I won’t bore you all with the details of the trip, I think I posted plenty of boring rambling text from the boredom of days at sea.  Here are some pictures we took along the way.

Small diversions created much excitement.  Here we are watching the dolphins that entertained us for about 30 minutes.

Surprisingly all these months we’ve had very few dolphin encounters.  We were impressed with their speed.  Makai was zipping along at 7 kts here and those dolphins were zig zagging in front of us.

The sunsets were beautiful.  When we’re at anchor we often miss the sunset because we’re too busy with dinner or movies.  This passage was heading west and every evening the person on watch just had to do their job and look out ahead.  This is enough to see the sunset every evening.

Poor Marie has several queezy nights.  When she wasn’t feeling well her favourite place to sleep was in the cockpit with her Little Mermaid pillow and fuzzy pink princess blanket.

On one of our calm sailing days, we had a chance to take a dip.  We took turns dragging off the back of the boat.

Roy liked dragging from the end of the rope.  That was to scary for me, it’s hard to hang on to a rope being towed at 3 kts.

Genny is the one who organized this activity, she’s like our cruise director or something.

After their first swim, someone had the bright idea to use soap and scrub some stink off.

Our nights are rigid two hour watches.  Daytime is a loose schedule.  Here Eric is trying out the Little Mermaid pillow and pink fuzzy princess blanket.  He said it was very comfortable.

For most of the trip we rarely saw any other boats.  Throughout the entire trip we only saw 1 or 2 boats smaller than a tanker or cruise ship.

We have an AIS system on board that transmits vessel data to and receives from other ships with this system.  It’s mandatory for the large commercial vessels to have AIS, and many private boats also have it.  This is really handy on night watch, often we see the AIS contact before seeing the ships lights.

Eric decided it was time to rinse off the watermaker’s prefilters.  He does this by tying a line to the filter and dragging it off the back.  Then the kids played with it a bit and figured out how to make it do tricks by turning and twisting the line.

It’s nice to see the ocean litter free, but occasionally something does pop up.  Here’s the fender Roy dragged in.  After cleaning, filling it with air, and trying to fix the leak, it was tossed in the dumpster here in Ft. Lauderdale.

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We had Eric’s birthday brownies before night watches began.  Since I tossed the used candles out at the last birthday party, we had to use the sparkler again.  Fireworks are always a big hit.

Here is a Disney cruise ship.  I pictured all these people staying in Disney themed rooms and having dinner with the characters.  I’m not sure what they do on a Disney cruise ship, but Eric said that’s probably as close as we’ll ever get to one.

Topaz is the biggest trooper here.  She had to do her business on the back step which wasn’t always level, or dry.  After days and days, her boredom really started to show.

One of the pieces of data the AIS transmits is the ships speed.  We noticed that the tankers cruised at 12 kts and the cruise ships usually went around 20 kts.

Here’s a shot of the water on a wind free motoring day.  This picture made the surface look way more bumpy that it seemed to be that day.

The Captains quarters are the starboard aft cabin.  The two aft cabins are the most stable places on the boat.  When we have a bumpy night, everyone piles into my bed.  This cabin is also right next to the steering station.  All you have to do is look down the hatch to see what mischief those kids are getting into.

Just as we were approaching the western edge of the Bahamas, our trip log reached 1000nm

Then just as quickly as 1000nm was displayed, the trip meter automatically reset itself back to zero.

Eric thought the port engines vibration was unusual. He looked here and there and then decided to jump in and look below.  Since there was no wind, he could do this easily.

Finally, after over a week and 1000 nm, we found this tiny piece of island with a lighthouse.  This island is Great Isaac and out in the middle of nowhere. We pulled over to a shallow place near here and rested for four hours waiting until 11pm to make our Gulf Stream crossing.  This set us up for a daylight arrival.

Early the next morning, the Fort Lauderdale skyline greeted us.

From the harbor entrance we traveled south along the ICW for a few miles to the marina.  This area is also shipping port.

 

Now we’re safely tucked into a marina waiting for a hard fiberglass top for our cockpit to be installed.