Morning finally came. We had been worried since before we left Wilson about our anchor, it's a style long relied on by cruisers and it's correctly sized for the boat, but many sources urge you to have an oversized anchor, and there are newer and better designs out there now. We decided we did not want to spend another night like that. We knew we had been lucky; the wind was under 15 knots, there was plenty of room in the anchorage and there were no other boats. If we were going to spend most of our time at anchor, we didn't want to be constantly struggling to get the anchor to set, and we didn't want to worry about the boat dragging anchor.

So what to do? We decided we needed to get to a place where we had Internet to evaluate our options. We had intended to skip Great Harbor Cay Marina, as the winds were light now, we didn't need to hole up for a storm. Now we thought we'd go there to figure out what to do next.

First things first, we needed to take Fuzzy ashore. We got aboard the dinghy and headed in. We just got him to the beach when a man came by and asked us what we were doing. I explained about the permission to bring the dog ashore. He called the island manager on his radio. No, she said, permission was for yesterday. They were getting ready for guests (a cruise ship had just anchored) but we were welcome to bring Fuzzy ashore after 4:30 in the afternoon. So off we went, back to the boat. Poor Fuzzy hadn't even managed to pee, (he still wouldn't use his doggy port-a-potty).

Bud took the time to snorkel out to the anchor. We thought that through the night it might have set and then we would reassess our plans. No, it was still lying on its side. So we hoisted the engine back off the dinghy, tied the dinghy off the stern, readied the boat, hoisted the anchor and took off for Great Harbour Cay Marina.

It was only a bit over twelve miles. The last four miles were shown on the charts as a marked channel. There were supposed to be three green day markers followed by two red day markers. There was one unmarked post. Bud followed the channel from the chartplotter and I stood on the bow and directed him. We wore our "Marriage Saver Communicators". These are short-range radio headsets that don't need to be keyed on, so you can talk to each other without using your hands. Jon and Arline told us about them and we've had them since the Hudson, but this was the first real workout they've gotten. It worked great. Bud read out the depth meter readings to me and I looked ahead for anything and tried to keep him in the deepest areas. It was all pretty uniform though, and we never saw any depths under 7 feet. Most of it was 9 and 10 feet deep. Still, going 8 miles across the ocean floor in under 15 feet of water is nerve racking.

We had no problems, and here we are at Great Harbour Cay Marina. Fuzzy finally got off the boat at about 12:30. And we have Internet, sort of. There's WiFi, but it doesn't reach the boat. So I'm writing all this out in the cabin, then I'll carry the computer up near the office to post it. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure the Internet will be working at this hour (7:15) so this may not get posted until the morning. I did use the Internet this afternoon to try and call a couple of marine stores in Nassau to see if we could find an anchor. They were both closed, so nothing can happen until Monday. Tomorrow we are going to take a day off from all things boat related and just go play!

This is the marina where Jon and Arline were when they rebuilt their engine. I told the woman when we signed in I wasn't sure how long we were staying because we had to figure out the best way to get an anchor. I told her we were friends with Jon and Arline, and that it was quite a coincidence that probably the only two boats she'd ever seen from Lake Ontario were both in the marina with problems.