Riviera Beach Florida (2014-02-19)

N26° 46.441', W80° 03.037' 

 

We are now back in the US, after having a safe passage crossing the gulf stream from the Bahamas to Florida.

 

We left West End Bahamas yesterday morning a little after 0800.  The seas seemed rougher than what the forecast had said, but it just ended up being some weird waves warping around from the south of Grand Bahama Island.  After about an hour the seas settled down to a reasonable 1 foot swell on our stern starboard quarter.  It stayed like that until about 15 miles off the Florida coast when all of a sudden it seemed like we were in a washing machine, with 2-3' waves coming from all directions.  I figured that this was just the western edge of the gulf stream interacting with the rising bottom of the sea, and that it would settle down in a mile or so, and sure enough it did.  Other than getting waked by a huge sportfisher boat leaving the Palm Beach inlet just as we were entering it, that was the end of the uncomfortable seas for this crossing.

We ran at around 9 knots again for the crossing back, and managed to complete it in just over 6 hours, the same as our crossing to the Bahamas.

There was a lot of boat traffic to contend with.  We saw quite a few sail and power boats on their way over to the Bahamas.  There were also two large cargo ships and a cruise ship that crossed our path as well.  In fact, one of the cargo ships did something that I've never seen before, and was frankly very surprised by.  I was watching this particular ship on our AIS, and noted that our CPA (Closest Point of Approach) was going to be about 0.25 nautical miles in about 20 minutes.  I was going to wait for the first cargo vessel to clear our course (it was 2 nautical miles ahead of us) and then I was going to change course to pass well behind the second cargo vessel.  Well, I had the AIS info from the second vessel on the chartplotter screen when I noticed his heading start to change when we were still about 3 miles away.  I looked up to figure out where his course was going and realized that he was changing course to pass behind both us and a sailboat that was about a mile from us and also heading for Florida.  After he passed behind the two boats he changed course back to his original heading and continued on his way.  I haven't had a lot of experience with meeting large ships like this at sea, but my understanding was that they never changed course for small pleasure boats, and expect the small boats to change course to avoid them, unless there is a danger of an imminent collision.  Pretty nice to see something like this happen, even if he could have saved the fuel it took to make the course change and simply let me adjust my course for him.

Southbound cargo ship

Northbound cargo ship that diverted course for us and a sailboat

AIS identified this as the "Carnival Celebration" but with the recent news my mind tagged it as the "Carnival Contagion" :-)

When we made it through the inlet I called US Customs to start the clearance process.  One of the things the NEXUS card is supposed to do for us is allow us to do these clearances over the phone, but just like when we entered the US from Canada, the agent I ended up with didn't understand that, so we still had to go in to clear in person.  We pretty much expected that (sounds a little jaded I know), so we had made arrangements for a slip at the Riviera Beach marina, which is only about two blocks away from the nearest Customs office.  After getting tied up we walked over and in five minutes were cleared back in to the US.

M/V September Dream safe and sound after the crossing.  Note the 'Q' flag still flying as we were just heading over to Customs to complete our clearing in process

We had crossed with three other boats, and two of them were also going to the same marina, so we all decided to meet at the marina restaurant to celebrate a successful crossing.  Not surprisingly, we were all pretty tired, so we didn't last long, but the six of us had a good meal, and rumour has it that a few beer were consumed. :-)

"What does everyone else want to drink?" :-)

We decided to spend two days here and get the boat cleaned up and take care of some laundry.  Tomorrow we're going to head back to the North Lake Worth anchorage to relax for a couple days.  We don't have too much of a plan at this point, but in a few days we'll probably start heading up the ICW for a stop at Vero Beach.  We have a few other locations that we'd like to stop at, such as New Smyrna and the Marineland marina, but for now we're leaving it open as to when exactly that will happen.