Melinda enjoyed an afternoon ashore in the beauty of the island. I swam around the boat checking out the crazy amount of conch living in the sand we were anchored over. The water was just too beautiful to resist staying out of. The kids had been feeling a little sick having passed colds to each other so they all stayed in watching movies, not enjoying any of this amazing place.
All thru the late afternoon till sunset more boats kept coming in to anchor for the night. Its a little anchorage, but they kept squeezing in. I was glad we had arrived early to stake a good spot, and it gives us squaters rights. If we think a boat is anchored too close or there is a problem, we get to stay put, and those coming later have to move-- or so the boaters unofficial international code goes. Just such a situation occured to us in the middle of the night. I woke up around midnight and could not make any sense of what my GPS Garmin showed. We keep a little hand held Garmin at our bedside to double check our positioning thru the night so we can make sure our anchor doesn't drag. We were not where we should be so I went upstairs to check, and found the winds had totally died and boats were now subject to current and shifted to the North. I thought we were further from our anchor than we should be so I woke David up and asked him to double check. He glanced at the Garmin and said "looks fine" and rolled back to sleep. About 30 mins later Alex woke up crying and David got up to check on him. SInce he was up he popped upstairs to double check things. I followed behind, still awake. We found that the catamaran anchored next to us was about to swing into us. They anchored last, so this is their problem to fix. As they were floating closer and closer, just feet away now, David attempted to wake up the people on the boat by honking our boat horn, and yelling at the boat. The horn is quite loud in the quiet of the night, but it did the trick and 4 tired french men appeared on deck, starting their boat engine to move away from us. The boat was marked as a charter vessel, so most likely they were just vacation renters that don't always do the best job anchoring. (that said we have dragged our anchor once, and we put a lot of effort into being well anchored, so I guess it can happen to anyone). It took them awhile to decide what they were going to do, anchoring in the dark is no fun, but they decided to move to the back of the pack and re anchor in a little deeper water. Thankfully away from us. In the morning I could see why I thought we had drifted, I was using the wrong point on the map for where I thought our anchor was. Once the winds picked back up we were right back in place where we were the whole day before, not having moved at all.
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