By Friday we had a bad case of cabin fever. I dug out the jacks and taught Coleen how to play, which brought back memories of my Mom teaching my sister and I how to play. We had a great time. The worst of the weather was Friday night around 2 a.m. We had a 40 knot wind and a real deluge. Poor Coleen had a leak in her cabin and woke up with a wet pillow. I poked my head outside and used the spotlight to check on the dinghy. I was a bit concerned it might sink due to filling with rain water. Sure enough it was quite full, but the worst part was I saw a large rodent running around. That was a first! I called DJ on the radio, and asked him to come over and deal with it otherwise I was going to just untie it as I didn’t want that mouse/rat thing running up the painter and getting on the boat. He of course wasn’t keen on coming out the in the terrible weather and suggested I cut the bottom out of a plastic bottle and put it on the painter rather than letting go a $2,000 dinghy over a mouse. That sounded like keen advice.
I awoke at 4 a.m. to the dog barking like crazy. He was determined to go out in the cockpit as something was up. I took the spot light and we looked around but didn’t see anything other than a large fish jumping. I chose not to believe that he heard the sound of the mouse/rat coming on board. Not sure what happened to that guy, as I saw no other sign of him. I just pray he’s not living in the bilge somewhere.
Saturday after our fitful night’s sleep Coleen and I took a long dinghy ride to town. I let her drive all the way and even land the dinghy at the dock. It was a bit of crash landing, but other than that she did fine. We enjoyed a day ashore, doing a little grocery shopping, having lunch, doing laundry and having ice cream. Best of all our mail had finally arrived. Amazingly it took 3 weeks for our mail from Florida to reach us in the Bahamas. Unfortunately we had to head back to the boat in pouring rain, but thankfully we had our rain gear and it only rained on us for the first half of the trip.
We had a break in the rain long enough to hang all the laundry out to dry. Then I discovered that the leak in Coleen’s cabin was much worse than I thought. We ended up spending all day Sunday addressing the issue ( I hope) and drying things out. Thankfully the only thing damaged were a few charts of the South Pacific. It was a horrible day’s work and I’ll not go into detail, but let’s just say, I should not be allowed near black 5200.
Today, I recuperated from yesterday, did a bit more work before leaving Red Shanks at near full tide. We headed back over to the Volley Ball beach anchorage as I had promised Coleen. We had great time lounging in the water with our friends Matt and Julie. We enjoyed the local dish peas and rice for dinner, and then took a final walk on the beach at Stocking Island.
We’re leaving at 7 a.m. tomorrow heading over to Long Island, Bahamas. If the wind is favorable we will go to Salt Pond and enjoy the Long Island Regatta that’s being held Wednesday thru Saturday. If not we’ll head on to Conception Island and enjoy some snorkeling and gunkholing. It’s a win/win either way.