We woke up this morning to find our bait-line caught on the something. Upon further investigation we found it was wrapped horrendously around a coral head on the bottom at 35 feet of depth. After a few tries I was finally able to dive down with time to work, but as I was untangling the line the sharp teeth of a Moray came snapping out at me! I surfaced in surprise, caught my breath, then dove again to find the Moray was caught fast. We must have caught a small fish overnight, it swam around the coral head tangling the line until the Moray came to eat it. And now the Moray was caught fast. I tried untangling the line and pulling the Moray, but he was either very strong or the line was caught some more in his hole. Our solution was to get the gaff to try to pull him out. Well, after a few tries we finally got him out, but he was pretty beat up. He didn’t live so we thought to cut him up for some sushi, but pieu! He stunk! We sadly slipped him back into his home.
After departure, we only sailed as far as the airport before the wind died. We tried catching some of the following wind with the spinnaker, but without a spin pole it didn’t work too well. So we jumped in the water and played around a bit to wait for the wind, but it never showed up so we started up the motor.
Yet again, we watched the sun go down before entering an unknown anchorage, and it was quite dark by the time we started in using the laptop’s GPS as reference. I was up steering, David down below navigating when I felt like we were getting close. I had the spotlight shining ahead to look for shore, but nothing yet. The waves breaking sure sounded close though and I slowed down to a crawl. “What are you doing?” Dave yelled up. “We’re not even close yet!” “It sure feels like we are! I’m slowing down,” I replied. “Well, I’ll be down here. Looks like we’ll be there in an hour at this rate.” I poked my head down and sure enough, we weren’t even close. But I could hear the breakers clear as a bell. I continued slowly ahead with the light up and finally got a spark of white off a breaker. We were really close! I put the engine in neutral and had Dave take a look down below. Is our GPS bad? It was working great this whole trip. Dave went to double check and yelled up, “The computer froze!” Whoops! We poked ahead until we were encircled by the small, dark bay, black lava cliffs all around. The anchor went down, we let out some rode, but as I was backing it down with the engine the anchor would hold tight then break loose. It felt like hard, flat rock with cracks for the anchor to catch on. Oh well, there were no better anchorages anywhere even close, so this will have to do. We ate fish and rice and went to bed with the depth alarm set to 10 feet.
This was the worst night on the boat! I kept hearing the anchor slide over the rock. The chain was carrying the sound up from the bottom and directly into the fiberglass around my head, reverberating the “ckkkkkckckhhchkcck… chkkkkshhshshshkkkk” sound of the anchor sliding. I kept getting up to poke my head out the companionway, but the breakers still sounded the same distance away in the dark. At one point the depth alarm went off and I raced up to see. We must have swung a little bit with a change of wind, but the breakers still sounded the same distance. After a few hours of not sleeping, I finally went up top with a towel as a blanket and kept anchor watch from up there. It was a long, cold, nervous night but the sun finally came up to show how close we really were to the rocks. Sketchy!
