Early morning and we are off for the return trip to Miami. This will be another motoring trip as there is almost no wind today. That's an unusual occurrence in these easterly trade wind islands and we are taking advantage of the no wind to motor back to Miami.
You can tell we are traveling up the Gulf Stream by the blueness of the water and the presence of Man-o-War jellyfish sailing over the water.
Yep, definitely in the Gulf Stream as you can see our speed over ground is 10.1kts. It takes 2 days to get down to Marathon at our normal sailing speed of 6kts but, less than one day to get back making nearly twice that speed. Our ETA back to the Florida Channel at Key Biscayne is about 2000, just after dark. But it is a wide channel and well marked and one we have passed through several times so we will come in after dark.
Another sunset following a smooth motoring trip up from Marathon. We are just a few hours out from Key Biscayne.
Well, we are safely anchored off of Key Biscayne and it looks to be a quiet night. The entrance through the Florida Channel turned out to be not as comfortable as we had anticipated. I didn't realize that most of the channel markers are not lighted so we had to rely almost completely on following our chartplotter, like flying on instruments only. We could see the markers - as we passed them - illuminated with our spot light, but they are too widely spaced to be able to determine how to head to the next ones without the chartplotter. But the modern chartplotter electronics and GPS and radar make these difficult passages quite feasible these days as long as nothing goes wrong. We were safely anchored by 10pm and spent a restful night.
