We’re ready to cross back to Florida. We talked about staging at Great Sale Cay, which is a nice protected anchorage about 6 hours from here, but essentially we’d be sailing over there, anchoring for the afternoon, then heading out in the evening to cross the Bahamas Banks and then the Gulf Stream. Instead we’ll just leave from here (Foxtown). First, we were treated to the most spectacular sunset yet!

5.25 – Saturday

We planned to leave at noon, but by 9 or 10 we were out of things to do and ready to get moving. We managed to hold our patience for one more hour before we pulled up anchor at 11am. After we zigzagged around the rocks, we turned into the wind and raised the main, then unfurled the genoa. I shut down the engines and drove while Kyle got the fishing gear out.

Kyle barely got the first line in the water before the reel started buzzing. I told him his fishing rod was doing stuff, and he just shook his head. “No, I JUST put that in the water.” “Well maybe it caught some seaweed.”

Nope, we hauled in a nice looking fish! Kyle quickly dispatched it and we tried to identify it. He thought it was a red snapper. Suddenly I remembered that we need to be worried about ciguatera when fishing in the Bahamas, so I started googling furiously before we lost cell signal. All I could find is that red snapper is one of the fish listed as a ciguatera risk, and some sites said anything under 6lb was okay to eat, while another said anything under 15 lb was okay. Ours was about 10 lbs. Ciguatera is a neurotoxin, and while it isn’t common, the effects can range from long-lasting pain to longer-lasting deadness.

I finally got on Facebook to chat up a friend who’s been living in the Caribbean on his boat for years, he said he’d risk it. As we were wrapping up our conversation I realized we’d misidentified the fish. Red snapper don’t have a black dot, we had caught a mutton snapper! I sent a photo to my friend for confirmation, and just like that we lost cell service.

An hour later, the flappy bird hand line snapped, and Kyle pulled in a barracuda! He got the hook out and threw the cuda back. Twenty minutes later, the same hand line had another barracuda. Okay, so obviously the flappy bird is attracting the wrong kind of company, we didn’t put that line back out.

Within half an hour, the other hand line snapped. Kyle gave it a little tug but he didn’t feel a fish on, then suddenly it jerked out of his hand! It hit his arm and left a big welt, but he pulled in another mutton snapper! Kyle had to pull this one in on his own because we were meeting another catamaran and they seemed to be heading straight for us, so I attended the helm (we were under sail and they were under power, so we had the right of way).

This mutton snapper was almost the same size as the first one, and since we thought the first one was already a borderline ciguatera risk, we opted to throw him back instead of double our risk.*

An hour later, we caught barracudas #3, #4, and #5 (yes, all at the same time). We decided we were done fishing for a while after seeing all those teeth. In their defense, we were about 2 miles away from a spot called Baracouta Rock.

Around dinner time, we were regularly hitting 7-8 knots on a broad reach. It was causing the boat to vibrate (we’re not sure why, but it’s likely because we are so light right now – we have almost no water on board, the diesel tanks are half full, and most of the beverages we brought over from the states are gone). We put a reef in the main.

We were heading straight west as the sun set, I watched it sink into the horizon and darkness fell.

The genoa started luffing, there wasn’t enough wind to keep it full with the main blocking it. Kyle rolled it up. We talked about taking the reef out of the main, but the winds were supposed to increase and we weren’t keen on trying to put a reef in in the middle of the night. We could always shake it out later if needed.

5.26 – Sunday

Instead, we did about 4 kt all night, the forecast winds never came. Around 3am we passed the edge of the Bahamas banks into open ocean, and almost immediately started feeling the effects of the Gulf Stream. We gybed to the south to fight the current, but there was barely any wind and we were trying to head dead downwind. If there’s 6 kts of wind and we traveling in the same direction at 4 kt, the apparent wind is about 2 kt – almost non-existent.

Kyle started up the starboard engine to give us a little boost, but we were still going pretty slow. In the middle of the night, I was off-shift sleeping when I was woken by a THWAPTHWAPTHWAPTHWAPTHWAP. I sort of got up, sleepily asking what was going on. “A flying fish just landed in the cockpit!”

By morning, we pulled down the main and started the port engine. The forecast wind was supposed to be strong enough to sail the whole way over, so we were a little surprised to end up motoring.

As soon as the sun rose, Kyle put all four lines back in the water. We were really hoping for our Gulf Stream fishing favorite: mahi! They are known to hang out in the shallow shelf (120 ft) next to the Gulf Stream (2000+ ft). I waited all morning to catch something, but finally I gave up the helm and went inside to take a nap. Naturally, I was woken up around 10:30 when one of the reels started buzzing! Kyle pulled in a gorgeous lady mahi.

As he was pulling that one in, the hand line on the other side snapped. I pulled in another lady mahi! They are both on the small side – above the legal limit but not a lot of meat. Mahi lose their color very quickly once they’re out of the water, in the photo below the fish on the bottom and the fish in the middle are the same fish! They are so gorgeous, it’s almost a shame they taste so good.

We hoped for another big one – like what we caught on our first Gulf Stream crossing! I knew what I had to do to make it happen. I went back inside to nap, because as soon as I fell into a deep sleep we were sure to have some excitement.

I woke up to a buzzing reel. As I tried to shake the fuzziness out of my brain I went into the cockpit and tried to make sense of what was going on – the fishing rod was buzzing, but Kyle was pulling in the handline? He tried to explain but I was so groggy, eventually I understood that he was pulling in the handline so it didn’t tangle with the line the fish was on. With him occupied, I moved to the fishing rod to start pulling in the fish.

This one felt different from the start. The line was way off to one side, this fish was pulling! I fought to reel it in, we knew it must be big but it stayed deep underwater so we never got a glimpse of it. I struggled with the line, this was the first fish that has put up a fight!

It wasn’t until the fish was about 3 feet from the boat that we finally got a glimpse of a big bull mahi!

We hauled him into the cockpit, but he was violently flopping around. Kyle tried to wrestle him into place, but by then he’d sprayed blood everywhere. If I thought the cockpit was a bloodbath before, it was nothing compared to this carnage.

This mahi is about 2 inches bigger than the one we caught last time! This will provide a ton of meat, so after we reeled in this one we pulled all the fishing lines in. We’ve now caught ten fish on this trip (including the flying fish), we kept one snapper and all three mahi. We may or may not be Gulf Stream fishing experts.

Two hours after the last mahi, we entered the Ft. Pierce inlet. As we reached the first channel markers, the port engine started making a low hum, at first we thought there might be a low airplane overhead. I looked at the exhaust and there was smoke coming out. I took the helm and throttled back while Kyle ran down to check the engine. “Shut it down!” he yelled up to me, and I killed it.

He came up and gave me the synopsis. A hose had come off the raw water pump and flooded the engine compartment. We get extra points because we caught it before the engine overheated, and Kyle gets double bonus points because within ten minutes he had the hose back on and we had the engine running again. This makes it sound like it wasn’t a big deal, but we were entering an inlet at peak flood tide during Memorial Day weekend – it’s not something we’d want to do on one engine.

As we entered the inlet, our jaws got lower and lower. I knew the traffic would be bad, but I have never seen so many anchored boats in my life. We couldn’t even see the shoreline through the throngs of holiday boaters on the sandbar. I didn’t have to deal with too many idiots, but there was a lot going on so I focused on staying in the channel and not hitting anyone while Kyle kept an eye on the radio and looked out for any surprise morons.

We made it through the masses, then turned under the bridge and headed towards our anchorage. Just ahead of the anchorage, we saw a stingray leap out of the water a couple times! I’ve never seen that before. By 3:30 we were anchor down and sipping on our celebratory anchor beers. We made it!

I was dead tired, I went down to nap while Kyle checked us in on the US Customs and Border Patrol app! He tried to choose the no-video-chat option but I got woken from a dead sleep to say hi to our Customs agent so I could prove I was a real person. I tried to see the guy on the phone screen but it all looked gray, maybe there was a glare or maybe I was just really sleepy.

The next day Kyle told me about checking in, apparently he couldn’t get the video to work for us but it was working for the Customs guy, so I really had been staring at a gray screen. I honestly thought it was all in my head.

That evening I was on Instagram and saw one of our friends was also making the crossing to Ft Pierce, so I messaged them. They told us later that as they entered the anchorage, the only boat they could see with AIS on was Hobbes, and Debra got all excited because: Hobbes! And her husband Evan was like “???” and she had to explain that we were Instagram friends. Listening to her story was hilarious because Kyle and I have played out that exact same scenario when I’ve recognized a random boat in the anchorage!

Kyle went to bed before I did, since I had napped during the day. When I finally joined him, he was out cold, I don’t think I could wake him. In the middle of the night he got up and didn’t come back to bed, in the morning I asked him what happened and he said he had no idea – he’d woken up on the couch with no idea how he’d gotten there. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so tired!

We maintain shifts on overnight passages and encourage each other to nap during the day, but neither of us slept much on this passage despite the gentle, following seas rocking us to sleep. Of course, I had fish waking me up every time I laid down.

5.27 – Monday

This morning I coordinated a meet up with Debra and Evan! We met them at Sailfish Brewery and chatted for a couple hours. This is the first real conversation I’ve had with someone besides Kyle since…mid-April? Like I mentioned last post, we’ve felt really isolated lately. Anyway, we totally clicked with them and they were a lot of fun to talk to. Debra and Evan also invited us to dinner with two other couples – all sailors!

We had dinner with this great group of people, and they explained to us what went wrong in our attempts to be make friends. First of all, we were only in the Bahamas for a month, which means we kept moving – we averaged less than 2 days per anchorage. Most boats are spending a week or two, which means they get to know the other boats in the anchorage. Second of all, we spent May in the Bahamas, which is normally peak transition time as boats move north or south to avoid hurricane season. When you’re ready to go, it’s hard to do anything other than go.

The good news is: it’s not us. It’s just poor timing, which is something we seem to be great at. That being said, next season in the Bahamas should be much more leisurely, and we’ll hopefully find crowds of new friends!

Obviously I took zero photos all day, let’s chalk it up to having too much fun! Instead I’ll leave you with a photo of Kyle vacuum-sealing FIFTEEN POUNDS of fish, while wearing an epic Batman surfing tank top.

*Oh wait, I just realized I never gave the conclusion on the mutton snapper story. After we got back to cell service, my friend on Facebook said that mutton snapper is his favorite fish ever and I think he about cried when I told him we threw one back (side note: not a ciguatera risk). We also told that story to our dinner party and got the same reaction, eyes got wide and sad when we said we’d thrown one back. So obviously we need to get better at 1) fish identification and 2) ciguatera risk identification.