Bottom Harbor, Bahamas

.5 nm
Wind: NE 10 knots
Latitude: 25°05.00’N
Longitude: 077°12.70’W

Our stay in beautiful Bottom Harbour south of Rose Island has been marred somewhat by anchoring hassles. I dove on the anchor yesterday evening and thought that it was partially dug in, but today it became clear that it had not. I practiced my diving, making repeated attempts to pick the CQR up and dig it in, but my diving skills are not exactly up to snuff yet. I’m afraid that my buoyancy has increased over the months on the boat. I haven’t exactly kept up on my yoga, and exercise is hard to come by in these closed quarter. Finally, now, I’m able to swim, but I’m fairly out of shape.

It’s very frustrating for Karl, I’m sure--his chronic ear infections mean that he shouldn’t really get his ears under water or dive. He’s risked it a couple of times and when he does he dives easily, almost effortlessly. Of course, his body-fat percentage is a lot lower than mine. I keep agonizing about all the things I should be doing on the boat--pushups and squats, not to mention yoga and my writing, which always seems to get shoved to the bottom of the pile.

A lot of people say they have a hard time while cruising because they have the leisure, money, and time to live this kind of lifestyle while surrounded by others in such poverty in the countries they visit. I’ve had that haunt me at various times, although I don’t think we’ve actually seen people who are that poor yet. Most Bahamians seem to live a fairly good standard of living, with most of their income coming from tourism. Then again, Bimini is all that we’ve seen so far.

I keep justifying my leisure by my writing, even this little blog, thinking that if I can tell the stories of the places I go and the things I do, that that alone will be enough to provide purpose to our journey. I want to make art, too, specifically fiction--that’s been my ambition since I was a little girl. That was one of the reasons I wanted to move onto the boat, to have the time and energy to write. But so far that hasn’t happened, and I’m not sure how to make it happen.

So today, at least, I practiced my diving. I’m getting better, and I’ll continue to get better as I practice more. Already I can dive to at least touch the anchor, and when we tried to set a second anchor, our Danforth, I was able to pick it up and try to dig it in. We eventually decided, though, right at dark, that we were dragging and we moved with much trepidation to a different part of the anchorage where we hoped to have better holding. We set our anchor-drag alarm and seem to be holding, but it’s still a little freaky. I hope that all of the anchorages in the Bahamas aren’t like this.