We woke up this morning to the sounds of America; traffic, speed boats and low flying aircraft. We upped anchor around 7 am and joined an 11 boat caravan heading north on the ICW.

It took all of twelve minutes to realize we had broken the cardinal rule of ICW travel. We are traveling in Florida on a weekend!!!?! Ah, look out for the power boats!! Incoming jet ski!! Ready the explosive jet ski spear whacking warheads!! Fire!! Fire!!

We got bounced and jostled until we cleared Stuart and then the wind picked up to twenty knots and blew all the pleasure boaters away. With so much wind, we were screaming up the coast at 10 knots and we decided to go all the way up to Vero Beach, which was a total of 65 miles for the day.

We arrived off the marina and were directed to raft up to another catamaran on mooring ball number 8. We got the boat squared away just as the sun started to set.

For dinner I made mahi tacos and we split our last bottle of wine. Tomorrow is Sunday and so the bus system isn't operating. We'll wait until Monday and then we can hit the grocery store, the liquor store and the hardware store.

Oh yeah, our crossing was pretty benign. We motor sailed out of Nassau harbour around 9 am and continued on through the day, the night, and then most of the next day. We caught an enormous Mahi that weighed in at 35 pounds and was 48 inches in length. It took me 3 hours to get him cleaned up and packaged and we ended up with 26 individual sized servings.

The night trip across the banks was pretty lonely with almost no moon and around 3am the wind faded away and we had to resort to motoring. The following morning I redeployed my fish whackers and caught two more Mahi, one of which was 15 pounds and the other which was only 6 pounds and thus returned to the wild.

The freezer was then completely full and so we stopped fishing for the duration of the trip. Anyway, that was the crossing in a nutshell. Talk to you tomorow.