OK Sailor fans…. THIS IS IT…!
Jan 29th 2019…
It is time to cross to the Bahamas! As we have been sitting at anchor in West Palm beach Florida for the last few days we have been waiting for a weather window to cross. I’m nervous about this one though… it is not ideal. Crossing the gulf stream can be nasty and dangerous. It is extra important to pick a good weather window for your crossing.
See the gulf stream is warm water that flows continuously from the warm gulf of Mexico north towards Canada. The waters along the Florida coastline at like 5000 feet deep. That is a lot of water flowing north past here between us and the Bahamas.
The most dangerous time to cross that 2 knots of north heading current is when the winds are coming out of the north and heading south. This puts the winds against the current and the ocean waves will stand up pretty steep and pretty big.
Well…. that has been exactly the case out there for the last 3 days. While the rest of North America has been experiencing a freezing polar vortex (Arctic cold air way far south) with record breaking cold temperatures…. we have been having strong winds out of the North, which has rung up the gulf stream to 10 foot nasty waves the last few days.
Well… with our ground teams help (Thank you Carl)… it seems that there is a brief weather window for a crossing opening right now for the next 16 hours. The winds just switched around from the North this morning… to the west an hour ago… and even south right now. West and South West winds are the best for the crossing. The winds right now are perfect to cross…. but the residual waves still rolling out of the North East are still 5-7 feet high. It usually takes the Ocean time to calm those down.
We don’t have time to wait…. in 20 hours the weather window closes and she goes back to strong North winds again. There will not be another weather window for at least 2 more weeks or longer. So its now or mid to end of February to cross.
Sooo… we will try to cross now (Today at 2pm Jan 29-2019). We are just trying to give mother nature a few hours to lay those waves down. Every hour helps those waves spread out and shrink. So it looks like we will have great gentle west winds to cross on and 6 foot rolling seas from the North on our beam to make this a rolly crossing.
I’m nervous again… I hope MOM does not spank us yet again…. I don’t like being scared and I don’t like taking a beating from the waves. I hope and pray the waves calm down quickly and things get progressively easier as we sail into night tonight… I’m so nervous about this one.
I guess we can always turn back in the first hour if we don’t like the conditions…. but you never know until you get there.
Pray for us sailor fans….