10 October2012; At Sea.

 Today we crossed the middle part of the Caribbean Sea on our way to Florida. The stretch of water north of Aruba and south of Haiti. Although we are thus in the middle of open waters it was amazing to see how much traffic there was still out there. This area is a sort of cross roads for traffic to and from the Gulf of Mexico and destinations in south America ; ships going SE or NW. Secondly there is a stream of ships coming into the Caribbean Sea through the opening between the islands such as the Windward and the Mona Passage. Thus we saw ships everywhere today and although there is plenty of room here for everybody, we even had to change course to avoid some of them. In a way amazing as the sea is so large; in a way understandable as each ship sails the most economical courses possible and then you end up on each other’s track line.  At least it keeps the navigators from getting bored.

The thick pink line indicates the no-go zone in between the north and the South line and so keeping traffic apart.

More traffic will be us tonight when we sail through the Windward Passage located between the east point of Cuba and the West point of Haiti. Nearly all the traffic coming and going from the East Coast of North America uses this passage to get into the Western part of the Caribbean Sea. They nearly all make the same turn around the SW point of Haiti near Cape Tiburon and at the same distance near Cabo Maisi. The latter is the most eastern point of Cuba. Near Cabo Maisi, and north of Cuba, traffic is quite well regulated with Vessel traffic separation zones which separate the northbound traffic from the southbound traffic by means of traffic lanes. This enhances the safe sailing of all the ships greatly, as you more or less know what the other ships are doing when they are in the lanes. You still come across the occasional odd-ball who goes the opposite way and does not understand or pay attention to the pink lines in the chart, but in general it works quite well.

From the south side the challenge is more when you approach the traffic zone. Ships come from all directions towards it, and ships leaving tend to go for the best course the moment they clear the end of the traffic lane. My standing orders for this night always contain the sentence: plot all traffic in the area, plot all near the area, plot all coming to the area and even those that might not go near the area. Because there is always one…………………….

Although we sail fairly close to the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola, the water remains quite deep. I sometimes wish that we would be able to pump the sea dry, just to have a look to see what a big island like Cuba looks like, with no water around it. I assume it would be something like Table Mountain in South Africa but then on Himalaya scale and even higher.

Today we have several thousand feet of water below us and tomorrow when we sail in the Old Bahama Channel, North of Cuba, it will not be much different. The weather today behaved itself nicely, with small frontal systems coming by, with sometimes more over cast weather and sometimes sun shine. The wind varied from a force 1 to a force 5, depending on how close we came to rainclouds.

Tomorrow the wind should be on the starboard beam, blowing in from the North Atlantic and that means that we will have a breezy day in Fort Lauderdale.