We are now the only ones left in Ford’s Terror. Why does that sound like a horror movie? This morning we got up slowly, and Ryan had birthday coffee and opened cards and a present from various family members (which I had packed at the beginning of the trip). I defrosted the two layer cakes I had hidden in the bottom of the freezer, then we got the shrimp pot ready and took it out in the dinghy to drop. We are eternal optimists.
Despite a bit of rain, we had a good spin around in the dinghy. After deploying the shrimp pot, we went over to the other end of the bay to see where the other boat had anchored. “Evergreen Nook”, the name of that anchorage, was private, protected, and very scenic, but it actually had a pretty scary entrance. There were lots of big rocks right under the water most of the way across the entrance and the current when we went through was ripping. Admittedly, it was half-tide, but there wouldn’t have been that much water over some of those rocks even at high tide. When we turned to go back through, we found our electric Torqeedo outboard lacked the power to push the dingy out of the nook - uh oh! We pulled onto the spit to wait for the current to slow down closer to slack. The views were pretty spectacular from there, so we made some photographic lemonade from our tidal lemons.
After half an hour, though, we were getting cold and the current looked faster, if anything, so Ryan just lined the dinghy around the point and I documented the moment with my iPhone camera.
When we got back to Wild North we turned the heat up and boiled water for tea while I assembled the birthday cake, complete with icing, writing, sprinkles, and candles. Lunch was birthday banana cake and now we’re just napping and reading and listening to music.
There are lots of swallows that live in caves near our anchorage and they keep swooping around to eat the bugs that linger around the boat. Nice! They’re fun to watch, and sometimes they perch on the rails to look in at us through the windows.
We saw that the other boat left Fords Terror at high tide late this morning and the only boat to come in after them appears to be a skiff from a bigger boat that just cruised in and spent an hour inside before returning to the mothership outside. Since it’s generally advised to enter only at high water slack, we don’t have to worry about anyone else coming now that the day-time high tide has passed. We’ll pull the shrimp trap tomorrow when we leave, in case you’re wondering about the fruits of our latest shrimping endeavors.
Happy belated birthday, Ryan!