Little Farmers Cay -- What A Drag!

Back while we were in Nassau with wi-fi access Kevin downloaded a developers toolkit for his Pocket PC so that he could run the anchor alarm on the PDA. So in the evenings while I was banging my head over Su Doku puzzles (a new addiction thanks to my friend Kirstie), he was coding the software so that it would work on the Pocket PC. I joked that you can take the boy away from programming but you can't take the programming out of the boy -- I told him that I think he actually enjoys it now that he doesn't do it for a living. He looked at me and deadpanned "this will be the last thing I ever program. I can just walk away." Apparently Kevin is the Bobby Fischer of software development. He may disappear from the programming world but the legend of his genius will live on. Anyway he got the PDA version of the Anchor Alarm working so now we don't even have to get out of bed to check where we are in relation to our anchor.

So here in Farmer's Cay we have kept the anchor alarm on even though we were on a mooring. You know, just in case. Cuz' you ever know. However for the past two days the alarm has kept going off and we kept puzzling over why? We would say "Well the mooring is a massive concrete block, and it has maybe 20 feet of line attached, so there is no way we are 80 feet from the mooring...". We kept thinking the GPS was off by more than a few feet, and I even began to doubt Kevin's anchor alarm, thinking maybe there was a bug somewhere in the programming (sacrelige!). Last night the wind kicked up to 15-20 knots and the current was bubbling at a good pace. And although the anchor alarm kept chirping every once in a while, every time we got up to check on our mooring lines we were still firmly attached to the mooring.

Which is why I was shocked when Kevin gently woke me up this morning at 6 am to say "Okay, wake up, everything's okay, but I need your help". In the light of the rising sun we could see that yeah, we were still attached to the mooring, but the mooring itself (the massive concrete block part) had dragged. The anchor alarm, like Lassie, had been trying to tell us all along that Timmy was trapped in the well but we just didn't listen. Over the past three nights the mooring had gradually dragged some 100 feet from its original position! Luckily we were still in 8-9 feet of water, but we were awfully close to the rocky beach, so we started up the engines, cast off the mooring lines, and motored to the opposite side of the anchorage. There are moorings here, but we instead opted to use our own anchor, which has never dragged on us. Two lessons learned: 1. NEVER pay the full mooring fee in advance (we were paid up through tonight...Stupid, stupid!), and 2. ALWAYS trust Kevin's Anchor Alarm.