From south Florida to the Bahamas

Does anyone know anybody who has sailed a small Cat from south Florida to the Bahamas? I know people have done it. Is anyone interested?

From the south east coast to the Bahamas is 70nm but from Miami to Bimini it's only 43nm. The issue of course is the gulf stream.

Having done the crossing from multiple spots on the coast, I have to recommend against trying it on any kind of beach cat. Weather forecasting is much better than when I last did it, but the ditch is unforgiving and weathermen are still frequently wrong. If you're absolutely set on doing it, have a support boat.... A big one.

its definetly been done. heres a scan of a newspaper article.
http://www.angelfire.com/fl3/delraybeac ... baham.html

I would be interested. seems dangerous but i think with the proper tools (GPS, EPIRB, VHF, Etc.) it could be done fairly safely. You would just need a large weather window to pick an exceptional day. That route is fairly busy with traffic as well so if you could find a couple boats making the crossing the same day you could keep in touch with them and hail them on the radio if something happened.

oh wow i just noticed this was posted in the WAVE section. I would NOT do it in a wave. I'm not knocking on waves or anything, they are great boats and easy to sail with lots of buoyancy. But i dont think they would have the speed or the wave handling ability necessary to handle the gulf stream.

What do you mean by the "ditch?"

im assuming hes talking about the gulf stream that you would have to cross. i believe it moves the current at a rate of 3.5 knots northward. if you have wind coming out of the north you will have scary scary waves. thats what i was talking about when i mentioned the weather window.

Ditch is what the old birds I used to crew for when moving boats back and forth called the Gulf Stream. Others call the Intercoastal Waterway heading into Florida the Ditch. My reference was to the Gulf Stream.

And yes... When the wind and ocean currents oppose, it gets truly ugly. Once on a return trip with a 60+ foot motoryacht, we turned back to Bimini after hitting the edge of the Stream. We felt like a ping pong ball in a washing machine. It wasn't really the size of the waves that got us... It was the period and steepness. There is such a thing as too much roll and yaw.