Bahamas

This blogging thing is intimidating. I'm just letting you know up front that it's going to be a bit rough, as I haven't written in ages. But something is better than nothing, right?

Bimini
We sailed to Bimini a couple of weeks ago, from No Name Harbor in Biscayne Bay.
We stayed at the Bimini Sands Marina, which was great. Super easy to get into. Quiet. My favorite part was walking down the sidewalk next to our boat, because when you look into the water you see a load of fish! It's like looking into an aquarium. Every 100 yards or so you see a barracuda just hanging out, and we saw a nice-sized shark over by the office.

The next day, we caught a taxi to the airport and checked in there. Then we stayed in Bimini for about a week. One night we took the ferry over to North Bimini and ate dinner.

Fish, green salad and rice and beans.

We took our dinghy over on a different day to find the post office. I had to buy a stamp and the lady at the window didn't have change for my $10. I wanted to buy some bread anyway, so I said I'd go get some and come back with change. She gave me the stamp ahead of time, AND waited... it took us a long time to find the bread place and come back.

We also did a little snorkeling.

Great Harbor Cay, Berry Islands
It took us two days to get here. The first day we had to anchor in the middle of the Grand Bahama Bank. It's a weird feeling to drop an anchor in the middle of the water, with no land near by, but evidently this is a normal thing to do on this passage. And the water is only 10-20 feet almost the whole trip.

I like the Berrys! We anchored on the west side of the island. There is a beautiful beach on the east side that they call the shelling beach. We went to see it on a whim, and when we found out it was a 3 mile walk, we got a ride to pick us up while we were walking there. Not knowing how to time it right, we only got to hang out there for about 10 minutes, and didn't have a good camera with us. But it was something out of the movies... a huge cove of crystal clear water a foot deep covering crystal sands. My pictures don't come close.

We also dove a plane wreck that was very close to where we anchored.

West Bay, New Providence Island
We sailed!! Very nice. We clocked over 7 knots at times in 11knots of wind. Getting better at this.

West Bay is the far west end of the island where Nassau is located. We will probably be here for a few days, and then move to a marina as an "Impulse" is coming in from the Gulf of Mexico.

Fair Winds and Following Seas, y'all!!

It's been a month

The first week of September, Kevin and I boarded the Amtrak bus (ha) at the downtown Austin depot and began our journey across the country, going to Fort Worth where we caught the train to Chicago, then Chicago to Washington DC, and finally from DC to Jacksonville. The trip took 3 days, on 3 different trains.

We then picked up our rental car and began to move onto our new (to us) boat!

Since then, we've spent the month getting accustomed to living on it. We've taken some sailing lessons and practiced docking, mooring and anchoring. And we've spent a lot of time buying equipment.

I'm looking forward to posting lots of pictures of clear water and sandy beaches, colorful corals and fish. In due time. For now, we're enjoying Jacksonville. :)