Hoffmans Cay - Cold Front

A year ago today we both still had jobs, cars, furniture, and a house. We were on a ski vacation in Whistler and Kevin shocked me by proposing marriage over a swanky dinner. What a difference a year can make. Now everything we own that isn't on the boat fits easily into a 5X5 storage unit and although we still own the house someone else is living there. No more swanky dinners, either, since now we have to eat my cooking.

There was a little excitement yesterday. A front came through in the morning bringing with it winds gusting to 32 mph. Unfortunately around 10 am the current picked up and was opposite to the wind, causing all the boats in the anchorage to go in circles around their anchors. The monohull next to us must've wrapped their anchor chain around the anchor and pulled it up because they started to drift toward the rocky beach. Kevin got out the horn and sounded the danger signal (five short blasts) while one of the other boats in the anchorage hailed them on the VHF to let them know what was going on. Luckily, they were able to move to safer water and reset their anchor.

Kevin was up most of the night perfecting his latest version of his "Anchor Alarm" software. Basically the software knows the GPS coordinates of the anchor and goes off if the boat's distance to those coordinates goes above or below a certain number (indicating that we are dragging away or sitting on top of our anchor), or if the bearing to the anchor changes more than 90 degrees (indicating that the wind has shifted and we should get up and check what's going on). When we were still working, he had a similar version of the software running on my loaner laptop from work, and the alarm was a voice synthesized one that sounded like a speak-n-spell: "Anchor. Alarm. Anchor. Alarm.". But now we only have his personal laptop which is older and doesn't have a voice synthesizer. So our new alarm sounds like a cross between "Asteroid" and "Space Invaders". Ah, technology. Now if only Kevin could somehow program a "Collision Alarm" to tell is if one of the other boats is dragging towards us!