPS route to Beaufort NC): 445 nautical miles

End of Day 1 Fort Lauderdale towards Beaufort North Carolina, USA

Fort Lauderdale Fl USA

Looking west up Carlotta Canal from Richie and Susan’s dock (Fort Lauderdale).  ‘Florida, the Sunshine State’ is the strapline on Florida registered car number plates.  Sunshine State?  Really?

The view east down Carlotta Canal towards the Stranahan River

It was rather grey and overcast when we arrived at Fort Lauderdale and made our way to our friends’ dock.  We had always intended to stop in and see Richie and Susan (who are also the OCC Port Officers for the city) on our original pre-Covid-19 plan to explore the Florida coastline on our way north towards Newfoundland.  However, the pandemic has messed up our plans and our expected visit time and so, sadly for us, Richie and Susan were actually away when we arrived.

On the dock

But when we turned into the inlet at 0735hr on Sunday 17 May, Richie and Susan’s neighbours, Jean-Marc and Melissa, were out on the dock to meet us and to help us with our lines.  They immediately made us feel very welcome and we arranged to join them for sundowners on the deck later.

Fort Lauderdale was our port of entry into the USA so our immediate priority was to clear in with CBP (Customs and Border Protection, the federal body that covers customs and immigration).  This is a 2-stage process for us as non-US citizens/residents.  The first part was to notify our arrival on the ROAM App and, once that was complete, we were given permission to go ashore to the nearest CBP office to complete the process.  Jean-Marc and Melissa were stars and offered us the use of one of their cars, so getting about suddenly became very easy indeed.  Checking in with immigration was quick and efficient, with the office open on Sunday.  Clearing the boat in with the customs side of CBP would need to be done on Monday.

The Fort Lauderdale CBP office is about 5 miles away from where BV was moored and in the same area are a host of shops including a large West Marine chandlery, a laundrette, and a big supermarket.  Laundry was left for a day but after a trip to West Marine, Nicky came away with some new sea boots and deck shoes so that she can move around safely on our Atlantic crossing [Ed: my old boots and deck shoes both had nearly slick soles and neither had any significant grip on the deck, particularly when the deck is wet], whilst I had done some research for a new Raymarine instrument to replace the one at our chart table  The instrument in place was rather old and had had a number of funny turns on our passage north following which it had, at best, taken to displaying depth only in fathoms, with other data displayed as and when it wanted to show it, in the format it decided met its needs, not ours.  Our return trip was via the Publix supermarket to check that out and to buy a few bits and pieces for dinner.

I tinkered with some minor maintenance jobs on BV whilst Nicky caught up with some admin and work for the OCC.  Before we knew it, it was time for drinks with Jean-Marc and Melissa on the patio where we could chat whilst maintaining appropriate social distancing.  It was a lovely evening and, along the way, we hatched a plan for a barbeque the following evening with some English friends of Jean-Marc and Melissa.

Now that’s more like the weather we expect of Florida!

Monday (like most of Sunday, to be fair to Florida) was a beautiful day with blue skies and warm [Ed: hot!] weather.  First thing, we studied the latest forecast and checked with Chris Parker the weatherman.  Unfortunately, it looked as if there wouldn’t be a good weather window to set off transatlantic from Fort Lauderdale for 10-14 days.  Two weather systems, particularly Tropical Storm Arthur [Ed: an early start to the hurricane season this year] were forecast to kill the wind almost completely, after which the trade winds were forecast to fill in strongly from the east, rather than the more normal southeast.  On top of all that, Tropical Storm Arthur looked to be curving back southeast, towards the routing that we would want to take though, admittedly, quite a long way further east than we would be.  So, we made a new plan to move up eastern the USA until the conditions are right for turning towards home.

The clarity on the weather was opportune because our priority for the morning was to don facemasks again and visit the CBP customs office.  That proved to be a little more difficult than the check-in at immigration, but we came away with a US cruising permit valid for the next 2 months which means that we can cruise up the coast and not have to visit any more CBP offices until we plan to leave the US.

The new instrument fitted at our chart table.  We are gradually
upgrading the whole system to the newer NMEA2000 network
 standard.  We currently have a mix of the old and new networks
 with a couple of boxes to translate between the 2 but it’s
 proving to have too many niggly and irregular errors

A further trip to the shops saw us arrive back at BV with more food, a topped up propane bottle, and a Raymarine instrument from West Marine.  They only had one instrument in stock, so we bought that and ordered another one for the cockpit.  Once the food was all stowed, Nicky took a trip to the laundrette complete with a huge bag of washing, whilst I played carpentry and electronics and fitted the new instrument at the chart table.  Sadly, by sundowners time the weather had turned very thundery so we postponed the planned barbeque.

Tuesday was literally a washout.  The weather was miserable all day with lots of thunderstorms and heavy rain.  Exactly the unpleasantness that we had timed our visit to Fort Lauderdale to avoid; it would have been miserable being at sea during it.

With little enthusiasm to venture out, we spent the morning catching up with some admin and blog stuff.  However, during the afternoon we had to do a quick run out to pick up the second Raymarine instrument from West Marine, which I then fitted in the cockpit under the shelter of the sprayhood.

By late sundowners-time the thunderstorms had moved off far enough for evening drinks on the deck again with Jean-Marc and Melissa, though it was too cool for lazing in the pool.  Again, Jean-Marc and Melissa (and Tillie the dog) were great company and it was lovely to hear about their work in Fort Lauderdale, their future plans and some of their previous sailing escapades.

All in all we had a lovely 3 day stop in Fort Lauderdale, all resulting from the generosity of Richie and Susan in letting us use their dock.  It’s such a shame that they were away when we visited but we touched base with them via FaceTime and emails and hope to see them properly again when we are back in the USA.  Melissa and Jean-Marc were absolute stars, lending us one of their cars and making us feel so welcome.  In the current climate, with Covid-19 still prevalent and taxis/Ubers difficult or impossible to come by, having the use of the vehicle made such a difference to us in being able to get around Fort Lauderdale quickly and easily.  We achieved so many things during our stop that we would not otherwise have been able to do and, better still, we had some lovely evenings chatting to delightful and interesting people.  As ever, we were sad to move on, but the next leg of our journey east was beckoning – a 500nm+ leg up to Beaufort in North Carolina.

Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA

Isla Mujeres towards Fort Lauderdale End of Day 5

These Blog entries are edited versions of the messages we sent back as we completed the passage.  They were sent by radio using a laptop that controls a modem and the HF/SSB radio, using the SailMail system.  We sent the messages daily to my daughter Charlotte and she then forwarded them on to a list of family members.

0745hrs (EDT, GMT -4) 17 May 2020

Dear All,

Since midnight we have only run the engine for an hour and half.  The rest of the time we sailed and it was good sailing too with the wind on our beam.  For part of that time we had a bit of a boost from the Gulf Stream, even seeing a maximum of 9.5 knots at one stage.  So much so that I had to slow BV down so that we didn't arrive off the entrance to Fort Lauderdale too soon.

Miami

The sail up the Florida coast was interesting with the bright city lights of Miami off to our port side and a dramatic lightning display way off in the distance to our starboard side over the Bahamas

Dawn looking out towards the Bahamas…

… and towards the Florida coastline

A rather grey sky for our early morning approach through Bar Cut, the entrance to Port Everglades, Fort Lauderdale

We just made it in time for the 0730hrs opening of the Stranahan River bridge

In hindsight slowing BV down was a mistake and we only just made it through the entrance and up to the SE 17^th Street bascule bridge across the Stranahan River a minute before the 0730hrs lift!  A few minutes beyond the bridge is Richie and Susan Goldstein's house.  They have very kindly allowed us to moor BV on one of their 2 docks whilst we make our final preparations and wait for a good weather window to set off towards Guernsey.

So now that we have arrived, our priority is to complete the arrivals paperwork with the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) office.  That's partly done using a smartphone app (the CBP ROAM app) followed up by a trip to the CBP office to get our passports stamped and the boat documentation completed.  If we can get all of that admin done today, Sunday, that will be a bonus, leaving us free on Monday and Tuesday to refuel, top up our in-use propane tank and to buy in some fresh food.  Right now there is a possibility that we might be on our way again starting our transatlantic crossing as early as Wednesday.

Love to all,

Reg and Nicky 

Passage statistics:
Position at 0745hrs 17 May: N26 06 W80 07
Position at midnight 17 May: n/a
Midday to 0745hrs distance: 130 nautical miles (average 6.6 knots)
Midnight to 0745hrs distance: 49.2 nautical miles (average 6.3 knots)
Total miles covered:  559 nautical miles
Approximate distance to go (GPS route to Fort Lauderdale): 0 nautical miles

End of Day 5  Isla Mujeres, Mexico, towards Fort Lauderdale, USA

Sailing to the Bimini Islands Bahamas

Our departure from Key West was earlier than we really wanted.  It’s a lively place and it would have been nice to stay for a few more days to see more of the sights and to enjoy more of the bars and restaurants.  But, as we hadn’t originally expected to visit Key West, our short time there was a bonus.  It had also been particularly useful as a place to restock the fridge and wine cellar after our time in Cuba.  However, we were acutely aware that we still needed to sail a further 300nm (straight line distance) into wind, up the Straits of Florida and across the Great Bahamas Bank to Nassau, to make our planned rendezvous with friends Nici and Strevs on Monday 25 March.  The plan wasn’t aided by the forecasters’ talk of an active cold front and its after-effects producing very strong (20+knots gusting 30knots) northeasterly winds crossing the Bahamas from Tuesday 19 March through until Thursday 21 March with, possibly, another milder frontal system affecting the area for a few days from Friday 22 March.  We needed to make progress east …… and quickly!

Close hauled in the Florida Straits as evening approaches

So, the anchor came up at 0720hrs on Friday 15 March and we made our way across to the fuel dock.  There we topped up BV’s diesel tanks and took a little extra petrol for the outboard.  With that all sorted, Nicky rang Customs and Border Protection from the marina office to let them know that we would be leaving the USA.  She got an answer machine so hopefully the message she left will suffice.  It’s a freephone number so our UK mobile phones aren’t able to call it and our USA sim card expired months ago when we left for the Caribbean.  These days everyone assumes that you are constantly able to communicate and connect to the internet but there seemed little point in buying another American sim card for just one phone call during our 3-day stop at Key West.  We were all done in an hour, which we thought was pretty efficient, and then headed out into the Florida Straits to take advantage of the wind.

There was about 17knots of wind from the east-southeast and initially we were beating into it, with a short tack to the south (to keep us away from the reefs) and a longer tack to the northeast (making progress towards destination, hooray!).  However, as the Florida Keys started to curve away to the north, and the wind backed to the southeast [Ed:  as forecast], we were able to spend longer and longer on the more favourable starboard tack.  My night watches were largely uneventful but Nicky had a bit of a shock at 2350hrs.  Off the starboard bow a white light appeared, which appeared to be a long way off.  It became brighter and bigger quite quickly but there were no navigation lights or other lights associated with it to indicate what the vessel was or which way it was going.  Nicky could only imagine that it was some type of buoy (odd because it wasn’t marked on the charts and the light was steady not flashing or occulting) when the depth gauge suddenly dropped to show just 10 metres instead of the 70+ metres that it had previously been reading and which, according to the chart, it should be reading.  Slight panic! But the lights on the navigation beacons out to port showed that we had not strayed onto the shallows and several vessels ahead of us had followed this track.  What was going on?  Perhaps the instruments were failing?  But then the depth gauge started reading correctly again and the white light began to move away.  Her conclusion?  BV had sailed over a submerged submarine – the single white light being at the top of its periscope.  Not a nice experience and certainly not something that you want to bump into in the middle of the night!

Approaching North Bimini

After a great sail for all of the day and most of the night, the wind finally died off at 0510hrs and we had to switch to motor power to finish off the passage.  It was as we had expected from the weather forecast but this period had been predicted to be the best sailing weather window for getting to Bimini for a week, probably longer.  If we had stayed just a day more in Key West we would have had to have motored the whole way.  But at least we had a good bit of help from the Gulf Stream which pushed us north over the final 60-odd miles of the passage.

The anchorage, just right of the nose, with North Bimini beyond.  South Bimini is on the right of the picture with the entrance channel to the Alice Town marinas between the 2 islands

The entrance to the channel to Alice Town

Bimini appeared where we had expected but very late on in the passage because it is so low-lying.  In fact, our guide to the Bahamas even lists the lat/longs of all the Bahamas Telephone Company telecoms masts and recommends using them to help confirm your position as they can be seen from so much further away than the islands on which they stand.  Originally we had expected to call up one of the marinas at Alice Town for a berth and to clear Customs and Immigration from there (Nicky had in mind that the officials want you to be alongside in a marina whilst you complete the formalities) but whilst we were on passage she had spotted an Active Captain entry from a yacht that had anchored on the west side of North Bimini, just off the town, whilst the crew cleared Customs and Immigration.  The entry mentioned a beautiful beach, great holding in sand and of being almost as close to the Customs and Immigration offices as you can get; it sounded perfect.

We anchored a little behind the motor yacht, just off the beach

And it was.  Whilst a stream of yachts took the channel up to one of the many Alice Town marinas, we joined a couple of boats anchored in the beautiful turquoise water just off the beach at the south end of the North Bimini.  The anchor hit the sand at 1330hrs, 29 hours and 171 miles (through the water) from Key West, and with the perfect white beach and palm trees ashore it was as near to the perfect Bahamian arrival location as we could have wanted.

Welcome to the Bahamas!

Bimini Islands, Bahamas

Key West FL USA

The inner harbour at Key West, looking across to the Municipal Harbourmaster’s office (grey building in centre) with extensive dinghy docks in front

Our first job, after arriving at Key West on the morning of Tuesday 12 March, was to dinghy ashore from the anchorage and visit the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) office to check in to the USA.  Not being au fait with the place, we tied up at what looked to be a dinghy dock at one of the private marinas.  When we found the office, the dockstaff told us that we should be at the municipal dock but were happy to let us stay where we were whilst we dealt with officialdom.  Unfortunately for them, dealing with the officialdom turned into a rather tedious process.  When she had called the CBP ‘Sector’ telephone number as we arrived at Key West, Nicky had been told that we should report to the CBP office on arriving at the town. Slightly wary about just making our way there (normal procedure is to pass full details of the boat registration and crewmembers’ passports before being permitted ashore) we used the landline in the marina office to call the town’s CBP office to pass that information. Our caution was justified and we were told in no uncertain terms that we should not arrive at the office until we had used CBP’s ROAM app to notify them of our arrival after which we would receive permission to set foot on land and visit the CBP office.  But we were on land and we didn’t have internet access.  “No problem”, came the reply.  “The marina is required by law to provide you with internet access to use the app”. Apparently, this applies even though we weren’t staying at the marina!  Just as well we have an appropriately modern smartphone onto which we could download the app (our iPad is far too old for the app to load onto it) and that we had also brought ashore our laptops and UK phones (happily, the latter had a signal) so that we could go through the multi-step security process before starting to use the app.  When, eventually, we had received a message to say that we were permitted ashore and must report to CBP within the next 24hrs, we headed off straight away. However, the CBP office in Key West is in the courthouse building and, as we found out when we arrived, electronic item (mobile phones, iPads, cameras, laptops) are not permitted inside!  So Nicky went in first to sort out BV’s new cruising licence and her 6-month entry stamp whilst I stayed outside with all the electronics and then we swapped places.  What a palaver.  To add insult to injury, the CBP officers in Key West, in contrast to all the other CBP officers we have spoken to, insisted that there is no problem with rescinding a cruising licence anywhere in the country as and when you want to, which was not at all our experience with our last cruising licence, and so would only issue us a cruising licence for one year rather than one valid to mid-Jan 2020 which is what we had wanted.  Hopefully, that will work for us for next winter as we expect to still be outside the USA in mid-March.  If not, we should be far enough south that we could just depart to the Bahamas for 15 days, though with the Bahamas charging a US$300 entry fee, that’d be an expensive way of doing things. [Ed:  the issue here is that if your vessel is inside US waters when the active cruising licence expires, you are required to remove her from US waters for 15 days before re-entering and obtaining a new cruising licence.  In our experience in 2018/9, rescinding a cruising licence before its expiry date can be virtually impossible.  Indeed, we had to return to Culebra in Puerto Rico in Jan 2019 in order to rescind the cruising licence that we obtained on 1 May 2018 just so as to avoid the 15-day thing as we knew we were likely to be back in the USA by 1 May 19.].

When we left BV, Serene, who had arrived just ahead of us, was anchored a good distance off to our southeast.  When we returned, she was close north of us, and spinning like a top

When, eventually, we had finished all the CBP paperwork, had our photos and fingerprints taken etc, etc we headed back to the dinghy via a laundry and the municipal dock, just to check them both out and confirm costs.  Back at BV we were somewhat disconcerted to find that Serene, a yacht that had arrived minutes before us, seemed to have moved (we wondered if the anchor had dragged) from her position when we had left BV well clear to the southwest of us to a new position remarkably close behind us to the north.  With the tide on the turn and the wind acting in opposition all the boats were spinning like tops and Serene (unoccupied at the time) was uncomfortably close to us and another yacht.  We watched her closely for a while and I even dinghied over to the other yacht to see if the owner knew how/when Serene had ended up in her current location but he hadn’t seen her arrive.  Eventually part of Serene’s crew returned and I helped them to re-anchor miles away [Ed: quite literally – on the other side of the main channel – but it’s where the owner wanted to be!!].

Top: Key West harbour and boardwalk.  Bottom: Colonial style houses abound in the residential areas
around the centre of the town

We took the dinghy ashore again, this time to the municipal dock (approx $7 per day to park the dinghy there) and went for a wander through the town.  We found West Marine and bought some bits for jobs the next day, including some powerful diesel bug treatment to treat any bugs left in the fuel tanks, and then enjoyed the sights of old town Key West.  There are lots of colonial style buildings here, many actually dating back to colonial times and to an era before air conditioning when large, shady verandas were essential to keep the homes cool.

The white building, known as The Red Doors, is now a clothing boutique but has had a varied and at times insalubrious history.  Built in late 1868 as a property speculation, it was first leased as a cigar factory to Cubans fleeing Havana.  When the cigar industry moved to Miami at the beginning of the 20^thcentury, the building became a ship chandlery and then, in the Depression, a grocery and hardware store.  By the 1950s shrimping was the new king of commerce in Key West and the building became a dockyard bar under a succession of owners, and was known informally as ‘The Bucket of Blood’ because of the dangerous reputation of the place.  The bar became economically unviable with the decline of the shrimping industry and closed in 1972.

Close to the harbour and the new boardwalk are many buildings dating from a time when Key West was a bustling commercial port as well as a big fishing centre.  Now the warehouses, stores and taverns have been converted to classy boutiques, cheeky by jowl with tourist tat shops.

Schooner Wharf Bar – a vibrant watering hole right on the harbour boardwalk with
reasonable wifi and good food

½ dozen oysters to keep you going?  Well, why not?

Over the next 2 days we did a number of jobs, interspersed with sightseeing in the town. Some of the jobs (updating the computers and electronic charts and catching up with home admin) we had to combine with visiting a boardwalk bar, the Schooner Wharf Bar, which we found had reasonable wifi, good beer and tasty food.  A terrible hardship!  All joking aside, our 2 months in the Turks and Caicos and Cuba with very little internet access had left us with electronics virtually screaming to be plugged into the web and left to update themselves for hours.  Happily, the bar staff seemed quite used to grotty yachties doing that and just kept bringing more beer!

Schooner Wharf Bar. Unfortunately, the steel drum performance was nothing to write home about

In terms of boat jobs, Nicky dealt with a small mountain of laundry, I trudged the propane cylinders to a local garage to have them refilled (using the filling station for LPG cars!) and together we tackled fitting and running the cables for a new GPS aerial as well as rewiring our wind instrument.  The old GPS aerial was probably working OK but it now didn’t seem to always communicate properly with the other instruments (notably the chart plotters, which is a just fraction critical) as well as it had done before we fitted a new multiplexer in November. We have a mixture of NMEA0183, NMEA2000 and Raymarine SeaTalk 1 networks on BV and the multiplexer shouldenable them all to talk to each other seamlessly.

All the time since we had last been in the US, the GPS readouts on some of the instrument displays had randomly blanked out and then, later, come back.  As for getting the COG and SOG to read correctly (and the same!) on all the various instruments, well, that had been a several week frustrating exercise in computer programming!  By hooking up the boat laptop to the new multiplexer I had been partially successful in reprogramming the multiplexer translations but I suspected that the issue was that the old GPS aerial was communicating in a very old version of the NMEA0183 and our old, now unsupported, Raymarine instruments probably don’t have the latest firmware in them.  The new GPS aerial works in NMEA2000 and seems to work much better with our set-up, though it’s still not 100% perfect.  (As an aside, it hadn’t helped that just as we had fitted the new multiplexer, there had been a date rollover issue with GPS chips and our plotters had needed a firmware update.  At the time we had thought that it was our new multiplexer causing the problem but an email to the manufacturer had highlighted that it wasn’t but that they had been caught by surprise and needed a few weeks to write a software patch to fix the issue.)  Whilst we were in the process of running wiring and playing with circuitry, we also rerouted some wiring for the wind instrument to simplify the Seatalk network and to try to help reduce the data dropouts.

Chickens roam the streets of Key West.  In the tourist office list of ‘must do’ things in Key West, getting a picture of a free-ranging chicken is up there with visiting the Southernmost Point

The other big boat job was reprovisioning and what a joy that was here in the land where the consumer is king compared with our recent time in Cuba!  Unfortunately, the nearest big supermarket is quite some way from the municipal dinghy dock – a $12 taxi ride distance away – but the range and the quality and the fact that it is all there under one roof was a delight!! For a while we felt as if we were in heaven – and the cashier must have thought all her birthdays had come at once as it turns out that Key West is not a cheap place to reprovision on account of it being at the very end of the highway.  Nevertheless, it was an excellent place for us to stock up before heading to the Bahamas where provisions can be very expensive.

With the chicken pictures in the bag, we had to visit the southern tip (and I got a picture of the lighthouse too)

And with all the jobs done we treated ourselves to a little more sightseeing:  the Southernmost Point in the continental USA…..

Key West is famous as the one-time home of Ernest Hemingway.  This was his house

….Ernest Hemingway’s old home, though we didn’t go inside because it was about to close,…..

The town is also famous for being the start (Mile 0) of Highway 1…..

…..Mile 0 on Highway 1……

….and has a reputation as being a tolerant place as well as a lively place

….and most of the rest of the town as well.

More delightful colonial buildings; shame about the ugly electricity cables 

Duval Street, Key West’s main street and a lively hub as sunset approaches

We could easily have stayed longer, much longer, but we were very conscious that we needed to be in Nassau on 25 March to meet our friends Nici and Neil who would be joining us on board for 10 days.  By the shortest possible route, Nassau is about 300nm from Key West, in a generally easterly direction, so hard on the wind or into wind.  With about 10 days to go before we had to be in Nassau we really needed to be looking to make tracks, particularly when the forecasters started talking about cold fronts once more.

The harbour by night

So we put our vague plans of SCUBA diving on the Florida Keys on hold and instead decided on an overnight passage to Bimini, departing on Friday 15 March.  Once we were in the Bahamas we would be able to slow down again a little and work our way to Nassau in and around the weather fronts.

Key West, Florida, USA