As I’d been a good boy and went to bed early the night before I was up a 07:00 and was surprised that the night’s rains and wind had drifted the charter boat behind me right up to my stern. Then I realized that boats don’t drag upwind so I checked to see if I’d somehow dragged anchor (unlikely, with 110 feet of chain in 20 feet of water) but I hadn’t done so. When I looked at the situation more carefully I saw that the charter boat changed anchoring position and was also tied to a marker buoy by the stern; they were probably swinging too much in the wind and used that white ball as a kedge.
The charter boat just left, I had to motor forward a bit so that they could get the chain up; I don’t know when they re-anchored but they must have been quite close to me while doing so and thankfully I slept through all of that.
I sailed from the North Sound to Great Harbour on Jost van Dyke and shortly after leaving the Sound my faithful friend, “Otto”, decided to throw a fit. The system has a rudder angle sensor which shows how many degrees the rudder is angled one way or the other and suddenly, without my moving the wheel, it would display random and extreme values to both side. When the autopilot is engaged it uses that value for heading which meant that the system was moving the wheel around in random directions so I had to hand-steer until shortly before Sandy Cay and Sandy Spit; then I decided to re-boot the system to see if that would ameliorate the problem and after re-starting it worked again. I’ll have to take a day in a calm anchorage and check the mounting hardware to see if something might be loose.
I went to Corsair’s bar for dinner and had a great pizza and too many drinks; my intention was a quick meal and return to the boat but in this case the quick part meant from 18:00 to just before midnight. As always it was entertaining and I met a number of interesting people.
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