Summer Breeze

The end of January, 2015, we traveled northward from the Exumas and Nassau into the Berry Island chain and decided to settle in for a month or so at Great Harbor Cay Marina at the far north end of the Berrys. We've stayed here many times in the past 10 years and it's one of our favorite hangouts.

Here is our Summer Breeze in her slip, and look whos big Westport yacht is a couple of slips away again . . . Jack's "Sea Bear" is back for some bone fishing in Cub 1, Cub 2, & Cub 3. Jack and Johnnie Miller are obviously on the same Rest&Relaxation schedule that we are. They just bring much nicer accomodations.

After a couple of weeks, Autumn & Michael joined us all the way from Santa Cruz, California, for a week visit of beach hiking.

Michael learned the hardway that walking on Bahamian ironrock will cause you to "blowout a flipflop".

Lunch at CarriEarl Restaurant

Oyster Cracker

Autumn & Michael departed on the puddle-jumper for Nassau on Feb. 11. About 2 minutes after I took this boarding photo, smoke started pouring from the plane, and all of the passengers were quickly evacuated. This turned out to be funny! The guy loading the luggage accidently hit the fire extinguisher inside the cabin and it filled the plane up with powder, not smoke.

A couple of days after the kids left, our bow v-berth is once again filled with old friends from Virginia, John & Kay. Everybody needs a winter break, and there's no better place than on a beach here.

We even got in a little free golf . . . but with only 2 clubs, and we had to beat around in the roughs for lost golf balls.

John won "immunity", but we voted him off of the island anyway!

After John's departure, the fish decided to come back out of hiding . . . Sorry, John.

Here's a couple of friends who did much better than I.

On Feb.22 we checked out of our Great Harbor slip and anchored in Slaughter Bay off of Royal Caribbean's Stirrup Cay playground island, in anticipation of a nice crossing window to Freeport, Grand Bahama. We weren't disappointed. Leaving in the dark at 5:30AM, we knocked off the 58 n.miles to Ocean Reef Y.C., making it into a slip by 4:00PM before dark.

Shipping traffic on this crossing is always spooky.

It wouldn't be a complete winter if we didn't stop by Ocean Reef on Grand Bahama on our way back to the States each year. It's always like a family reunion with lots of cruising friends we've met here & there over the years. It's especially fun if our "hanging out" in the comfort of a marina for another month coincides with St Patrick's Day which is observed by one & all . . . great FUN!

We've posted a lot of photos over the past winters of previous Ocean Reef / Freeport, Grand Bahama adventures, so please just click down to our "older posts" for a more thorough view of this island. We did cover a lot of ground on Grand Bahama this winter, also, including a really neat "all you can sample" at the Sands Brewery in Freeport. I still can't believe they left two dozen sailors "unsupervised" for an hour in their multiple-tap courtesy tasting room . . . talk about leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse!

On March 21, 2015, we made a final bumpy Gulf Stream crossing from Old Bahama Bay at West End back to the Lake Worth inlet in Florida. The long 61 n.miles into a NW-N light wind made for a sloppy slog over large ocean swells. Thankful that the north breeze didn't stand the waves up into square chop like it normally tends to do, we arrived after a long 12-hour day . . .pooped . . . and just as a thick ground fog soup sets in along the coast.

Departing West End at sunrise