Wednesday 4 March – farewell to the Crickmores

We planned to do a morning snorkel but woke up to the news that the tummy bug had struck poor Arthur. With the winds predicted to come in the afternoon, we decided to bring forward the water taxi which was picking up the Crickmores from our boat to take them to their resort they are booked into for two nights. Thursday they are predicting 40knot winds, all the diving phinisis are banned from going out, so we did not want to be going to LBJ on a day like that. Such bad luck for the Crickmores with weather timings, breakdowns and tummy bugs! We said our goodbyes and by 10:15am they were gone and we were off the mooring ball. We have decided to continue our progress west and to get into a very sheltered bay about 25 miles away. Easily doable in daylight.

We left our sheltered side of the bay and found the wind was picking up and the sea was pretty rough. Things progressively got worse with peak winds of 37 knots and huge current against us. It was absolutely flabbergasting, we had the engines at full throttle trying to aim for our waypoint and the current was just taking us further and further north rather than heading south to our bay. We were gaining about two miles west in an hour in huge choppy waves. It was very unpleasant. We knew from our snorkel yesterday that the tide was going to turn around 3pm, and like clockwork we suddenly got going and gained huge speed as the tide went with us. There were a few boats in the two nearest bays, so we had thought we would go to the most southern one, but as we passed the second bay with only one boat in it we had had enough and decided to go there. It was a relief to get out of the rough sea. We got the anchor down around 5pm, thank goodness the Crickmores left early as we would not have wanted to get in here in the dark. We deserved a very big drink tonight and collapsed into bed, it has been a busy few weeks, we have to stay here at least until Saturday to let the storm and swell pass, so we can relax and recover now we are safely tucked up.