Our trip from Turks and Caicos to Florida took longer time than we had planned. The first two days were sunny with almost no wind, as predicted by the weather forecast. None of us got seasick and the nightshifts were easy since we motored most of the way. Elliott made delicious food for us all. We had banana cake the first day and pancakes the next. The third night, on Elliotts watch, we ran into a thunderstorm that was part of a low pressure system. It was supposed to be north of us according to the weather forecast, but had moved further south towards us. It took us by surprise since our weather app didn’t model it correctly. During the thunderstorm, we saw hundreds of lightning strikes around us and we spent the night navigating around waterfilled clouds shown on our radar, as best we could. Fortunately we didn’t hear many of the lightning strikes and thus knew that they were far away.
The next morning, we encountered a squall with heavy rain and winds of 40 knots. Everything went into blur. Impressively, our autopilot held and we kept moving on our course. We found a small flat island near Exuma Banks to anchor and rest. At night the sky was still cloudy, but we didn’t see many lightening strikes or hear thunder. The morning after, we looked at the new weather forecast. It predicted more of the same weather if we stayed put, so we decided to set off in thick clouds with rain to get away from the storm as quickly as possible. At one point, we spotted a tornado over the water and became somewhat concerned. We sent a “Securite” warning over the vhf radio to other sailors nearby. One of them answered that he had been following it, and it seemed like it was only a waterspout, i.e not as powerfull as a water tornado. True enough, it dissipated quickly, but it did scare us to see this phenomenon somewhat close to us.
We continued on to a smaller island, Chub Cay, and anchored to rest for the night. Thankfully, the next day we woke up to sunshine and had a smooth sail to Bimini, where we slept for one night before the final stretch to Fort Lauderdale.
The kids sent a message in a bottle towards Denmark through the Gulf Stream.
From about 30 nautical miles away from Florida coast, we could see the sky lit up by the lights of Miami. Next morning, we finally arrived at the entrance of Fort Lauderdale and found an anchorage in Lake Sylvia, glad to be at land again.
