The wind was supposed to be blowing about 18 knots this morning, but decrease to about 12 or 13 knots by evening. Or, if you believed the other weather report, it was supposed to blow at about 18 knots all day. In any case, it was around 14 knots this morning, so Passages and we decided to go to Marsh Harbor. They said they were pulling up anchor at 11:00 AM, so we decided we should pull up ours at about 10:50, since we had just under a mile to go to get back to where they were.

We pulled up the anchor on schedule. This was a short sail so we decided not to put the main up. Once we were headed out I started to pull the jib out, but it wouldn’t come. We looked for something it might be fouled on and couldn’t see anything. Then Bud noticed that we hadn’t moved the spinnaker halyards from the bow pulpit. When we stop for more than a day, we usually hook the spinnaker halyards (we have two) to the bow pulpit so the wind doesn’t make the halyards slap on the mast and make noise. One of our setting out rituals is to move those back to the mast. We usually do that as we are unzipping the main cover, but since we didn’t unzip the main, we forgot about the halyards.

I went up and took a look. One of the halyards had gotten caught in the jib furler and was wound around the jib. At first I thought I would have to go up the mast to release it. It wasn’t too windy and I was able to unclip the halyard and walk it outside the jib and unwind it once. That still didn’t free it, so I did that again. It was still caught right at the top. Bud tried to use the furling line to wind the bit of the jib that had come out back up, but it wouldn’t come. However, when he did that it released the halyard and I was able to pull it free and get it properly stowed at the mast.

After that it was a pretty nice sail. Most of the way we were going down wind, so it wasn’t very fast, but we were keeping up with Passages, it was a nice day and we didn’t have that far to go, so we were content. Actually, Earendil sails faster than Passages under the same conditions, so we were slowing down to stay behind them. It was very nice to be able to follow them in to this harbor, as it’s shallow and they’ve been here many times. It was also nice that the wind dropped to about 10 knots by the time we got here. I took this picture as we approached the anchorage. Not long after this was taken I was busy with the anchor. We got it wet with no problems, and although Bud was a little worried that we were too close to the boats on either side, when he got away from our boat in the dinghy, when we went to check the anchor, he could see that there was really plenty of room.

Once the anchor was set we went in to town. I did two loads of wash and Bud did some grocery shopping. We have to do more of both, but figured to wait until we went in to a marina to finish. Tomorrow we’re going to rent a car and go see this island. We decided it made no sense to pay for a dock and spend the day away from the boat. Thursday we’ll go into the dock and finish our errands and get water (and probably top off the fuel, though we’ve only used about 15 gallons of fuel since Emerald Bay where we last filled the tanks).