Almost Goodbye Daisy!

A few weeks ago back in March, Danni and a friend came to stay with us during their spring break. It turned out that the friend wasn't a sailor, didn't like deep water and was terrified of anything that might be in the water. Every time we moved the boat she had to lie down because she felt sick, so Bob and I did our best to make her as comfortable as possible and only sail very short passages, and anchor or pick up a mooring only in calm bays...

We decided to take the girls to Anguilla and the little islands around it, Dog Island, Sandy Island and Prickly Pear. Sandy Island is like something out of Treasure Island, this tiny sandy spit in the ocean surrounded by beautiful clear calm water. Anguilla is an expensive island to visit, to stay in the island waters for just 2 days cost us $171. However we felt the girls would enjoy it. We sailed over to Sandy Island first and picked up a mooring.

Normally we would swim ashore, but as Danni's friend had such a phobia about things in the water that might gobble her up, Bob decided to take both girls to shore in the dinghy, where they could have fun on the beach, and play in the surf.

While Bob was taking them ashore I was hand feeding this rather large, and incredibly friendly Cowfish off the stern of Daisy. When he returned we both decided to swim off the boat and hand feed the fish.

Now this is where I have to tell you, that Bob is always telling me he is not a strong swimmer, and likes us to stay close together when snorkeling off the boat, his legs cramp up sometimes and so he doesn't have the confidence he should have in his swimming ability.

So we're both happily snorkeling around feeding all the fish, we hadn't swum very far from the boat, when we looked up to see the bow of the boat (mooring still attached), and we both thought "OH she's just swung around in the wind". A little later we looked up again to see that we were looking at the stern, but quite a bit further away than we thought we had swum. The third time we looked up, Bob said "I think we should swim back to the boat, we seem to have drifted quite a long way". I looked up and saw that we were indeed a long way from the boat, so we both started to swim towards it. I was swimming hard and fast but each time I looked up I didn't seem any closer, it was as though I was still in the same place.

I continued to swim this time looking at the ocean floor to see whether I was covering any ground, I thought perhaps I may have been swimming against strong current, but no, I was definately moving forward, when I noticed Bob suddenly take off like a torpedo, I kept swimming as hard and fast as I could, my heart was racing and pounding in my chest, and I was out of breath, but I had to keep going, just when I was about to give up, thinking I couldn't possibly swim any more, I just managed to grab hold of the back of the dinghy, which was tied to the stern, Bob was already on board.

I looked behind for the first time and saw that we were a very long way from the island, and the mooring field. "What the hell happened" I yelled at Bob, who was at the helm with the engine running. His reply, "The mooring line broke".

There I was thinking that all the money we paid to use the moorings here, they would at the very least be maintained!

We moved the boat back to the island and dropped anchor.