Charleston to the Bahamas – day 2

Chris and I came up for the 12-3am watch as the clock ticked over to November 7 for day 2 of our passage. As they handed off the boat to us, Patrick and Tom reported there was nothing going on of note, and headed down for some sleep.

Nothing going on of note, my foot! Shortly after starting our watch, we noticed a US Government vessel headed straight for us, going fast. We were also scratching our heads at what seemed to be four ghost ships, all going by the same name on the AIS, lined up all in a row…none of which actually seemed to be there when we went by the place where they should have been. You can see them lined up near us in the picture below. (Granted, the scale on this is zoomed way out, so there was a lot of space between them, and also between them and us…but we didn’t see any of their lights at all. Weird!) And there were two cargo ships nearby, and a cruise ship! Seems like plenty going on. You can also see that the US Government vessel did speed right past us (and past the ghost ships).

To top off all that excitement, the moon came up just before 2 am looking like red devil horns. This picture does it no justice. It took me a hot minute to realize it was the moonrise.

At around 0230 we decided we were definitely out of the Gulf Stream. Little to no current pushing us around, and the sea temperature was back down to 79 degrees. Woohoo, we crossed it!

After a few hours of rest, we were back on watch again at 6 am, fully under motor with sails down. We were greeted with coffee and two thoughtfully left coconut cookies to start the day, along with a beautiful sunrise.

Cecelia poked her head up out of her window to say hi, as we sat in the cockpit reading books and enjoying the day’s awakening.

We also cleaned off the fishing lures–one of them had this sargassum on it; our first sargassum of the trip!

Suddenly I spotted a green flash behind the boat and a whole bunch of splashing. Fish on! And it sure looked like a mahi! The boys stormed to the back of the boat to reel it in, but alas, it got itself off the line somewhere in the midst of the reeling-in process. We pulled out The Cruiser’s Handbook of Fishing for some divine inspiration. Sure enough, we nabbed another fish not too long after that (some kind of tuna, we think…still not great at the fish identification). That lucky fella got turned into poke bowls for an early lunch.

Still motoring with no wind, we decided to turn the engine off and drift so we could all take a swim in the ocean. What a treat! Nothing to see around us anywhere except the bright blue sky and the azure blue water.

We all took advantage of the swim to soap up and rinse off using the stern shower. After our refreshing dip in the deep blue sea, we then got back on our way south.

Before we got down to the business of serving dinner and switching to night watch mode again, we calculated what our arrival time would be in Marsh Harbour, and decided we would alter course to arrive in the quiet cove of Powell Cay instead, in order to set the anchor before dark. We’d then head to Marsh Harbour the following day to check in with customs and immigration and all that. We adjusted our RPMs to maintain the right speed for our target arrival time, and got excited that there were only 163 nautical miles remaining.

We also discovered that what must have been a very hungry fish destroyed Tom’s cedar plug lure, which was on one of our trolling lines. Whatever it was, it was big! Maybe we’ll catch something big tomorrow before we arrive in the Bahamas…