Drama at Dawn

I should preface this by describing our usual wake-up routine. WW gets up, does his ablutions, puts on the kettle and, eventually, leans into our berth to ask if I want tea. I always smile. I always say “yes”. I always bury my head under my pillow and am out cold again within seconds. I actually surface on his return visit when he announces that my tea is ready.

Well, all the rules were broken on Friday. His head appeared, I donned my smile, but he said nothing about tea.

“Kathy,” he said. “The dinghy is gone.”

All I could think was, “Bad, Boffo. Bad.”

I stumbled into clothes and onto deck. Boffo had snapped her ancient painter (the one we knew we should replace…had actually bought line to replace) and gone AWOL in the night. Perhaps she was cranky over being anchored on the beach while we partied. Whatever. She was not there.

We hauled out the kayaks (Lady and the Tramp…the Tramp lives, obviously, on the trampoline, while Lady is stashed at the stern). Then we raised anchor (with remarkable ease and fluidity, probably due to my not being awake enough to screw it up) and set off for Goat Cay, where the wind and waves were headed.

It was horrifyingly early.

We pootled across into steadily shallower and shallower water. At 0.8 meters we were feeling a little tense. Django draws slightly less than one meter…say, about 0.8. We saw Boffo, bouncing cheerfully up and down on the rocky face of Goat Cay. We dropped anchor in ridiculously little water. WW wanted to know whether I wanted to trust the anchor or use the engines to keep her in place. To my everlasting gratitude, a large starfish was hugely visible on the bottom astern of us. I said I’d trust the anchor but, if Mr. Starfish started going below me, I’d ease forward with the engines. With that, WW leapt into faithful Lady (at least she hadn’t broken her painter) and made his way over to our runaway. Meantime, I put on the kettle and talked to the starfish, trying to convince it to stay right where it was, and eyeing the idling engines’ controls warily.

WW was soon back with the wayward dinghy. She didn’t look one bit ashamed, even though she’d scratched her nice outboard. I told her she was a bad, bad Boffo, and gave her a new painter. I thanked my lucky starfish as we pulled out. Boffo bounced along behind us as we made our way back to the anchorage, revelling in her new bit of line.

Boffo and her lovely new painter.

Back at Volleyball Beach, we got in a few rounds of anchoring practice…once it didn’t hold well, once we were poorly placed relative to other boats, finally we were just dandy.

It was most definitely time for my first cup of tea.