Dawn on Sunday, December 14, 2025
This morning it was windy, then both windy and rainy, then the wind died and there was light rain for a few hours. Once the wind died, it was hot and humid. Eric cleaned the bottom.
The wind was forecast to shift direction, so he made sure that the anchor was well set, which was easy to do in such amazingly clear water.
Continue readingOn Wednesday, December 10, 2025, we woke up wondering if the Apocalypse had just happened.
While Christi and Keith did school, Eric removed the salinity probe and cleaned it. But it didn’t help — the sensor still wasn’t working. When he put it back, he tightened it as much as he could to ensure it didn’t leak.
We needed to go to the grocery store. We decided to go to shore at 1130, figuring that would give us enough time to have lunch and do our grocery shopping before the current was too strong in either direction. We somehow made a big mistake in calculations. Going in, the current was still strong. We made slow forward progress while the battery power was quickly sucked down. Eric had intended to bring a spare battery for the dinghy to be safe, but when we were about halfway to shore, he realized he’d forgotten it. From there on out, he was really anxious about getting stranded. We made it to the yacht club dinghy area with no problems. It was high tide, and the sea wall was again underwater.
On Tuesday, December 9, 2025, it was raining during sunrise. The view of the sun was completely obscured, but there were some pretty colors prior to the rain rolling in.
Much to our dismay, when we checked the forecast this morning, we saw that it had changed again — the wind would continue to come from the west all day today. Argh. We were frustrated with ourselves for not moving yesterday. When Eric and Keith went to bring in the flopper stopper, they saw this guy was making circles around it.
We immediately moved to the anchorage called Between the Majors on the northwest side of Big Major Cay. It was much more comfortable than the south side had been, but still rolly enough to deploy the port side flopper stopper. One of the issues with this anchorage that had made Eric reluctant to move yesterday was that it had a strong current that caused the boats to swing wildly from one direction to the other, increasing the chance of dragging. And the boats didn’t move together in unison. Some boats moved more with the wind direction and others with the current, so there was a bigger chance of collisions in this type of anchorage. We made sure that we anchored far away from the other boats and that the anchor was set well. This was our view of the anchorage looking northeast towards Fowl Cay.
Continue readingFull moon just before dawn on Friday, December 5
Sunrise
On Friday morning, while Christi and Keith did school, Eric cleaned the watermaker sea strainer, the DC carbon filter, and the AC carbon pre-filter and filters. In the early afternoon, Eric and Keith tried to go to shore to explore the hurricane ruins, but that dock was still inaccessible. Given how shallow it was around that dock, it was probably only usable at high tide.
Continue readingFriday, November 28 — It was an interesting sunrise. The clouds mostly blocked the colors, but wherever there was a gap in the clouds, the colors were vivid.
There had been a little bit of rain overnight. It was a gloomy morning. The wind was at 12 – 15 knots and the anchorage was quite rocky. It never failed to surprise us at how little fetch it took for wind waves to form. Unlike Thursday, there wasn’t much boat traffic. It seemed most boaters had hunkered down for the windstorm. The temperature was warm enough for shorts in the morning, but as the day progressed, it cooled down. By the late afternoon, we were wearing sweaters. Due to the thick cloud cover, the solar panels only produced 1/3 of the electricity that they normally generated.
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