Freeing The baby lobster, and other madness !

Laguna De Bluefield

Our first day in the bay.  Bluefield was only meant to be an overnight stop! But things needed testing before we could depart. I was still in shock from nearly loosing our anchor last night.  Bob had spent the night making adjustments (that’s about as technical as I get) and we were ready to do a sea trial, and set sail for Colon.   I brought the anchor up (without incident) and we motored around the bay testing the autopilot.  Sadly, there was still a problem, so we motored back to drop anchor again.  Having secured the snubber, I noticed the water around Daisy looked very shallow, Bob had said we were in 20 feet of water, when we dropped anchor, but it looked a lot less than that to me now.  He had already gone below to start work on the autopilot again.  So I checked the instruments and saw that our depth meter read “0.00”.  I called to Bob “is our depth meter working?”  “Yes, why?” he replied.  “Because if it is, we’re aground” I told him.  I won’t go into the detail’s regarding in the panic that followed that statement, but lets just say that we moved the boat speedily to another location.

Two little local children, on their way to school
in their dug out canoe

Boatloads of Indian children visited all day, and I provided them each with paper and pens.  A man came buy selling a freshly caught lobster, it was such a perfect, young, magnificent, little creature, I had no intention of killing it, but I didn’t want anyone else to either, so I paid him (more than he expected) and as soon as he was out of sight I returned the lobster to his rightful home, the ocean.  Yes I realize this makes me a hypocrite, because I have eaten lobster in the past, and probably will again in the future, but this little guy was so perfect and obviously a young one, I had no other choice.  At least I know Danni would approve of my actions.

The afternoon was spent tearing the boat apart, floorboards up, cupboards emptied, wires re routed, mess and stress everywhere.  I constantly caught Bob scratching his head and frowning at the manuals… It had been a long, long day, and unknown to us was about to get longer…

After another failed sea trial at 5pm, (having waited out the storm,) Bob said he had no option other than to get everything out of the lazarette and get the floor up to get to the driver (or something).  It was already starting to get dark and looked as though another storm was on the way.  Together we moved all the contents of the lazarette into the cockpit, then Bob with trusty tool bag in hand, set about working in the cramped, confined space that is our lazarette.

Naturally it started to rain, so he was now in the dark, cramped, sweltering, soaked hole in the floor, doing contortions to reach and repair said stuff!

Many hours later, parts removed, re-wired and re-modeled, a very tired, wet, slightly stressed, but confident Bob, emerged from the hole looking like Lurch from the Adams family basement. 

It’s now 4:30am, the storm is still blowing, and its continuous pouring rain, I’ve never known so much rain, and I lived in Wales for 7 year’s! I’m wondering whether we’ll ever get to Shelter Bay.  If you’re reading this, then “yeah we made it” and if not, it may be at the bottom of the bay at Bluefield, and no one will ever know.

OH how I love Boat Life!