Blue Horizons

Powell Cay, Abacos to Port Canaveral, Florida

April 11 ‒ 12

We thought we wanted to spend some time anchoring north of Whale Cay, dropping the hook at several islands well off the beaten track. But as soon as we started talking about going home, something shifted. The wind started blowing toward Florida. We were ready.

Marine weather guru Chris Parker forecast four days of benign conditions for crossing the Gulf Stream. Those days would provide “an embarrassment of opportunities for westbound sailors,” he said. With the weather window wide open, we weighed anchor at Powell Cay and kept going until we made landfall in Port Canaveral, Florida, a trip of twenty-eight hours. Fortunately we left when we did, because the four-day window for Gulf Stream crossings slammed shut after two days (and would stay closed for the following week and a half).

On the Little Bahama Bank before we arrived at the Gulf Stream.
The lighter water is a fish mud: sand stirred up by fish.

As blue-water crossings go, in our experience, it was relatively comfortable. A waxing moon illuminated the horizon and delineated our mild pitching and rolling. For fifteen hours, we saw no sign of land. The immensity of the open ocean, shades of blue stretching to every horizon, was truly awe inspiring, not a breath-baited terrifying awe but a breathless holy awe. That sphere of unbroken blue speaks so powerfully of the vastness of God who created and fills not only the space you and I inhabit at any given moment but the entire universe.

~~

Search high and low, scan skies and land,

you’ll find nothing and no one quite like God….
He looms immense and august over everyone around him…
powerful and faithful from every angle.

Psalm 89:6‒8 msg