How Come "IT" Never Happens in Daylight?

Tropical waves are starting to come with more regularity. Which means more clouds, rain, lightning, and squalls. Tropical waves are the precursor to tropical depressions so we tend to keep and eye on their location and strength. On Friday afternoon after a particularly robust squall came through, the Moonies, (Jeff and Lelia from Ivory Moon), called us to say they thought we had moved. They were taking bearings off our bow and some bouys in the anchorage to make sure they weren't moving. Because they don't have a working engine at this point they are very vigilant. We looked out and agreed with them that is was most likely we did move, but we thought that we would be o.k. and didn't think too much more about it.

Until. . . . .around 10:00pm or so we had a great big squall with winds around 30 knots. Michael pulled our cockpit GPS out of the oven (more on that later), hooked it up and turned it on. He sat outside for an hour or so, watching the shore line and the plot on the GPS. At around 11:00pm he got Barbara out of bed and said "I am pretty sure we are dragging and need to re-anchor". Sure enough, we had dragged several hundred feet and were continuing to be slowly blown across the anchorage. Needless to say that is not a good thing.

So we got all ready, pulled out the big spotlight, Barbara put on her headlamp, we pulled the anchor up, and moved farther into the anchorage to re-set the anchor. It all went very smoothly. We were lucky. Often times it can be a real hassle and mess, but we did great. The anchor came up holding a big ball of mud and weed. We were pretty sure was just dragging across the bottom. We got it re-set and put out a whole bunch of rode. We were anchored in about 9 ft of water and had out 100 ft of chain.

It held overnight and the next morning when we had the sun nice and high so we could see the bottom better, we moved and looked for a good sand spot to drop the anchor. The night before we just dropped it, but weren't confident that it was in a good sandy spot on the bottom. After resetting the anchor, Michael went in the water to check on the anchor. It was very deeply set, in fact the chain went into the sand and our Delta anchor was buried out of sight. We are a lot more confident about holding now. We were glad we did reset. For the last two days we have had many squalls and the max wind speed on the gauge is 35 knots (42mph). We are holding well now and are looking forward to these last two waves pushing through. The next two are not supposed to be nearly as active. The forecasts are telling us that the next two waves are being suppressed by dry Saharan air and (yes, Gene) lots of dust!

One other note about the GPS in the oven: when there is lightning in the area we put our important electronics (the ones that are portable) into the oven. We are hoping that it will act like what is called a Faraday Cage, and will give some protection from a lightning strike if we get one.

We think today is World Cup Finals (go Holland (for all our Dutch friends)), and may go into town to watch the game. That's hoping the weather settles a bit.

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