The sky looked like a massive bird just before the sun peeked over the horizon on Monday, March 31.
Yesterday morning, the wind was back down to 9 knots when we got up in the morning. The motion in the anchorage was pleasant compared to previous days, but there was still a notable amount of motion. It rained periodically for the entire day. The showers usually passed quickly, and several were quite hard rains.
In a previous post, we’d mentioned that we’d (relatively) recently bought new refrigerator and freezer units. We bought one dedicated freezer unit, where both drawers are only freezers. We bought two combo units: each unit has two drawers, and each of the drawers can be set to be either refrigerator or freezer independent of the other drawer. Since leaving San Diego in December, we’ve had all four drawers set to refrigerator mode.
At around 1100, we noticed there was condensation on the outer drawers of the freezer. Uh oh. We consolidated the food in the refrigerators into one unit, and switched the now empty unit to freezer mode. Once it had cooled down, we moved the frozen food out of the unit with condensation and defrosted the freezer. As we typically do when we defrost the freezer, we threw a bunch of rags in the drawers to absorb the water as the ice melted.
Most of the families were as tired of the uncomfortable anchorage as we were. The weather conditions were supposed to be good for traveling on Tuesday. At 1300, we went to shore to meet up with these other families to discuss where everyone wanted to go on Tuesday and to see if it would work out to travel together.
After much debate, most of the families agreed to meet up at The Bight Bay on Cat Island. Over the last couple of weeks, Eric’s D & D group had grown from three families (including us) to five. Since four of the five D & D families were going, the D & D sessions would continue.
Once the plan was decided upon, Eric and Keith played D & D onshore while Christi went back to Kosmos. She was horrified to see that, rather than the water pooling in the drawers, it had leaked out of the unit. The carpet was sopping wet. Our guess was that the motion of the anchorage caused the water to slosh out.
Christi dried out and cleaned the freezer, paying extra careful attention to the seals. We’re hoping the problem was simply that the drawers weren’t sealing properly and that the de-icing/cleaning seals would solve the problem. She turned the freezer back on and moved food back to that unit. Much to our relief, all seemed to be working fine again. Phew.
Christi had also mopped as much water as she could out of the carpet, then pulled it up so it could dry out. Because it was raining outside, the carpet simply wasn’t drying. When Eric and Keith returned, we ran the generator and turned on the AC for a few hours to help with the drying out process.
In the middle of the night, the wind picked up to 14 – 18 knots. The motion of these waves was sharp and uncomfortable. At midnight, a cruise ship 17-miles away from us set off an AIS broadcast message that woke us up. Between the AIS message and the uncomfortable motion, Eric did not sleep well.
This morning, we did a repeat of the previous Monday: we went to The Sandpiper for breakfast, then to the grocery store. There was a grocery store at The Bight Bay, but we had no idea how big or well stocked it was, so we figured we should stock up here to be safe. Being as it was windy and wavy in the bay, it was a very wet ride back to Kosmos. We noticed that almost all the boats that had been anchored near us had left. It was difficult to function onboard due to the motion. We were counting the hours until we could leave for The Bight Bay.
In good news, the motion did improve a little bit after sunset. Some of the D & D kids came over in the evening to work on their D & D character sheets and watch a movie. The crescent moon was bright in the twilight.
