Saturday, December 25, 2010
Once again WindGuru and PassageWeather showed a big north swell and I decided to stay at anchor. I decided to finally install the nice LED lights that I had purchased into the cockpit and boarding areas but that turned out to be much bigger project than originally planned. While access to the wiring in the cockpit was easy, I needed to get behind the aft transom steps in order to drill the holes and install the lights. First I opened up the central life raft locker in the hopes of accessing the steps from there, but there was no access but a lot of collected dirt that I ended up cleaning up. Then I took out all the contents of the aft starboard lazarette locker so that I could remove a wooden panel and access the steps from there. When I’d finally removed everything (finding some stuff that I’d completely forgotten that I had aboard in the process) it turns out that I could only access the aft air conditioning unit and that blocked me from getting to where I wanted to go. I used the opportunity to clean the area, inventory everything in there, and do a better job of storing the heavy items (a kedge anchor with chain, a sea anchor with heavy grapnel anchors and more chain to mention just some of the heavy stuff). By then it was late afternoon and I was running out of steam and decided to tackle the aft port lazarette locker the next day. I did see that Sophisticated Lady was anchored close to Saba Rock and took the dinghy over there to say “hello” to Jenni and Rick (and “Lucky”, the parrot). An hour and two drinks later I headed back to the boat and realized that I’d not had enough water to drink all day and those two beers had affected me strongly, enough so that I had trouble navigating the dinghy! Back aboard my boat I drank a litre of water and felt much better thereafter. I ended up making a BBQ dinner aboard and watched a movie on the PC and fell asleep at 11 pm, not before rummaging around my storage and finding my little handheld Garmin GPS and setting up an anchor alarm. I’d seen that the winds were to pick up and clock around overnight and I only had 120 feet of chain out in 30 feet of water and couldn’t let out any more due to other boats then being too close, so I felt the alarm was a good way to get a solid sleep. The alarm went off twice overnight, once for no apparent reason, but the second time the wind had shifted by a good 30° and that put me out of the predefined 70′ circle. Happy not to be dragging, I reset the alarm for 80′ and slept soundly.
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