Warm Christmas in Pelican Bay with Friends

Merry Christmas from Anchor! This has been my first Christmas ever sitting on the hook, and certainly one of the best! I generally dislike the holiday, especially the way the media crams holiday cheer into your head starting at Halloween, bah humbug! But this year was a delightfully positive experience, and I even tuned my Ham radio into an AM station to listen to the cheery music. I had a date set to have dinner with my friends on Rikava, and I was on the hook to provide baked sweet potatoes, so I dutifully started cooking them. However as I looked in my larder I had several apples which were going south, and I decided to make some cinnamon spiced apples. As a last extra goodie I had a recipe for Bahama bread that turned out great. The bahama bread’s dough is more like thick pancake batter as it’s leavened with baking powder, and it doesn’t need to be knead. The combination of these desserts made my boat smell so good that I had bees visiting to find the sweetness. It smelled so good that I think I’ll have to add the baked apples in particular to my favorites list if only for the way they make the boat smell! The anchorage really filled up, and I was pleased to see that most of the boats were really expensive and nice. Half of the sailboats were catamarans, and it was lovely to see so many families enjoying the holiday on the hook. I twisted my own arm to do the chore that I really wanted to avoid which involved getting wet. I steeled myself and put on my wetsuit. Considering that nobody was anchored within 500’ of me, I just wore the wetsuit naked: my speedo has holes in it anyway. And I jumped in! Not too cold, just enough to elicit some uncontrollable shaking and clenching of all muscles. Let me tell you, I had pumped myself up to do battle which could be none other than the dreaded polypropylene lobster trap rope. Visibility was poor and I anticipated eager hacking and sawing at the tenacious stuff. I had my scuba knife at the ready, and I dove under. I swam through the murk and the beast appeared before me. I raised my sabre with one arm, ready to deal a mighty blow to the offender, and with the other hand I grasped the tightly woven rope and… pulled it cleanly off the prop with no effort. What? That was easy. I had time left on my breath to ensure the prop feathered as it was supposed to and that no lasting damage was done, and I flaked off a few barnacles but quickly decided my job was done. That was almost not worth getting wet for. While I was in the water I did a swim around but this revealed nothing new, so I gladly hopped out to dry off, strip, and take a hot shower that I had preheated the water for. There was only a slight problem. While I was swimming, a beautiful 46’ catamaran had anchored about 100’ along my side, and it was loaded with a family of about 12 whose primary discussion evidently focused on the young man who had for some unbeknownst reason decided to go swimming in this cold water. This man was also very naked under his wetsuit and wanting to get the cold stuff off and run into the shower. So I did what anyone who believes life is short, sail naked does. I just took the wetsuit off giving them a brief instant of full moon and then dashed inside the boat to take my shower. I did note there were no children onboard, as some people are sensitive to such things. The police never showed up, so hopefully I just gave the family something interesting to talk about. Not long after my shower I dinghy’d over to Rich and Cathy’s Rikava and had a wonderful meal. Cathy did a fantastic job in particular because all of her dishes had to fight for the same limited acreage inside her boat’s oven. It was a great dinner, and we chatted boat stuff until it was time for me to return. The turkey hit me, and I was asleep by 8pm.