Whooooo-eeeee! An interesting morning to say the least. The night was dead calm so the wind generator added zip to the battery banks and, of course as it was night, neither did the solar panels. The first thing that struck me when I got up on deck this morning was that somehow we had dragged our mooring and we were hard aground un a mud bank. As I looked over the side the water was so clear and so calm it seemed as if the bottom was right at the surface. Fortunately, before I did anything panic stricken or stupid, I realized that the boat was still bobbing as I moved from one side to the other, clearly something that if we were hard aground we would not be doing. I switched on the depth sounder and we still had loads of water under the keel. Obviously it was a false alarm, but something that in retrospect, I wouldn't have missed for the world. Still, I was looking at running the engine a wee bit to get the batteries back up but before that I jumped in the dink and headed into the dock to buy some lower unit lube. That was the one thing that I hadn't replaced post flip and I wanted to make sure. Darren at Edwin's No. 2 was into work and he had a quart that he sold me and when I rushed back to Nelleke and got the engine up on deck with Barb's help we noticed what you can see in the photo for today's post. Nelleke was right at the edge of one influence and the Hunter 42 right behind us was right at the edge of the other. The result was that both of us were lying to the mooring at 180 degrees out of phase. If I had been able to take the picture 5 minutes earlier it would have shown three boats all within touching distance. The little green sloop in the photo had been at its mooring since before we arrived so I guess it would have precedence, then Nelleke, then the Hunter. Fortunately the conditions were very benign so even when we touched it was very, very gently so no one was upset. As a side note, this doesn't happen very often in this harbour.

After giving the patient pooch his poopambulation Barb and I set out in the dink to see if conditions were suitable for snorkelling. To shorten the tale, they weren't but instead we set off for Garden Cay. You may remember in an earlier post, my fantasizing about this place - it's a small Cay about 4 acres with a harbour carved out of the limestone and a single home on it. In short it is a privately owned little piece of paradise. Well, if you add the tone of creepy to paradise, that is. The place has been simply abandoned and the house is rotting, the orchards are going wild and are overgrown, the paths are being overgrown and filled in with sea grape leaves, and something with four legs has taken up residence in the woods. Garden Cay needs someone to take it over and love it. The harbour is silted in and even has its own wreck along one side of it with a school of grey snappers in residence. At one time it was set up for at least one larger boat with a four foot freeboard judging from the limestone stairs leading up from the side of the quay. There is also a wooden dock that has partially tumbled down outside the quay area that I expect was for visitors and the ferry to tie up alongside on those occasions that they came out to the Cay. That's one thing that I don't think that I've mentioned, if you ask, the ferry will pick you up at your dock even if you happen to not be exactly on its route such as Garden Cay. On the whole the place has promise. If it were me, I would fix up the existing place as a guest house (did I mention that it has two bedrooms one and a half bathrooms and a hot tub on the roof?) and then I would live in it while building the "main" house on the north end of the Cay. I would also widen the footpaths a little and prune back the orchards and start to harvest the oranges for drinks and marmalade, etc.

Today was a day for reading and lying about on the deck. After all, isn't that what we have all been dreaming of? It's supposed to be part of the lifestyle. That and nubile females waiting on your every need, but I haven't been able to convince Barb of the necessity of that part of the dream.

Later in the afternoon Barb and I accompanied by Jim from Patty Jean went over to Tradewinds to try our luck at snorkelling. It was fairly shallow water which was great for the light attenuation and I was able to get some photos from a cheap Wal-Mart Digital Camera that we bought last year for our stay in the Tampa area. We saw a whole whack of reef fish and picked up some sea biscuits, a really interesting sort of crustacean and that was on a very small piece of reef. I am looking forward to what snorkelling on a real reef will be like. Tomorrow we will head out to Little Harbour with Barry and Marcia aboard Troubadour and perhaps, just perhaps we will learn what that will be like.