A little closer to home

 When I last spoke, we were at the Berry Cays, specifically on Great Harbour Cay. It was very scenic and quiet there but the weather prevented us from taking out the dink and traveling to some of the sites we wanted to visit, like Market Fish and Hoffman's Cays. These were long rides in the dink, perhaps as much as 15 miles each way. Given the westerly wind  patterns and our experience telling us 8 miles was enough we elected not to push it and move on.
 In spite of leaking dripless shaft seals, we have arrived at Bimini. We had to sweat things out along the way because the shafts started leaking. Not much of a leak. It was about the same as having standard packings. About a drop a second or two. Since this was in line with the non catastrophic failure, I pushed on and to our advantage the leaks settled down to the point they stopped for a while. All in all after traveling about 11 or 12 hours from the Berries to Bimini we only shipped about a gallon or two of water. Since (for years) I have been performing regular bilge checks while running we were on top of the situation and within a comfort zone. No big deal in spite of some paranoia. Besides the water was so shallow we could have sat on the bridge and waited for help if it got 'that bad'.
 We chose some great weather to make the run from the Berries to Bimini. It was a very smooth ride and on several occasions we were treated to views through gin clear water.  If you click on the photo and look closely you will see all the tracks that were left on the bottom. The water isn't very deep on the bank. In some places one can only expect five feet at low tide and that's when we were running. Low tide. Freedom only pulls 3.5 feet. Being fortunate to have good weather and light winds on we went until we hit the deeper water where all the "Sporties" took off by pushing the throttles forward on the V10 MTUs and V12 Cats. Awesome boats. Must be nice! Some might say the same about us also I suppose.

 It was actually a bit of a dull ride across the bank. We took turns on watch while the other played electronic Yatzee. I guess that doesn't say much but it helped pass the time.
 But when we were within about 3 hours of North Rock at the North end (ya think?) of Bimini, we had company. What we think is a Whip-poor-will caught up with us and started flying around the bridge. Since we had the enclosure down due to the heat we were wondering if it was going to land on our heads. We were hopeful it would land somewhere because there was no land in sight and it was flying low, seemingly 'out of gas'. Fortunately the bird landed on the bow rail and stayed with us all the way to Bimini where it took flight and landed on another motor yacht. This sly little critter had us worried. I'm thinking it was totally within its envelope now. It held on even after the swell from the Gulf Stream started to hit us on the starboard bow.
 Coming around the North end of Bimini we dealt with bad information in the cruising guides that document one must go north and round the Moselle Bank. Not so. There's plenty of water there. However coming into Bimini, one has to have things working well and find the markers that may or may not be there. Fortunately for us they were present and the water was calm.

 So we settled down and the next day we took the dink out to the wreck of the Sapona. It's pretty spectacular to take in from a dink and it was worth the 4 mile ride out against the chop. They say Henry Ford had it built and used it for an escape from Prohibition. And we all thought he was a good tea totaling business man that brought America into a new age. Anyway we circled it a couple of times and Deb was able to review marine life with the look bucket. Once we had our fill we moved on to the Rocks, the South Riding Rocks. We stayed in the lee which happened to be on the Gulf Stream side and worked these as far as we could back to South Bimini. It was a much more comfortable ride (I know, why didn't we go out that way) on the way back and Deb was able to use the look bucket quite a bit to check out coral and fish in the depths below us.
 The water here is very clear, so all we need is some good weather now. That front that brought all the Tornadoes to the U.S. hit us today and tore all the zippers from the enclosure. Well, not all of them but quite a few. But we're safe and looking forward to some more sedate weather.

I've put some photos in the bucket and updated the GPS data as well. You might enjoy flying the "Sapona Wreck Dink" GPS track with Google Earth. And the web cam (for what it was worth) is dead. The router's just don't agree with the wifi here. That and having to restore the laptop due to an incompatibility between IE8 and Symantic, well, I've decided to wait until the wifi is more reliable and forgiving.