I heard a great line the other day. “Cruising just means fixing your boat in exotic locations.” Seems about right. No matter how well you plan your maintenance and boatyard stays, if you use your boat it will break when you least expect it.
Coming into Staniel Cay Gary noticed that our port stabilizer fin wasn’t centering the way it should. So he started disassembling it. It’s in our walk-in closet under the floor. Remove hanging clothes, pull up rug, get out tools. Once disassembled he decided that someone was going to have to get in the water and hold onto the stabilizer fin to align it correctly. Someone. Someone is Betty.
Get out the hookah, attach it to a scuba tank and … oh we haven’t used the scuba tanks in over a year so they need to be filled. Start the generator to fire up the compressor and… you guessed it. Remember the generator is a siren song for the sharks? Yeah. I was in the water when Gary said “incoming” so up the swim ladder and out I came. I can deal with sharks and these are nurse sharks so they are fairly benign but there were three or four and one was bigger than me so it was a little intimidating.
Once we turned off the generator they lost interest and left. Except for one that settled down for a nap on the seafloor under the boat. Oh, and his friend the white finned shark sucker otherwise known as a remora. Remoras are usually about twelve to eighteen inches log but the guy was well fed and about two feet long. Being a remora he wanted to get up close and personal and become my new best friend. So here I am, holding the stabilizer to keep it from swinging, trying not to kick the sleeping shark on the bottom with my fin and fending off a lovesick remora. It took about twenty minutes all told which wasn’t bad. It also gave me time in the water which I love and a chance to get reacquainted with breathing under water. My happy place.
Last night we had a big blow come through with sustained winds of about 28mph and gusts to 30mph or so. Everyone here at Big Majors anchorage was hunkered down, rocking and rolling for about eight hours. Today is much calmer but we still have 10-12 mph winds and another big blow coming in a couple days.
Several nights ago we looked up at the night sky and saw an amazing cloud ring around it. Really large and something neither of us had ever remembered seeing. I posted it to Facebook and several people came back with the idea that it was an indicator of a significant weather change. After last night’s winds we’ll be on the lookout for that again.