December 15, 2013 1st anchor

Yeah!  We're back to internet connections.  Now I will catch up on my blogs.

We had a great night at Wharf Marina.  We were much more sheltered than at our old marina.  We enjoyed their beautiful, clean showers, checked computers (thanks for all the well wishes from family and friends), and looked at charts.  Here we are on our second day of cruising and someone hacked one of our credit cards.  Dave has been getting some strange e-mails from Hotel.com with one thing different in the e-mail address.  Rather than delete them, he has been watching what might develop.  Well sure enough, we had a charge at a hotel in Ft. Lauderdale, Fl through Hotel.com.  So he called our credit card company and had the card cancelled and figured out any other bogus charges.  But Dave can't leave it at that.  Dave had the name of the person and the hotel through the e-mails.  So what does he do?  He calls the hotel and the person hasn't checked out yet.  So he gives the hotel a heads up about the card not being good.  The person on the phone said they would talk to the manager and thanked him for the information.  He really wanted to know how they would handle this information.  There were a couple more attempts to charge, but the card had been cancelled.  Now we have to figure out how we are going to get the new cards that are being mailed to Alabama.  Good thing we have more than one card.  In hind sight, he should have asked to be connected to the room and talked to the person himself. 

We left at 1:00 pm and only traveled 1 hour 15 minutes on the Intracoastal waterway to Wolf Bay.  We traveled north into the bay to Hammock Creek.  We had a 15mph wind out of the north and it was only 46 degrees.  We pulled out the gloves and my earmuffs.  But being the hardy northerners that we are, we still loved it. 

We knew this would be a short day.  We had originally wanted to spend the first night here, but changed our plans so we could watch the Christmas parade.  This will be the first night we will sleep at anchor.  We thought we would also spend some time today exploring the bay with our dinghy, but that north wind changed our minds.  There is a muddy bottom in this area, so we chose to use a 45 lb Bruce anchor.  To determine how much rode to use (rope/chain), you need to figure the distance from your deck to the bottom of the water you are in.  You look at your depth and add the distance from the water to the deck of your boat.  Then you take that times 7 for an overnight anchor.  We were in 7 feet of water and our deck is 3 feet off the water, so that equals 10 feet from out bow to the bottom of the bay.  Take 10 times 7 for 70 feet.  We brought the boat to the spot we wanted to lower the anchor, lowered it, then let the boat drift with the wind until the anchor set.  Then you try to motor in reverse to see if the anchor stays in place.  With this length of anchor rode, you can sway in the bay with the shifting of the wind.  There were no other boats anchored here, but there were homes and condos on the shore line.  We set anchor at 2:15pm.

Dave checked out the boat for stability for the night while I cooked us a warm lunch.  I made biscuits in our gas oven.  I also made tomato soup and added chili peppers, fire roasted diced tomatoes  and a little meat that we had left over.  Warmed us up nicely. 

Dave took a nap while I started looking ahead at charts for the next few days.  And I updated our ship's log book.  In the log book, we note the weather, engine hours, from and to ports along with time and any comments we want to make.  It's more technical and an abbreviated version of  my blog.

We have paper charts for much of the Gulf of Mexico, but will probably not continue to buy paper charts.  Sailors now have such good electronic navigation systems.  But you have to have power.  I like having a paper chart in my hand to look at when I am not navigating the boat.  I guess it's similar to how I like an atlas in the car.  We sorted through our charts to store those we no longer need and organize the remaining charts.  With all the work we had to do before leaving, we now can enjoy the fun part of looking at the details of the voyage.  We knew the first few days would just be following the intracoastal waterway. 

I talked Dave into playing a game of cribbage (and beat him for once because he used different colored pegs this time-he says).  We actually went to bed early because it was getting cold.  We ran our generator for a while to charge our batteries, but didn't turn on any heat.

Here is a picture of Dave on the dock next to our boat at the Wharf Marina.  And working on a project from the never ending list.