Honey, What's That Noise?

Today was our 36th wedding anniversary. Gee, I can't believe that I'm 36 years old, let alone being married for 36 years! The weather was predicted to be calm with 0% chance of rain, so to celebrate we packed our lunch, loaded up the skiff with the kayaks and snorkel gear and headed to a couple of the islands to the north. First stop was Great Guana Cay where we kayaked Settlement Harbour and further north to Fisher's Bay, and discovered very few boats or people around. Then we back tracked and anchored in between Guana and Scotland Cays, where there is a shallow cut out to the ocean. This is a great place to have lunch and watch the rays and turtles cruise by in the current with not a soul in sight.

 

Dave did a bit of snorkeling and came up with a couple of queen conchs (pronounced conks), and a humorous treasure left over from the last hurricane...the front of a golf cart complete with headlights!

Since the water was so warm, Dave decided to clean the growth off the bottom of the skiff, which has no anti-fouling bottom paint, while I sat under the bimini top out of the sun. While he was scraping the barnacles I heard a rumbling sound and ignored it at first, thinking it was the either the scraping on the bottom, the waves crashing outside the cut, or a jet overhead (which we certainly don't get too many of here in the Abacos). A few minutes later I heard it again and asked Dave if he had heard it, which he hadn't because he was working so hard. I peaked my head out from under the bimini and surprise(!!) there was a huge dark band of clouds to the north. Thunder?! No way with 0% chance of rain. I continued to "keep an eye to the sky" but as soon as Dave got back in the boat, rolling thunder could definitely be heard and was closing in on us. We headed back towards Hope Town as the sky got even darker, but couldn't resist stopping out at the reef to feed the fish, since it was right on the way....sort of. We wanted to stop at Man-O-War too, but as we passed by the entrance and Dave started to turn in, I looked around, saw the storm gaining on us, and yelled "no way, keep on going!" 5 miles later we were safely back in the harbor, the kayaks unloaded, everything put away, and New Horizon closed up (I had left all the ports, hatches, and doors open because it was so warm out...yes, I know our northern friends don't want to hear that!), but didn't rinse off the skiff because it would soon be rinsed naturally. And we waited for the skies to open up...and waited, and waited. Apparently the prediction was right. We received 0% rain HERE...and Dave had to use our 35 cents a gallon water to rinse off the boat. Go figure...