Thursday, Jan 29 — Yesterday, several boats moved into the anchorage and were uncomfortably close to one another. Eric thought all should be okay since no there was no current in the little cove and everyone will move together with the wind.
For their big outing of the day, Eric and Keith went to lunch at The Rusty Anchor. After eating, they walked the 1.5 miles to town and went to grocery store. There were still no eggs or bread. In good news, they found another market that had eggs and bread. Woo hoo! They caught a taxi back to The Rusty Anchor. After dropping off Keith, Eric visited each of the neighbors. Eric and Keith had a quiet evening onboard.
This morning, Eric got up at about 0700ish. He went outside and saw the crew of one of the boats in the anchorage, Karen and Jay, in a small inflatable dinghy. They told Eric that their dinghy had broken loose and was on the shore behind Kosmos. They were on their way to retrieve it. Eric hopped into Kosmopolitan and followed them to shore so he could help them if needed.
Karen and Jay were unable to move the dinghy off the beach because the propellor was grounded in the sand.
The battery didn’t have enough power to tilt the motor out of the sand.
Eric decided to anchor the dinghy so he could help them onshore. Securing Kosmopolitan was actually a big tricky. It appeared that when they’d dredged this bay, they were intending to put a sea wall, so there wasn’t really a beach to land the dinghy. Eric parked Kosmopolitan in a spot shallow enough that he could scramble up to the shore and secured the anchor in the sand over by the tree.
Looking at the grounded dinghy, Eric decided to tie a line between a tree and the dinghy and pulled on the middle of the line to try to tip the dinghy on its side. While there was a lot of leverage, It didn’t work — the propellor was dug in too deep in the sand and the angle of the lift was not quite right. They realized that they needed to do a hydraulic bypass on the motor in order to tilt it. Eric went back to Kosmos and got a screwdriver. Another boat, Peaks, also came and helped. They were able to get motor up, spin the dinghy around, and push it back in water. There appeared to be no damage.
After the kids all finished their school work, Eric and Keith went to shore to explore the island with the family on Peaks. There was a trail cleared.
They’d built a canal from one side of the island to the other.
There was a new looking wooden structure at the top of a hill. Eric and Keith were told was a lookout point for fires.
View of the anchorage from the structure.
Looking the other direction.
There were a lot of abandoned construction materials strewn about. They were told that these pipes were expensive, but now that they’d been left outside for so long, were probably damaged and worthless.
The beach on the other side of the island.
In frustrating news, Keith’s glasses broke yet again. He’s had three pairs of these same frames and has broken all three. Eric spent the evening trying to make the glasses usable. He tried glue and epoxy. The epoxy did the trick. In good news, Christi had taken the other broken pair of glasses with her to San Diego to get them repaired, so Keith would have properly fixed glasses in a few days.
Eric wasn’t the only one who was concerned about how the boats were anchored in the cove. Peaks started a WhatsApp group for the anchorage so that they could coordinate moving into better positions in advance of the big storm that was coming. While everyone agreed that people needed to move, no one really wanted to take charge of orchestrating who would move where. Eric eventually took charge. He laid out a plan of where each boat would move to and they agreed to execute the move the next morning at 0700.