We decided to stay put

After much discussion today, we decided to stay in Bimini until the front passes. It will be tough to be sitting here tomorrow and Saturday, watching the calm winds and clear seas, and knowing we could have been out on them. Our primary concern was the fact that should we break down or if the front moves faster and is here by Saturday morning, we would have been in for a wild ride. If it was just Kristen and I, we probably would have gone.

Some of the decisions we make are based on the fact that we have kids aboard. One of my recurring nightmares after we made the decision to cruise was that we would be hit by deadly weather and I'd be asking myself "Did I just kill my family?" Kristen keeps telling me that we made the decision to cruise as husband and wife, and that she wanted to do this as badly as I did, but I'm always wondering, in the back of my mind, how selfish am I to put my family at risk like this? We've made many investments in safety (for those of you that don't know what all of these are, they should all be google-able) - liferaft, 3 EPIRBs (don't ask), SPOT, satellite phone, redundant GPS's, paper charts, jacklines, this blog with information as to our destination (aka floatplan), etc. Regardless, I'm somewhat protective of my family for some reason, and, even though Kristen doesn't always think I do this, I tend to err on the side of caution.

Our path across the banks - 61 miles of nothing but shallow water

In this case, we would have been butting up against some nasty weather. We would have left Gun Cay tomorrow morning early, taken the whole day to cross the Great Bahama Banks, passed through the Northwest Channel in the late evening, and then sailed through the night to get to Nassau sometime on Saturday morning. There is NO place to hide when crossing the banks, and once you've crossed you can really only anchor around Chub Cay (yes, the kids went crazy when they saw there was a Chub Cay). Chub Cay is supposed to be a pretty rolly anchorage, and if the weather detiorated early, we'd be stuck there for 4-5 days.

So, we've decided to take the cautious route and leave Bimini when the weeekend weather is gone, hopefully by Wednesday of next week. In the meantime, we took the opportunity to visit Alice Town on Bimini today (more on that later), and we'll hopefully find some activities to do between now and when we leave.