Gulf Stream to Green Turtle Cay
Picking the best weather window We woke up before dawn on December 10 and immediately checked the wind and sea state forecast to decide if we would cross the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. It wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t terrible. We needed to be in Hope Town by December 19th to meet the Swedish side of the family so we also knew we didn’t have time to wait around for the perfect forecast. There is a common cruising adage that says you should never sail by a calendar. That’s all well and good if you’re independently wealthy or retired or have no commitments other than yourself and your sailboat, but since we have to plan around Hans’s work schedule, we are basically always sailing by the calendar. Granted, we plan ahead and build in lots of extra days to wait for good weather, but sometimes we have to take the “good enough” forecast.
We decided that the pre-dawn Gulf Stream crossing forecast was good enough. The forecast: winds around 15 knots from the north with 2 meter seas with a 12 s