Springtime in The Bahamas – Ft. Lauderdale to Grand Bahama Island

After all of our boat work had been completed in Florida, we were ready to do some offshore cruising and go off grid for a few months. This was the first time we had ever done such a thing. By mid-March of 2023 we were ready to head to The Bahamas.

We departed from Ft. Lauderdale and headed to Port Lucaya on Grand Bahama Island, and eventually to West End where we checked into customs. The passage was 13 hours and we left on a beautiful calm morning. The plus side was that the sea state was really smooth and we didn’t have any raging seas as we crossed the Gulf Stream. The negative was that we had to motor quite a bit of the way, as there wasn’t enough wind to fill the sails. But it was peaceful, and fit my idea of fair weather cruising quite well.

We had two amazing crew members who went on this three-month adventure with us: Lauren, our daughter, and Ellie Fahrbach, Lauren’s good friend (like family to us). We made an amazing team and grew so much together during that time.

We chose to spend most of this cruising season in the Abaco Island chain as it gave us an opportunity to hone our skills in the more protected sea of Abaco. We spent time on the Cays of Green Turtle, Guana, Scotland, Man-o-War, Elbow, Sandy, and Marsh Harbor. We also made an overnight passage to Spanish Wells on Eleuthera Island, and then made our way to Nassau where we met our good friends, Rick and Maryalice, whom we met on the docks in Ft. Lauderdale. They became a welcome buddy boat for the rest of the cruising season. We went back to the Abacos and showed them all of the great places we discovered our first time around.

Come May, it was time to head back to the United States and end this leg of our journey. We sailed back to West End on Grand Bahama Island where we were going to stage our trip back to the States. We ran into weeks of bad weather and ended up spending our last week in Port Lucaya where we found calm waters, sunshine, and a respite on a beautiful private dock with a pool! We stayed there for many days before we found a good weather window to make the three day passage back to Charleston, our hub in the United States.

We ended up sailing from West End to Brunswick, Georgia, as the seas were too tempestuous for us to make it all the way to Charleston. After hanging out in Brunswick for over a week, we finally found the right window to get back to Charleston where we caught up with good friends, re-provisioned, unloaded and loaded things from our storage facility, and then made our way around Cape Hattaras and into Virginia. We spent the summer cruising up and down the beautiful Chesapeake while we waited out the hurricane season. You can read more abut our summer adventures here.

Since I didn’t start writing this blog until many months after our three-month trip to The Bahamas, it’s not very easy to go back and record all of our adventures, what we saw, what we learned, the people we met, the cultures, and the discoveries we made. So instead of trying to remember and record it all, I decided a picture gallery will have to express what I can no longer put down in words.

PHOTOS BELOW: Ft. Lauderdale to Port Lucaya on Grand Bahama Island. Then to West End on Grand Bahama where we checked in at the customs office and stayed a couple of days. Worked our way through Indian Rock passage to overnight at Great Sale Cay before heading to Green Turtle Cay.

PHOTOS BELOW: We sailed from Great Sale Cay to Green Turtle Cay and caught a 25 pound red snapper along the way in only 25 feet of water. We were quite surprised to get such a monster in the Sea of Abaco. Most fishermen have to go out to the Atlantic Ocean to catch such a beauty. With it, we made BBQ snapper, snapper tacos, and baked snapper with cream sauce. It was delicious every meal!