Position           24:31.88N 076:48.06W

Date                1800 Monday 26 March 2012

You will no doubt be pleased that I persuaded myself not to use the misquote ‘every shroud has a silver lining’ as today’s title.

Have a look at Highbourne Cay before the weather changed.

The colour of the water is exactly what it says in the brochures.

After the exertions of Sunday’s overnight sail a change in the weather due to an approaching cold front gave the excuse to sit tight for a day.  Enthusiasm for going ashore was tempered by the waves ploughing through the anchorage as winds veered around to south and then west.  Fortunately the anchor was well dug in and I suppose due to the very shallow water the waves moved round with the wind so that whilst we pitched happily there was not too much rolling.

It also gave Elizabeth no excuse but to get on with her Queen’s Diamond Jubilee kneeler for the Church in Coggeshall.

Suggestions by the Skipper that she leave the number ‘60’ out of the pattern until last in case she wished to make it 61, 62 or some other year’s reign were dismissed out of hand!  It will be finished by the time we return to the UK in May.

We also had our first sighting of real yachting one-upmanship:

Now that is what I call a model helicopter.  No flying demonstration however, it remained firmly tied to the deck.

To celebrate the idle day the mate broke out one of the steaks from Penn Dutch, a meat supermarket in Fort Lauderdale and I managed to keep the barbeque alight in the breeze; it was excellent and we still have fresh salad from the USA to go with it.  We filled the freezer from Penn Dutch with a combination of steak, sirloin mince and chicken at extraordinarily good prices and it has so far all proved absolutely excellent.

Today, Monday, we decided to move on south and had a very pleasant 3 hour sail of the 15 miles to Shroud Cay, all in beautiful turquoise water no more than 5 metres deep and often rather less.  On arrival I did not wish to chance using a Park mooring as the depth under them would have given a bare clearance for our 2.2 metres so we anchored a couple of hundred metres further out which gave us a more comfortable metre under the keel at low water.

We took a wet dinghy ride ashore and walked up as far as the path through the undergrowth went to view a signposted well, complete with bucket, on the top of the island (6 metres).  Such wells must have been a valuable resource in times gone by.  We will stick to our water maker.

Supper – a slightly chilli’d bolognaise.