Weather is such a finicky thing. Yesterday, was beautiful, clear and sunny. Today, outside, the winds blew to gale
force. We had gusts in excess of 45
knots, which was totally unexpected.
The weather forecast was for winds of 15-20 knots, less than half of
what we were actually experiencing.
Never trust the weatherman! But
luckily, we were well protected by the land and all we got was a slight chop to
the waters. Our anchor was well set and
even though those winds tried desperately to blow us free, the anchor held
firm. But boy was it cold! No way we were venturing out today. Larry had gone out on deck to do an errand
and quickly returned, shivering. It
could wait for a milder day!
So … we made it an inside chore day. Larry got out my sewing machine and I spent
the day sewing. I made a body pillow
for the bed … hopefully, this will help with my sore back that I still seem to
have. I also sewed non-skid to our
rugs. I tried to use the sewing machine
for this task but was unsuccessful. The
fabric wouldn’t slide through the machine and I kept getting knots of
thread. I just couldn’t find the right
tension. With regret, I gave up and did
it by hand. Wow, big job!
Larry went through his to-do list and cleaned it up. It’s still big but we’re making
progress. Nothing is critical but it’s
good to see those non-critical things gradually come off. And as we get new problems/projects, we’re
trying to tackle them as they occur so the to-do list doesn’t grow. For example, while we were sailing from Long
to Crooked, we heard a horrendous BANG!
Larry rushed below to investigate.
One of our drawers (for our kitchen gadgets, etc) slid out and BANG,
solidly hit the floor. Instead of
adding “fix drawer” to the to-do list, Larry got out a piece of wood, his
5-minute epoxy and added a stop to the bottom.
Now the drawer will not be able to move. While he had the epoxy out, he did a couple of other little jobs
that were on the list (like fastening the Velcro more securely to my jewelry
box and epoxying a small clock out in the cockpit. As the winds subsided slightly, he took the opportunity to sneak
on deck and used the Baja filter and added fuel to top off our tank. This filter allows him to filter the fuel
for particles and water to keep the fuel in our tanks clean. We will be doing this going forward before
any fuel is added to our tanks. There’s
a lot of BAD gas/diesel out there in the smaller islands. He also added BioBor, which is an additive
to keep the fuel “fresh”.
So, although it was a very cold and windy day, it was a good
day.
A funny thing happened this evening. We were sitting in our cockpit (all alone)
when we noticed a power-boat coming in.
We hadn’t seen a boat since we got here so were a little surprised. He came very close to us and then hailed us
on the radio. They said they read in
the cruising guide that the government dock had fuel. Could we tell them where the government dock was? They couldn’t find it. Hah!!!
We pointed at the dilapidated dock that stretched out from the point of
land before it fell into broken boards and pilings towards the sea floor. We told them we went ashore today and the
place was more than abandoned. The crew
on the power-boat was none to happy to hear this. It turns out, they had traveled far out of their way to this “government
dock” to get fuel. Remember, we are in
a very isolated area and there is nothing anyplace nearby. They said they were critically low and would
need to get fuel before they could even get back off the Bight, let alone very
far out to sea. Wow … I wouldn’t want
to be them right now. The one guy spent
several hours this evening on his satellite phone. We don’t know if they were able to find something, someplace but
they anchored for the night and headed up the coast by 10am.
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