Thursday, December 30, 2010
Although the night was gusty I did sleep well (assisted by medication dispensed by the Willie T bar and a solid dinner) and woke up at 07:30. I had my coffee while watching the hurried (and harried) Moorings and Sunsail guests depart and decided to let them disperse for a bit before getting on my way. I did a bit of work on the website (I finally used a spell-checker for the blog pages and was surprised at how bad my spelling has become) then cleaned up inside and prepared the boat for heavy weather; which consists of storing items and making sure that anything that can fall or slide if the boat should heel at a strong angle does so without doing damage. It is now just shy of 11am and I am waiting for the Wi-Fi signal at Pirate’s ashore to be turned on so that I can check my e-mails and then I’ll head upwind. I think I will take a mooring at Trellis Bay (if there are any spots left) otherwise I’ll go to the North Sound and anchor off Prickly Pear island again. I’m still undecided on where to spend New Year’s – it will be either Trellis or Leverick Bay. I retrieved by backup line and managed to slice up my right hand a bit on the mooring painter, which was encrusted with sharp ocean flora. Ah well, I have ample supplies of band-aids which need to get used. On that note, my broken toe is healing well, the swelling is still present but it barely bothers me anymore, that middle toe doesn’t seem to have much pressure put on it. The sail was great with a bit of challenging conditions and I’ll skip over that – I opted for Trellis and found one mooring ball and did a slow circle around it so that I could get an upwind run to it and when I was within 50 feet of it a dinghy zoomed up with a couple in it and they started doing something to the painter. I approached them and asked them what they were doing and they said they were reserving it, they were there first! It is pretty hard when sailing alone to leave the boat and start beating these charlatans with an oar so I just shook my head and headed over to Marina Cay. Coming in, a charter boat was zooming out at speed and asked if there were any mooring balls left as they passed. I signalled “No” and slowed down so that I could go forward and prepare the anchor. As I was doing this,they turned around, passed me at speed and then somehow managed to drop the anchor where I wanted to go and I put the boat in neutral to see where they would go and they put their boat in reverse right in my direction (which was cross-wind, not downwind) so I had to put in reverse to avoid touching them. By this time I was really peeved and as I did a slow circle I saw yet another Sunsail boat come towards me at Warp-speed with a person at the anchor – it looked like they were intent on either ramming me or anchoring closer in than I was. I finally anchored and cleaned up my lines, put up the anchor ball, and opened up the hatches and noted that the first boat was having trouble anchoring (again) so I went over to ask if I could assist. They dropped anchor behind me; their dinghy was gone and they reported that they’d lost it on the way from Road Harbour so I offered them the use of my dinghy until dinner time as I didn’t plan on going ashore. What a day. I did have some great ribs ashore at the restaurant and talked with Eric Stone, the new musician at Marina Cay (who has replaced Michael Beans who, in turn, has moved on to Leverick Bay) for a while, I’ll have to make sure to catch his show next time around.
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