12/13/12

We arrived in Nassau at 11:00AM this morning, our crossing from Bimini took us 21 hours and was about 120 nm.  We fueled up at the Nassau Harbor Club and took on 11 gallons of diesel averaging just over .5 gal/hr.

After anchoring east of the fuel docks we all jumped in the water to cool off.  The boys watched eagle rays gliding  along the bottom while I cut away some monofilament line that was wrapped around the prop shaft.

12/14/12

Woke up this morning to a change in the feel of the motion of the boat.  Going up on deck confirmed my suspicions that we had run aground!  Being low tide we were fairly certain that we would float off by morning, but still, it was disconcerting to have run aground and visions of towing bills danced in my head.

12/15/12

Morning came and we were all happy to see that our boat had also risen with the tide.  We hoisted our anchor and wasted no time motoring to the Atlantis Resort.

We spent the day at the water park and were thoroughly exhausted by evening.

Staying at the Paradise Island Marina turned out to be a good value.  The slip cost us $4/ft and there was a 40ft minimum but for $160 we also received free admission to the water park.

12/16/12

We took showers, checked the weather and did our laundry before checking out of the Marina and relocated to our old anchorage but this time in a little deeper water.

We put out more rode and set the anchor and felt confident that we had picked a better spot for the night.

That evening we invited a boat neighbor over for dinner.  Just seeing the boat that he was sailing was enough to tell me that he would have a few stories to tell.  David’s boat was a Pacific Seacraft Flicka, a 20ft boat capable of crossing oceans.  We listened to David tell stories about crossing the Atlantic ocean in his Flicka “Mist” to the Azores and beyond.  He told us how he used to dive for abalone and his encounters with great white sharks and the seals that would hit you from behind to steal your shells.  If you knew what was good for you the smartest thing to do was to let them have them and get out of there.

David had lost 7 boats to hurricanes and just about the time I started thinking that some of his stories might be a little too fantastic to be completely true a squall blew into the harbor and our anchor started to drag.  David thought that out rode had wrapped around  our keel so I put on my snorkel and fins and dove over the side to clear the keel.  By the time I surfaced David had hopped into his dingy and rowed out to unfoul our anchor which had wrapped around his own anchor line.  He lifted our 70ft of chain and anchor not once but twice into his dingy and reset out anchor before rowing back to our boat and calmly said to my wife. “And that is why I remain so fit!”

That a 73 year-old man could row out at night, in a squall and rescue our boat was more than a little like watching superman swoop down out of the sky and lift a plane about to crash back to safety.

The worst of the winds passed and we were all eating spaghetti when I noticed a brightly lit boat pass our stern.  We all went up into the cockpit and watched a Christmas parade of boats traveling up and down the eastern channel blasting music and fireworks into the night sky.  Clearly, Toto, we’re not in Kansas or Idaho anymore.

Mark