Monday, November 24, 2025 – Just before the sun poked over the horizon

Our feet and legs were completely covered with red welts from all the bug bites. Eric had 32 bites on one of his legs and at least 15 on the other. Christi and Keith were not far behind in the bug bite count. None of us wanted to go to shore today because we did not want to get any more bug bites.

After morning chores and school, Eric and Keith went for a swim around boat. The water was a little bit on the cold side, so they wore wetsuits. They had fun playing in the water. Eric wanted to clean the water line, but Christi forbade him. Eric’s back was slowly getting better each day, but it still wasn’t 100% better and she was worried that he’d strain his back all over again. Christi did not go in as the water was too cold for her, even with a 3/2mm wetsuit. Here was a photo of the bottom, showing how amazingly clear the water was, the sea grass, the lone starfish, and our anchor chain.

We laid low onboard for the rest of the afternoon and evening. Ironically enough, a mosquito got inside and we all got more bites. 

On Tuesday morning, the wind shifted direction. While it was still relatively calm in the anchorage, it wasn’t as comfortable as it had been the previous few days. We also wanted to note that since we’ve been here, we’ve had a fair amount of fast boat traffic zoom by that created wakes. The fast boats weren’t frequent, but they did go by more often than we’d expected. Today, with the anchorage a little rockier overall, the wakes were even more uncomfortable.

After morning chores and school, Christi braved the cold and jumped into the water. She screamed a little bit from the shock. She did a quick once over on the water line and a little bit of the bottom, just focusing on the cleaning the worst bits. The current was stronger than anticipated and she tired out quickly. Despite objections from Christi, Eric then jumped in to continue cleaning the bottom, focusing on the stabilizer fins and keel coolers. He found a lot of dark shells -maybe mussels or oysters – growing in the keel cooler slats, where the water gets sucked in. Eric believes the diver may not have seen them since they were black and the water in the Chesapeake was so murky. He had to do quite a bit of scraping to remove the shells.

Much to Christi’s relief, once he’d finished the keel coolers and was back onboard, Eric reported that his back was not any worse. After showering, we pulled up the anchor. There was a lot of sea grass stuck in chain that had to be picked out as we pulled the chain up, so pulling up the chain went slowly. When we got to the end of the chain, we found that the anchor was really dug in. We had a hard time getting the anchor out of the sand.

We headed back to Marsh Harbor. Seas were calm and it was a pleasant ride.

We dropped anchor near where we’d anchored last time. We had a quiet night aboard.

Wednesday was yet another day where we never went to shore. In the morning, our friends on Tiki Tour arrived in Marsh Harbor and dropped anchor near us. They came over to visit for a couple of hours in the afternoon, after they’d completed their check in paperwork. We were excited to see them again.

The anchorage has been significantly rockier the last couple of days than it was last week, primarily due to a big increase in speed boat traffic creating wakes. Since Abacos was close enough to Florida to be a day trip in a boat capable of doing 20+ knots, we figured that a lot of Floridians were here for the holiday weekend. Here was the dusk on Wednesday.