From the Mountains to the Sea: Bimini

At the moment I'm freezing in air conditioned business lounge in an Embassy Suites near Miami Airport. My mom is coming for a visit and I'll be picking her up tonight. I left Cody with the boat down in Key Largo - our first night apart since we began this wacky trip. I'm doing laundry and printing information on good snorkeling locations near the Keys, and I figured it would be quite the luxury to type a blog post on a real computer. It is. But I wish I'd brought my hoody. I think the AC must be down at 60 - at least that's what my room was set to before I had a chance to crank it back to 75.

Anyway, I wanted to write about our trip to Bimini, Bahama, which is where I left off last time. We spent a hot night anchored in Miami, with our alarms set for 3 AM. Between the heat, the airport noise, and the guys who were engaged in a verbal dispute in the neighboring park for an hour (I was seriously wishing someone would just punch someone and then shut up, but alas, the yelling went on and on) we didn't get much sleep. Undeterred, we rose with our alarms, hauled up anchor, and got moving.

The wind was predicted to be out of the Southeast, which isn't ideal when you're heading, oh, southeast. We were shooting straight across the gulf stream which at time moves at 3 knots northward, and we'd decided that regardless of wind we would keep our speed no less than 5 knots. So we basically motored across. We had a smooth crossing, with our biggest trouble being from the seaweed floating in big clumps on the surface of the water that would clog up our engine, forcing us to stop and clear it off. We had read that one should aim 2 degrees further south than the destination for each hour of travel across the gulf stream, so figuring 10 hours we pointed 20 degrees south of Bimini. That proved unnecessary and halfway to our destination we corrected course. At any rate, seaweed not withstanding, we had a very smooth crossing.

As we grew closer to the entrace to North Bimini Harbor we could see the bluegreen glow of the water, as light shone through it to the white sandy bottom. I can truly say I didn't think water was actually that color. I mean, sure, there are pictures of it like that in magazines and stuff, but that must be photoshop, right? Or 1 in 1000 days. But no, it's really like that, every day. It was breathtaking.

We motored up to Alice Town and dropped anchor just across from Customs. We raised our yellow quarentine flag (stitched together from a $1 Pet Supermarket shopping bag, rather than dropping $20 on a yellow flag from West Marine that we'll use once) and Cody dinghied to shore, passports and boat registration in hand, to deal with customs. As per instructions I remained with the ship, but did allow myself a quick dip in the gorgeous water while I waited. Customs was easy, and Cody was back in a half hour.

What to say about the rest of our time in Bimini? A day by day account would get redundent, so I'll touch on the highlights.

We spent 12 days exploring the islands that make up Bimini - North and South Bimini, and Gun Cay. There's also Cat Cay, but that's a private island for the 1% and we didn't feel like dealing with it. We snorkeled almost every day, including a wreck snorkel on the Sapona, a partially submerged ship in about 10 feet of water. It was there that we saw a big nurse shark who definitely swam over to check us out. It was very cool. One day we were heading north to find dolphins and, lo and behold, we found dolphins, and right outside the harbor. I told Cody I was going to jump overboard (we had full sail up) and he finally said OK, go for it. We swam with the dolphins for a while (Cody joined me after dropping sail and setting the anchor - I'm a bad wife) and it was amazing. There were a good dozen of them, and they were digging something up from the sandy bottom to eat. The water was close to 40 feet deep, but with the light and the clean water and the white sand it was easy to see the dolphins as they nosed around for a snack. Occasionally they'd come to the surface and swim close by. It was very, very neat. We also swam with sting rays! The first day we went down to Gun Cay we anchored in the little open harbor on the north end, called Honeymoon Harbor. A guy was there with his two kids and they were feeding a bunch of stingrays that live in the harbor. He invited us to feed them the shrimp he'd brought and it was completely amazing. They were clearly used to being fed and would come right up and eat the shrimp out of our hands. You could touch them as they swam around and their skin was amazing - not like fish skin, more like a dolphin or something. I as completely enamored with the stingrays. There was one who was missing his tail aand I named him Stumpy.

That was on the eve of my 31st birthday, and I woke up the next morning, my birthday, to a beautiful deserted harbor. Might I recommend skinny dipping off your own deserted island for your next birthday? It really can't be beat. I then donned swimwear and swam with the stingrays again. Stumpy came over and swam around, clearly wishing me a happy birthday. We headed back up to North Bimini later that morning, stopping along the way to snorkel Turtle Rocks, which was amazing.

Cody had offered me a choice - scuba diving or a hotel - for my birthday present. It was a tough one. One particularly bumpy and thunderstormy night made up my mind for me; I wanted to sleep inside, on something that didn't move. I know, that's soooo boring compared with scuba diving with hammerheads. What can I say? Cody got us a room at Resorts World Bimini, and we had a lovely dinner at one of their very fancy restaurants. The next morning we dawdled in the room, watching the Tour on ESPN and savoring our last few hours of air conditioning. Happy birthday to me.

As we neared the end of our stay we wanted to check a few things off the must-do list, and one of those was to revisit the sting rays and bring our own shrimp to feed them. The day before we set sail back for Miami we went back down to Honeymoon Harbor. This time our plan was to don snorkels and feed them off the boat in the deeper water so we could watch them swim around (when we'd fed them before we'd been sitting in a foot of water just off the beach). Well, that ended up being a little more intense than we'd planned. While I'm not afraid of sting rays, it's a little intimidating when three of them are swimming towards you in aggressive pursuit of the bag of shrimp you're clutching. After a few minutes of nervous snorkel-giggles and attempts to fend off some rather forward rays, we went back to the beach and resumed feeding them in the more controllable manner.

Later in the day Cody baked us a pumpkin pie on the grill. Pumpkin pie. In the Bahamas. In July. It was amazing, by the way. And we were treated with an extraordinary sunset that night, the eve of our departure.

We arose the next morning at 3 AM to leave for Miami. We'd been tossing around some ideas regarding our return to Gloucester, and our plans were contingent on my comfort with sailing Tri-oomph in the dark by myself (while Cody sleeps). So after we rose sail Cody went back to bed and I took the helm as we entered the Gulf Stream. I felt good with it and was encouraged, which furthered our plans of which I'll reveal in a later blog post.

But to wrap up, Bimini was amazing, and totally worth the trip. The people were incredibly nice and helpful and we felt comfortable wherever we went. What a great place.