Sinking stuff.

There’s definitely something to say for not having a lot of really expensive, non-floating objects on the boat. In this way, when they drop overboard and sink to the bottom (notice I said when, not if), you won’t get all freaked out about it.

While loading our stuff in the dinghy to head over for an evening visit with our friends on the catamaran Isla Bonita, Rebecca and I both heard the dreaded splash. The first question each of us asked was “what just fell in the water” because it was so dark that neither of us could see. It only took a second or so to determine that is was our handheld VHF radio. Now, I was kind of thinking (Hoping! PRAYING!) that the radio could float so after quickly retrieving our spotlight, we scanned the surface of the water around the dinghy. Not seeing it, we did our best to see down into the water. Even though we were only in about 11 feet of crystal clear water, it was very dark so we couldn’t see anything. With a plan to search again tomorrow when it got light, I set a MOB (man overboard) waypoint on our GPS so that, in theory, we could come back to the exact spot that we dropped it.

After sharing our story with Marc and Isabelle on Isla Bonita, Marc was determined to try out his brand new, still-in-the-box underwater flashlight and go search for it with me. A quick ride in the dinghy and we were back at the scene of the crime. Sadly, as good as the light was, we were still unable to locate the radio and so we again, resigned ourselves to the fact that if we were going to search any more, it would have to be the following morning. Thanks anyway for your help Marc, we really appreciated it!

This morning, while I was playing around with the GPS, trying to determine just how close our boat might be to the location where the radio was dropped, Rebecca stood on one of the transom steps and called to me. The radio was right there, lying on the bottom, directly by our dinghy. It was almost as if our boat hadn’t moved an inch, which is not true at all because we had been swinging quite a bit earlier. One chilly swim later and the radio was retrieved from Poseidon. Now we just need to see if we can get it working again!

Our day’s travels took us on a nice 2-hour zig-zag sail from Norman’s Cay to Shroud Cay. Shroud Cay is so close to where we were anchored before that we can still see all the boats in the south anchorage at Norman’s. Once again, we have the place pretty much to ourselves, with no boats anchored anywhere near us. The solitude is nice in some respects but we’re also getting a little antsy to get around some people (that is my nice way of saying that Rebecca is getting sick of being locked up on this boat with me). 🙂

Our anchorage at Shroud Cay.

More beautiful blue water and we have it all to ourselves.

The rail where our SPOT tracker has been living for the past few weeks.

The traditional end of the day.

Another “textbook” beautiful sunset. I hope you enjoy the photo as much as we enjoyed the real thing.