On Monday, January 19, the anchorage was rolly and uncomfortable when we woke up. The discomfort this morning wasn’t a surprise — last night, the forecast had said the wind would shift northwest to the northeast and the wind was currently in the middle of its shift. As a side note, since we’ve been here, the wind has been constantly shifting and has come from every direction. We’ve done a 360 around our anchor.
When Eric checked the forecast this morning, it had changed to rainy and windy from this direction all day. It started to drizzle shortly after the weather check. We immediately got Kosmos ready to go to sea. We belabored a bit about which anchorage to go to. The closest protected anchorage was just a bit south, just above the blue dot on the map below. Bogumilia had told us they were going there and Eric wanted to join them since it looked so protected. But three other kid boats were at the spot where the blue dot was, and Eric ultimately decided we should go to where there were more families. Even if it wasn’t as protected as the anchorage to the north of it, it wouldn’t be a bad anchorage in these winds. We believe the spot was called White Point.
We got the dinghy up, brought the flopper stopper in, and pulled up anchor at 0830. It took 45-minutes to get to the destination.The red dot was Blackpoint, the blue dot White Point. Christi was feeling good when she got up, but the burst of activity needed to get Kosmos deployed tuckered her out.
As soon as we dropped anchor, we saw it was rolly and uncomfortable – even worse than Eric had expected. He put out the paravane right away, but it was still moderately rolly all day.
In the afternoon, Keith went to the beach with the three boys close in age to him, then they joined the girls on one of the boats and played games for a couple of hours. Eric puttered around the boat all day. Christi was worried that she’d relapse if she pushed herself too hard, so she rested most of the day.
In the evening, it was windier than anticipated at 15-20 knots. The rolliness worsened, bordering on uncomfortable. Bogumilla reported it was flat as a pancake. Christi and Eric seriously regretting not going with Bogumilia. Since it was so overcast all day, this was the closest we got to seeing the sun.
On Tuesday morning, it was gloomy. The forecast said there would be on and off light rain all day, and the cloud cover was thick. The anchorage was still very rolly and uncomfortable. There was 25-knots of wind sustained with gusts to 32; the forecast said the gusts would be up to 35-knots and the winds would last all day. Eric realized that the problem was the swell was wrapping around the bottom of the island and hitting us.
After Christi and Keith had finished school, Keith went to one of the other boats and played card games with a couple of the kids. Eric and Christi did chores onboard. In the mid-afternoon, the wind shifted directly slightly, but it was just enough to stop the wrap around swell. The anchorage became much more comfortable after that.
Eric has three anchor alarms. In the early evening, one of them went off — the one tied to the GPS — but not the other two. It looked like we’d moved a little bit, so Eric assumed that we were on the edge of the alarm scope for that alarm. but hadn’t gone beyond the scope for the other two. Earlier in the day, Ocean Posse had sent a notice saying the GPS could be off due to the solar storm that had just hit Earth, but Eric didn’t connect the dots until people started posting on the nautical WhatsAPP groups that they were seeing 50-foot discrepancies between their GPS and radars. GPS clearly had been affected by the solar storm and was now inaccurate. In good news, we hadn’t really moved and all was fine with the anchor; but GPS being off was bad news. We are relieved to report that the issue fixed itself shortly after. It was another quiet night onboard.