After dropping Rose and Kate off at the airport in Miami, we headed back north to West Palm Beach, our jumping off point for the Bahamas. We decided to join a rally for the trip because friends of ours signed up. Sadly, they wound up dropping out because their boat wasn’t yet ready for the journey. A rally is essentially a group of boats who decide to travel to and from the same place at about the same time. This is a relatively short passage (one overnight), but given that it’s our first time in the Bahamas, we thought that it would be a fun experience. Joining the rally incurred a small fee, but got us access to some fun group events like a dinner and social hour, some webinars, and professional weather routing from a meteorologist.
Our good friend, Brian, another sailor, joined us in West Palm Beach on Monday and will help us in the trip to the Bahamas. We’ve enjoyed West Palm Beach and getting to know some of the other sailors in the rally, but mostly we are waiting for the weather window to go. It looks like tomorrow is the day!
We reviewed our safety equipment on Tilia, which included checking the contents of our ditch bag, double checking the PFDs, how to use the life raft, location and use of the fire extinguishers, and rigging jack lines that we can clip on to if we need to go to the bow of the boat. We don’t anticipate needing much of this, but we take safety very seriously, nevertheless.
We hope our next post is from Great Harbour Cay in a couple days!