Manjack Cay, What a Drag!

March 26th - Yesterday Syd came up with the idea of going out with Mike and Kendal (and Doug the owner) and photographing them fishing. They said it would probably be OK so we were going to stay another day but they didn't go out so we left and headed up to Manjack Cay. The wind was still blowing 18-20kts and we had to beat into to it but we enjoyed the sail and put into the southern anchorage next to Rat Cay (obviously no realtors involved in naming that Cay). It's reasonably sheltered from the NE and we were the first boat in so we tucked in close. Finished off the last of the mahi mahi for dinner, what a wonderful fish.

March 27th - still blowing 18-23kts. At first we planned to sail up to the next Cay, Powell Cay, but decided to stay where we were. We intended to go ashore and follow the two hiking trails that the guide book said were there but the day was cloudy and windy and we never did. Dinner is now back to dynamite chile and rice (we're working hard to make some impression on the inexhaustible sack of rice in the ship's stores). Syd turns in for the night. The wind has gone round to the SE and is still blowing hard. I go up on deck with the torch just to have a look around and tighten everything up. There is no moon and the night is really dark, you can't see any boundary between water, land and sky. The torch happens to pick out a white buoy off to side. I'm a bit puzzled as I don't remember there being one there during the day. I put on the chartplotter which takes a couple of minutes to start up and horror of horrors we appear to have dragged about 400yds. It's looks like we are not very far off a lee shore so I wake up Syd to get his opinion. He agrees with the situation and he's not happy either so we pull up the anchor which is caked in sand and grass and motor back to where we had originally anchored and drop the hook again with 120ft of line. It seems to be holding. I set an anchor alarm and get into bed. Syd stays at the helm for an hour and a half, making sure we don't have trouble with the falling tide as well as the anchor, before he goes back to bed.
Here's the plot, you can see that luckily we dragged along the shoreline although that was about to change and we would have been on the rocks if we had dragged another 100yds or so. Scary.

and here's the little white buoy that we were passing on our starboard side going backwards and the place we were heading towards. I don't know if the anchor would have held where it was but neither Syd nor I were comfortable waiting to find out.