Fort Lauderdale – Bahamas Prep

One thing that happened during this week was a bit of arm-twisting from Andre and his colleagues who insisted that, as great as the Abacos are, we really need to do the Exumas.  Brad was one of those colleagues and friends and in one of those, “it’s a small world” scenarios, Brad was the young man who was Tim’s Uncle Jimmy’s captain when Jimmy had his Carver on Lake Erie many, many years ago.  Tim’s uncle’s son, Jamie (referenced on this site as the excellent Chef Jamie ) and Brad are friends to this day.  And yes, Brad was a captain when he was a very young man!

The Exumas idea threw a bit of a wrench in our plans as all of our preps were Abacos-geared, but hey – the OLOH mantra is not to over-plan so we listened to what everyone had to say and pivoted.  That meant that after months of research we were off to get new cruising guides and plot new routes and while we would be leaving with plenty of information, it wasn’t as “baked-in” to our thinking.  But we rolled with it and looked carefully, several times each day, at the weather patterns for the week.  We arrived in Fort Lauderdale on Monday and Thursday and Friday were both looking good for our relatively short but big water crossing to Bimini in the Bahamas, which would now be our jumping off point for our next adventure.  And this should give us just enough time to knock down a pretty big list of preparations.

By the time Thursday morning came upon us I began to fill out all of our Bahamas paperwork while Tim prepared for a few hours of quality time at Publix Supermarket for provisioning.  As I began to make sure all was in order… I discovered it was not!  The Admiral realized his passport had expired in February.  What a wonderful little nugget of information to receive the day before a perfect travel window!  After a few panicked phone calls to expediting agencies, he was told that the ONLY way to get a passport the same day was to try and get an appointment in Miami at the passport agency.  He immediately jumped on the phone and actually got someone who said if he needed to travel in the next few days it was possible but he needed an appointment and they had one opening left…11am.  It was 9:30am.  Go time!  All he needed was his old passport in good condition, an itinerary of where he was going and when he’d be back and two passport photos from a passport-photo-taking-place.  WHAT!?  CVS was on the way and had the service.  Itinerary?  We can make that happen.  Miami was 50 minutes away.  It was going to be tight and he was told not to be late.  Thankfully Andre had left us his car to use and the Admiral was off like a bullet.  After a slight hiccup at CVS (they couldn’t get their photo machine to work) and some direction snafus he arrived at 10:59am — only to be told he had to wait in line with all of the other people who had an appointment.  When all was all said and done Elvis had left the building with his new passport at 4pm.  The folks there were wonderful, helpful and hardworking and we thank them.

When he got back it was a whirlwind of provisioning that was to have taken place during the day before the passport fiasco.  As the evening began winding down we were tapped from seeing to it that everything was checked off our lists and our lists of lists.  And the weather was still looking very good to depart the next morning.  After a day like that it was a very good thing!  Read all about the crossing and our first day in The Bahamas in our next post!