In the Begining
It started this way. Dec 30 we planned on working on the repair of our roller furling track. We actually got one piece on! In the am we looked over the mtn and saw the clouds were coming on low. The mtn top was disappearing. Cool. Yeah, right! An hour later Brewers Bay was getting a down pour. Two hours later the wind had begun to build and we were getting rain. So much for working on our roller furling!
The winds went from a benign 10 kts to a raucous 20 kts gusting to 30 kts in the anchorage. The boat would pull from side to side tugging on the anchor and chain while our snubber would once in awhile scream that it was stretched to the limit and back we would be pulled. The boat sails some at anchor and we were sailing! We pulled the foredeck awning down to reduce our windage and later between sheets of rain we pulled down our small sun rain awning that we have connected to the dodger. Most of that day we watched sheets of rain blown across the harbor and we hung out on the boat, reading, hanging on, and doing Suduko.
We awoke the following day - New Years Eve to more of the same. So again we hung out but today was offering a small pitance of excitement. We HAD to move the boat. We knew it. But who expected this wx in Paradise? Not I . So about noonish or there after we upped anchor and moved back away from the danger zone of misfired fireworks. With the wind having howled for the last 24 hours (two boats around us dragged - one with the new fangled never to fail Supreme Anchor and the other with a funny claw), we pulled up our funnier XYZ anchor. And we pulled and we pulled and we pulled. It was well set; we weren’t going anywhere. It took us a good 15 minutes to get it out of the bottom and then we moved back to a new farther away location off Charlette Amalie. Deployed it, picked up some junk on the bottom…. again; removed the piece of line from the anchor and re deployed it for the night.
We set the alarm; on a boat staying up much past dusk is difficult and with the fire works going off at midnight we felt the only way we would get to see them was to set the alarm. So we did. And we slept, it rained, it blew and at about 11:50 pm the alarm went off. Up we go; hiding behind the dodger to watch the fireworks in the wind and rain. They were however; surprisingly good. So as the New Year set in we set about to again retire to a warm comfortable berth and await hopefully a new dawn.
Now I’m not going to get mushy here; who doesn’t wish others well on New Years? It seems like the most important thing to do on New Years is to make a list and then not follow it: I believe that is the current American trend. Since most all sailors have a list of varying length all the time we never made a New Years list. And since making resolutions seems to always be of lofty goals I’m just going to make a simple one.
My New Years Resolution is to “wake up tomorrow morning, and the morning after, and the morning after, ad nauseum!” A simple plan; one I hope I can stick to.
Fair Winds
ps In trying to continue to use book titles that above title is of a book. 