We had been watching the tides, and we knew that the tide would be considerably low that night. The night before, we were in only 1 foot of water below our keel, and we were fine. But we reviewed the tides again tonight, and realized it was still going out another 8 inches or more.
The bumping became more frequent and would have been described as lurching more accurately.
*Have you ever been in a situation when you knew for a fact that something was going to get worse before it was going to get better?
Well, we had another 3 hours to just sit and wait it out. It was going to be about 90 minutes until the lowest tide, then another 90 minutes until the rising tide came up to where we were now.
I tried not to let my anxiety take over. Would the boat heel over drastically? Would our boat sustain damage? Brian and Randy had been in a situation much worse than this in September around Virginia, and things were okay.
In the end, I knew that Brian and I need to remain calm for each other. At least the bottom was soft sand, and not hard rock or coral. There was nothing we could do. We couldn't turn on the engine and move the boat, because then we might move an even worse position, and may jeopardize our secure anchor.
We had to wait. The minutes crawled.
We finished the movie, tried to think of other things to talk about, Brian called Erik, and I read a little bit of my novel...meanwhile the boat continued to bump randomly up and down, sometimes softly, sometimes with a loud "BAM" if moved by a larger wave. We could see that other nearby boats had already swung around to a different position in response to the wind direction. They were in slightly deeper water. Even a few inches makes a big difference.
Then, much later, and as predicted exactly by our navigation equipment, we could feel the boat being lifted and then swing into position based on the wind. What a great feeling!
The next day, we moved the boat to a different anchor spot in Lake Worth.
No comments:
Post a Comment