Our Christmas dinner on the beach was a big success. Yes I was able to get that 1/2 turkey in my small oven after beating it down a bit.
New Year’s Eve was spent on Hamburger Beach with a bunch of French Canadian cruisers-lots of great food and drink. The French really do know how to party. Of course we started at 4:30 so Joe & I were back on the boat by 8:00.
Everything settled down after the Holiday Celebrations and we kept busy with water aerobics, volleyball, Joe sailing his laser sailboat, walks on the beach, church and bible study and having friends over for dinner.
The weather has been very warm and windy with the winds clocking around in all directions.
It all caught up with us last Wed. evening.
As we finished dinner Joe noticed the clouds were building and we could see lightening south of us, the wind generator started turning so fast we couldn’t hear anything so he went out to turn it off and that’s when the wind hit. We started up the engines to run up on the anchors to take pressure off of them and then the boats around us started dragging their anchors and were bearing down on us-of course, as usual, we were right next to the beach at the Monument and the wind was blowing out of the West so everything was coming our way. The radio was alive with boats yelling “your dragging”. A monohull beside us was blown on to the beach but they managed to get it off with their engines.
Now in a situation like this there isn’t much you could do to help others except get out of the way so after two boats came very close to crashing into us Joe realized one of our anchors had broken loose and he started backing up to get the other one out and we moved away from the boats and he let the anchors loose-had to cut the rope on one to get it freed. We powered across the harbour with waves coming over the transoms.
It wasn’t as windy over there because we were in the lee of the land. it was still too windy to re-anchor (thank goodness we carry 3 anchors) so we just went back and forth for 2 hours and finally got settled. Highest winds were clocked at 90 mph.
The next morning we came back over to Stocking Island and Joe snorkeled around looking for the anchors-he found one and later with the help of our friends, Joanne and George on Bristol Cream who had a tank and hooka rig Joe was able to dive down and find the other one. It was buried deep so we had to bring the big boat over to pick it up. Of course I was praying to St. Anthony to find the anchor and another cruiser came by to help-guess what his name was?-Anthony. oh well.
We were so lucky and felt bad for some of our friends. Several boats had damaged dinghy davits and dinghies, bow pulpits bent, lost dinghies, kayaks and paddles, fuel tanks, water jugs, bent rigging and rub rails.
We’ve heard that a boat was lost near Highborne Cay and a fellow lost a finger while trying to pull his chain up.
The amazing thing was that no one was hurt here and everyone has been helping each other-it’s a great community.
