Great Harbour Cay, (Berry Islands chain), (anchored)
March 18, 2022
This is the first time we’ve anchored in an open area – we’ve generally anchored in creeks, in ICW lakes (more like wide areas next to the ICW) or in protected harbors.
When I woke up this morning the horizon seemed to stretch forever. The moon was full, low, and bright and the water looked silky. The writer Anne Lamott says there are only three prayers – Help, Thanks, and Wow. I said the last two over and over.
at 6am
There’s land just to the east of us which blocks the very first bit of sunrise. It’s still stunning to see the light start to come up.
There’s also what seems to be about 100 roosters that start growing around that time. Add in several flocks of laughing gulls doing their thing as they flew over – it was a delightful morning.
Being docked has a lot of conveniences: stability, electric and most of all, being able to get on and off the boat whenever we desire. When we’re anchored we have to physically lower our dinghy from the davit with a series of pulleys. For safety as we crossed, we (mostly John, but I did haul it up) moved the dinghy motor from the dinghy itself onto a board mounted on our stern rail. This is a far more stable platform than a swinging dinghy (swinghy?) when we have rolly or crashing waves..
We also need to be able to dock the dinghy somewhere. The pictures of a dinghy on a beach don’t really tell the full story of trying to lug a dinghy and a 90lb motor safely above a high tide line! There’s a dinghy dock nearby that we just didn’t bother locate.
So we didn’t get off Lailia today. We did a few tasks, including cleaning the salt spray off the isinglass. John just realized that he wore neither shoes nor a shirt all day. I fished for a while without getting a bite (but finished another book). As much as we want to explore it was great to just chill on Lailia.
We move a lot on anchor. Because I worry about stuff like this, I not only have an anchor alarm but I also track our movement over time. This reassures me that we aren’t floating anchorless. This isn’t perfect – the tracker is phone-based so it shows me moving my phone in the boat, but I do like seeing that we pretty much move in a nice arc off where we dropped our anchor
There’s some weather coming early next week so we’ll need to move somewhere more protected. We considered heading to the Abacos tomorrow but have decided to head into a small bay inside this island. We’ll have to wait for another weather window to leave the Berry Islands but we’ll get to explore a bit. There’s supposed to be some gorgeous beaches on the other side of the island and I’d like to see them.
Life on Lailia 