NM Today: 3
NM to Date: 4401
We said farewell to Hope Town and headed to Baker's Rock anchorage for the night.
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| Restaurant at Hope Town Inn & Marina |
We backtracked to get to this anchorage because we had heard that Cracker P's Bar and Grill across the way from the anchorage planned to hold a Full Pink Moon Party tonight. With some time to kill before heading over to the party, we dropped the dinghy in the water and went exploring.
We landed on a nearby beach and walked around. Given the rough terrain of the beach area, I was glad I wore my water shoes with good heavy soles on them. Clark wore his dive boots to protect his feet.
We found a conch shell on the beach that Clark decided to bring back to the boat. We have to clean it up. I heard that it should be soaked in Clorox for 24 hours to clean it and kill any bacteria. A fellow boater told us we need to bring a conch shell with us on the Dismal Swamp portion of our return trip to New Jersey as one of the lock tenders collects them.
Our dinghy only has a 4 HP motor, so it is exceedingly slow to take us anywhere. The party started at 7:00. We left the beach to return to Sea Moss around 5:00 and started getting ready to leave for the party at 6:00. After a slow ride to the bar to reduce splash, we pulled up to the dinghy dock around 6:30. Then on the restaurant end of the ride, we secured the boat by tying it to the dock and deploying a stern anchor to hold position as required by the restaurant. Even though we actually got there faster than I anticipated, it was approaching 7:00 by the time we entered the bar.
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| Waiting for Clark to go in to restaurant for the Full Moon Party |
For $25 per person, the all-you-can-eat buffet had a lot of excellent choices. In addition to the great cuisine, the bar had a special rum punch drink that was a very tempting pink color. Although I don't normally drink alcohol, I just had to have one!
We are definitely not folks who normally hang out in a bar, but meeting old friends and acquaintances for dinner is another matter altogether. When we entered Cracker P's, we saw that Sum Escape, Putzin Around, Job Site, and Grand Baron had arrived before us and already had some tables pulled together. They pulled up another table so we could join them for the evening.
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| Table of fellow boaters we met along the way on the Great Loop or in Marathon, Florida |
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| The full moon did make an appearance but it was not pink! |
Clark climbed in first because he had a lot of preparation to do for us to ride back to Sea Moss in full darkness. As I stood looking down at the violently rocking dinghy wondering how on earth I was going to get into the boat, a dock hand from the restaurant came by and said he would hold the boat while I climbed in.
Normally I wait for instructions from Clark, but this guy was pretty insistent that he help me / us. With his help I sat on the dock and then dropped the short distance into the dinghy from there. It is not the method I would have chosen for myself, but it worked. I landed in the dinghy, found my seat, and very rapidly sat in it.
However Clark was no where near ready to depart, and now we had a dock hand holding the line instead of me. I tried to convince him to just hand me the end of the line, and I would hold the boat myself until we were ready to depart, but he refused as he said it was safer for him to help.
As Clark worked to get his GPS set up so we could find our way in the dark, the depth finder set up so we would not hit the sandbar near our boat, the red / green / all-around-white lights set up so that other boaters could see us as we made our way, and pulled in the stern anchor, the dock hand chatted away telling us about himself with frequent comments about boating that I could not fully understand.
It did not take too long for me to figure out that the dock hand was "drunker than a skunk" or "drunk as a lord" or "several sheets to the wind"... The fact that my life was in the hands of someone who had clearly overindulged in the spirit of the full moon party was not comforting at all.
Finally Clark started the engine and I hoped we would be able to be on our way. He had admonished the dock hand not to let the line go until he gave the word - our engine is extremely temperamental. Shortly after the engine started, it stopped. This happened probably three more times. We were not going anywhere fast!
Of course this gave the dock hand more topics to talk about like telling us to come back when he was sober (i.e. he admitted he was plowed) because he is an excellent mechanic. Meanwhile, I knew what Clark was doing as the engine has a recurring issue that Clark knows how to fix. Unfortunately he had to fix it in the dark, with only a flashlight, on a crazily rocking boat. Somehow he managed the repair in seemingly record time, and we finally said farewell to our line tender.
The ride back to Sea Moss was a wet one. Clark tried a few different angles for taking the waves, but they always seemed to roll up and over the side of the dinghy to give us a good splash. I had on my rain coat for warmth (thank goodness) and my life jacket for self preservation. Both helped keep the top of me reasonably dry. I had brought a small hand towel in case I needed it for any reason. That I draped over my knees.
By the time we found Sea Moss (not easy in total darkness) and got ourselves on board, Clark's pants were drenched. My towel was soaked but that had protected most of my shorts except my right side which were also soaked. Since both his shorts and mine were drenched in salt water, that was the end of wearing them until we can get them washed.
We left the dinghy floating behind Sea Moss for the night with the plan to secure it on the swim platform before leaving for Man-O-War in the morning. As fast as we could reasonably get ourselves out of our wet pants and ready for bed, we retired for the night.
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