Sunday, March 29 — It rained hard throughout the night, and it was still raining in the morning. At 0500, it also became vey windy. We’d made plans to meet Scott and Sheila at the sailing club at 0945. We lucked out because the rain stopped as we were getting ready to go. Here was Eric bailing out the dinghy prior to our trek to shore.
Shortly after we tied up to the dock, the rain resumed and the wind picked up even more. We had come a little early so that we could buy a pass to use the dinghy dock, and were disappointed to find that the office didn’t open until 1000. We hung out under the sailing club’s covered patio until the office opened and we could get a pass.
Dawn on Friday, March 27, taken as we were getting ready to go to sea.
And the sunrise.
We pulled up anchor at 0745. It was a mostly sunny day with scattered clouds. The conditions were uncomfortable until noon, with 14-knots of wind and fairly large waves on the beam. Keith got sea sick. Christi didn’t feel great. But then the wind calmed down a little down to 10 – 11 knots and the seas began to smooth out. By 1400, it was a nice ride. We ran at 1600 RPM and our speeds averaged in the low 6s.
This morning, the anchorage was rolly and uncomfortable. We did our morning routine of school and chores, but Christi and Keith had to stop school work early because they were both getting nauseated from trying to read with all the motion (as an FYI, we generally did not do school work when Kosmos was in transit because of the propensity to get seasick).
We decided that we needed to escape the rocking and spend the day onshore. Other than the public park, there was nothing open to the public that was within walking distance. Since we were low on “passage foods,” we wanted to go to the grocery store. We also wanted to eat out for lunch. Eric looked up prices and found that it would cost $35 – $40 each way to take a taxi to the closest grocery store. We knew it would cost the same or less to rent a car for the day. The first two rental agencies that we called had no cars available, but the third place did. They said it would cost $60 for the car for the day, plus a $30 fee to pick us up and drop us back off. We agreed to the terms. We arranged to be picked up at noon at the public beach.
At the beach, there were pylons that looked like they were the remains of what was once a dock. A couple of dinghies were tied to the pylons, but we decided that, with the tide swing while we were gone, it would be safer to beach the dinghy. This was looking northwest from the beach.
Eric and Christi both slept poorly because the snubber was making a lot of noise throughout the night. The smell of trash burning was strong this morning, just as it had been yesterday evening. We’d intended to leave early, but were off to a slow start didn’t leave pull up anchor until about 0930. The blue dot on the map was Norman Cay (where we left from) and the red dot was the anchorage we went to.
continued... We quickly got the dinghy down, got the snorkeling gear out of the lazarette, suited up and hopped into the dinghy. Here was a shot of the rock called The Aquarium.
There were moorings on the southwest side of the rock, which was the main snorkeling area. We attached to the mooring, which already had several other dinghies on it, and hopped in.
