After a good night’s sleep I woke early, but ended up being one of the last to leave the anchorage. I got engrossed in updating the blog pages and pictures and had three nice cups of coffee while working below decks. I could tell that I was back in charter boat country, since most of the boats going by were in a great hurry to get somewhere and had their engines revved higher than necessary, certainly going a lot faster than they should in an anchorage filled with kids in dinghies and snorkelers.
The winds were low in the anchorage, but I did my usual 1 reef in both sails when leaving, since I expected the winds to pick up once outside of the protected Bight on Norman Island. The reefs didn’t last long, since it was even calmer outside. At first there was just a breath to get me to Peter Island and then it picked up for a bit and I was doing 4-6 knots boat speed in less than 10 knots of wind, but despite wonderful looking cumulus clouds above the winds never picked up at all and once my boat speed dropped to under 1.5 knots at the Dog Islands I gave up on sailing and motored the rest of the way to the North Sound. The winds remain odd, I anchored in 15 feet off Prickly Pear Island and within minutes of completing the wind had shifted almost 180° but at 1-2 knots I’m not worried about problems with the anchor re-setting since the weight of the (rusty) chain alone is keeping me in place.
Unfortunately I didn’t tie down the ladder and when the wind switched the dinghy pushed the ladder out of its receptacle and it has gone swimming. This is the third time that this has happened, and I keep on wanting to splice together an attachment for the ladder but keep on postponing the job, even this time I though about attaching a safety line but didn’t do it. Unfortunately the water, while not deep, is murky and visibility is very low. My dive tanks were empty so I fired up the compressor to put in a 1000 PSI for a quick dive and had a losing race with dusk, getting a couple of minutes underwater for my first dive of the season, but having to give up before I found my itinerant ladder. What I did find was an oxidized aluminum dinghy covered with about 2 years of underwater growth! The details of our fruitless search are on the Searching for Michael Beans’ Dinghy blog pages.
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