Today we spent our last day in Bimini. We have been here since New Years’ Eve. Nobody here planned to stay this long, but we had to wait for a good weather window. Tomorrow should be good for sailing with strong northwest winds. We no longer have to worry about the Gulf Stream. It’s 120 miles from here to Nassau. We plan to stop there to get fuel and also fill one of our propane tanks. Then we’ll leave for another island.
We stayed at the marina all day except for a short trip to the phone store to get minutes for our Bahamas phone. I’ve set it up so that if someone calls our MagicJack phone it will forward on to our Bahamas phone. That way we don’t have to worry about being online to get phone calls.
It’s a little cool here, so we decided to have our second potluck at lunch time. Before we started everyone gathered together with their Explorer Charts and traded information about The Bahamas. Several of the cruisers have been here many times, so they had excellent tips. Most of us have never been here, so we asked questions and took notes.
We each brought our own meat to grill and everyone brought side dishes. Mike and Dee made conch salad and Joanne and Bill shared conch chowder so we had some Bahamian food, as well as other tasty dishes.
There were five couples here who arrived within a day of each other and four of us are leaving tomorrow. We are the sailboats. Joanne and Mark will leave on Thursday when the wind speed goes down as they are on a trawler. We’ll probably leave earlier than the other three sailboats since we tend to be slow, however the wind should help us tomorrow. We’ll either sail all day and overnight to arrive in Nassau Thursday morning or we’ll anchor halfway there and go the rest of the way on Thursday.
We’ve really enjoyed spending time with the cruisers on Avalon, Amazing Grace, Ultra, and Figlio. Hopefully we’ll see them again as we are all headed south to the Exumas. Figlio is going on to the Dominican Republic and Amazing Grace is on their way to the Turks and Caicos. The rest of us will be island hopping in the Exumas. Click here for more photos of Bimini.
