We spent two days in Warderick Wells. Aria and Theone did some hiking on the island during the day, while I stayed on the boat to get some work done.

The next morning we sailed off the mooring ball. We were the last ones out, so there were no other boats moored up when we left which made things easy. It was an upwind sail, but ideal winds for it, and we had a really great sail under full sails. We snaked into the anchorage at Cambridge Cay through some narrow shallow spots but managed to get in there just fine at near high tide.

Cambridge Cay is also known as Little Bell Island, just across from Bell Island, which is owned by Aga Kahn. This is where Trudeau got into a bit of trouble with the ethics commission taking vacations here several years ago.

We found a mooring ball that was away from the main group. Not thinking much about it we picked it up. It was kind of in the main channel, and it turns out it was actually one of the mega yacht balls. At first everything was just fine, but the current picked up later in the evening and it started to be a bit annoying with the boat running over the ball with the wind pushing one way and the current the other. We managed to stabilize it enough by steering off it, but it was pretty annoying.

The wind kept picking up, and then the rain started as it got dark. It was nice to get some rain finally to wash down the boat. It's pretty salty these days.

And this is where things started going bad. Sometimes when it rains we try to catch some fresh water with the dingy that we can use for washing the boat and such. I wanted to quickly clean out the dingy as it's often pretty salty, but first I needed to get into it. I tie the dingy up on the back of the boat by cleating the bitter end to a cleat, and then I tie a bight of the rode onto the pushpit or stanchion so that it doesn't chafe on anything. The dingy was tied up on pushpit just fine as it had been for the past few hours, and so I uncleated the bitter end to get ready to untie the dingy and pull up up alongside the boat. But I put the line down for a second before untying the part on the stanchion, to do something else for a second and when I turned around again the dingy was gone. My heart stopped momentarily, and then I realized what was going on. I must have pulled on the knot or something after uncleating it, and then the rode just ran free, and the dingy drifted off in the wind and current.

So at this point I'm standing in the rain, it's super dark, it's blowing 20 knots or so, and we've got a fair bit of current rushing by the boat as we are tied to this ball in the middle of the channel. I'm watching the dingy float away, and then I see it crash into the rocky wall just at the other side of the channel. I'm kind of panicking at this point, as there isn't any obvious way to get it back. But it does seem to be staying where it had drifted too and thankfully wasn't continuing out the channel into the great unknown. I decided to jump into the water with a life jacket and test if I could swim against the current, which I could a little bit. Then I realized I could put on some flippers, which was better. I was about to swim for it, when I realized I'd probably have no hope of swimming the dingy back to the boat, but I could row it. So I end up jumping into the water with flippers, a life jacket, and the dingy paddles and swam for it. I'm not sure if this was smart or stupid, but I managed to get over too it, and pull it off of the rocks which it was wegded up under. I was able to swim the boat away from the shore enough to have time to get myself and the paddles inside of it, just in time to push off the rocks again with the paddles. I got the oarlocks in and with a great sigh of relief managed to row back to the boat.

The dingy is a bit cut up, and had a few big chunks of this scraggly limestone in it that had broken off the wall of rock. But no major damage, just a lot of bruising. I'll have to epoxy up a bunch of the spots to avoid moisture getting into the plywood but other than that it seems to be ok.

And with that we capped off another day of wonderful sailing, and gut wrenching fear all in the same 24 hours.