(Note: I wrote this post on the day the events occurred, but posted this after the trip, so the dates may be a bit messed up. This post is from the fourth day of the trip, Sunday.)

Click here to see where we were and our approximate course.

Well, it rained on me as I slept on deck. Actually, I was up already because Cap't Dan's cellphone was beeping as the battery ran low. After I killed the phone, I turned over to go back to sleep, but it started to rain, so I had to retreat back into Papa.

By the time we woke up again the morning, it was totally dumping. We all slept in, keeping warm in the cold boat (we left the diesel heater off to conserve power and to keep the boat quiet). I stayed in the sleeping bag for a while, reading and sipping coffee; it was a very civilized and pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning.

After lunch, we decided to go exploring a bit and find a new anchorage. We motored around for a while going from cove to cove. Dan put up a bimini cover over the cockpit to keep us a little more dry as the rain and wind picked up. We also hooked up the radar to help us see in the mist and fog (it's bloody hard to read a radar display; fortunately this was the same model we used to have on our boat.) We finally settled motored up Pendrell Sound in East Redonda Island. We were all alone in the sound; we didn't see another boat at all. We found a little cove, just big enough for Papa to anchor and swing around it; it was protected by an hooked peninsula and island. We dropped our bow anchor and stern tied to a tree on shore.

It kept raining pretty hard, so we decided to have movie night, watching Master and Commander - The Far Side of the World on Dan's computer, pumping the audio through the boat stereo. Unfortunately, the laptop ran out of power because the inverter (the thing that converts the 12 volt DC boat power into 110 volt AC power the computer needs) was broken (which we just discovered that evening). As a result, we only saw the first half of the movie (disappointing to me because I hadn't seen it before.)

Mike and I had a good geekfest (we got to play with a multimeter) diagnosing the inverter (but to no avail). The lack of the laptop means that we won't have a chartplotter - a GPS that draws on a computerized chart. We'll have the navigate the old fashioned way - a GPS and paper charts. Oh the horror. Mike and I considered a mutiny and thought about demanding a refund, but cooler heads prevailed.

Fortunately, we had plenty of beer. You can see Mike (left) and Dan (right) modelling all the good ways to hold a beer on a boat.