Unexcused Absences Bahamas 2017 - The Cruise Home (he said)

Bahamas 2017 – The Cruise Home (he said)

by Kent 10 Jul 2017

Late June, 2017 – The calendar increased its relentless force as it passed mid June, so we eventually had to wrap things up and say our goodbyes and start the long cruise north and west back to Florida.

The trip was uneventful, which is always best for an ocean voyage. Our first leg took us first a few hours to the northern Exumas, and from there we did full-day trips to western Eleuthera, the northern Berrys, Port Lucaya on Grand Bahama, and from there across the Gulf Stream to Palm Beach and the Lake Worth Inlet. Other than the first day, where we had a moderate southerly wind, the rest of the days were cruising under partly-cloudy skies and light south-east wind.

A very low rainbow during our cruise home

Fishing-wise, we trolled the entire time, followed a few flocks of seabirds, and even got a hit right at dawn a half-mile south of Freeport on our last day, but never landed anything.

Heather in our new hammock, courtesy of Susan

The biggest change to the boat this year was the addition of our rigid aft-deck aluminum roof. This gave us much-needed storage space, shade, a fish cleaning table, dinghy davits, hammock mounts, overhead lights, and a nice place to mount 600 Watts of solar panels. The solar panels had the biggest positive impact on our cruise; last year we averaged 5 hours of generator use per day, but with all those extra electrons flowing from the panels we got by on an average of 1 hour per day this year.

Sunset reflected in our solar panels

So that wraps up our 2017 cruise. We got Miss Adventure settled at River Forest Yachting Center, packed everything away, rented a car, and drove back to DC. This year was both completely the same and yet totally different from our 2016 cruise; we were able to time things so we could enjoy a 6-week ski season in Vail (unlike last year in which we didn’t ski a single run), and we solidified our friendships with the locals in the central Exumas. The boat worked very well, and we suffered no major mechanical issues. And we’re delighted with our on-land summer parking spot in Stuart, Florida. We are, in fact, impatient to start our 2018 Bahamas cruise, except that we’re due in France at the end of August for our French canal cruise, 2017 edition.