Dawn on Monday, March 16

The forecast had predicted that it would rain last night, and when we woke up, we were disappointed to find that it hadn’t. The boat was starting to get gross and needed a good wash down.

Christi was the first one up, and she started working on getting the boat ready to go to sea as soon as she got up. If the forecast was correct, the wind direction was going to shift soon and the anchorage would become rolly and uncomfortable. Last night, we hadn’t totally decided where we were going to go, but we’d been leaning towards going back to Over Yonder Cay.

When Eric got up, he checked the route and saw we’d have to go through yet another narrow, shallow channel to get there. While the tide was high right then, it was a falling tide, and Eric announced that we need to leave right NOW before it got too shallow. We got the dinghy up, brought the paravane in, and lifted the anchor.

Our friends on Tiki Tour had texted last night and said they were going to Pipe Cay today. We’d texted back this morning that we were going to Over Yonder Cay. Tiki left the same time we did and were right behind us, so we guessed they were probably going to join us at Over Yonder.

The channel was very stressful. There were several spots where Eric was sweating whether we’d hit bottom and several more spots where it was incredibly narrow with no wriggle room. We came uncomfortably close to rocks at several points. 

Despite being stressful, all went smoothly. We were able to drop anchor in the exact same spot that we’d anchored in before. However, there was a small SNAFU during anchoring. As we were dropping the anchor, the cord that held the anchor locking mechanism in place got tangled in the anchor chain. Eric came out to help, and his hat blew away.

Since the anchor was only a little ways down, we brought it back up and Eric drove Kosmos in a circle around the hat. Keith tried to grab the hat with the boat hook, but Keith missed. There were quite a few hazards around us, making it kind of a dicey location to be doing circles, so after one circle, Eric decided it was best to just drop the anchor.

Once anchored, we could see the hat bobbing around in a nearby eddy. When Tiki came up behind us, we pointed out the hat and they rescued it for us before they anchored. Thank you Tiki! Zimovia and Clean Cup, both catamarans with shallow drafts, arrived a few hours later.

After Keith finished his school work, he went to Zimovia and was there all afternoon. They played a game called Muchkin, cards and wrestled on the bow. Meanwhile, aboard Kosmos, Eric and Christi were dismayed to find that we were grounded at low tide. We couldn’t even bring the anchor chain in because we were so stuck. But when the tide rose, Eric brought in some chain, so now we won’t drift into the shallows again. 

In the afternoon, an airplane with pontoons landed in the anchorage. It went over to the dock on the resort for a short time, then tried to take off again.

After that false start, it tried again to take off and succeeded the second time. We had a quiet night aboard. This was the sunset.