This is just how we felt as we sailed into the beautiful and spectacular Bay of Virgins in Fatu Hiva. Little teeny bay with Marquesan children playing in the surf, a white church with a steeple (the steeple always placed and used as a navigation aid by the locals) fishermen coming and going and 7 other cruising boats. All this is surrounded by towering volcanic cliffs rising straight from the sea with giant phallic lava pillars all around. We were feeling all rosy about this when the night from hell began. A young couple next to us was in the process of re-anchoring. Another boat was pulling up their anchor and leaving. All the boats were extremely close to each other and tension was in the air. Just as the young couple were doing, Barry "dived the anchor" to check out the holding. Our anchor was sitting upside down on top of rocks. He swam around the anchorage looking for a good spot. We pulled up the anchor, motored farther in, farther than anyone else, and reset the anchor in what Barry determined to be mud. It is now getting dark and there is no seeing the anchor. A few hours later we all went to bed. During the night there was howling wind. We kept sleeping. Several hours later I hear a repeated urgent whistle (loud and strong like Noelle's). I hear it again even more desperately. I go outside, see another boat approaching us and think what in the world are those people doing getting so close to us. My brain is asleep, Barry is sound asleep and I am totally disoriented. I am getting more and more worried about the approaching boat. When I feel the situation is very dangerous, I wake up Barry AND his brain and he quickly assesses that our anchor is dragging and we are being blown back into the boats behind. He runs to the anchor windlass, I start the engine and motor forward out of danger as he pulls up the anchor . (You can't go motoring around other boats or anywhere with your anchor dangling down in the water ready to snag on someone else's anchor line or rocks or trees or whatever.) I was still so disoriented in the dark, the dodger cover blocking my view out the window, cloudy, no star or moon light, strange place, that at one point I put the engine in reverse when forward was urgently needed. I recovered with less than a hair's width to spare. The most terrifying thing to me was how disfunctional my brain was!! I thought of the poor people in the hospital who get sundowners. Anchor down, Barry went back to sleep and I stayed awake, totally traumatized, and figured out how to use the electronic chart program to set an alarm if we stray out of a set boundary. After setting the boundary circle, I try to go to bed too. The chart program (Rosepoint) keeps sounding an alarm but not because we are moving but because our friends' boat has not only an AIS receiver but a transmitter so that they show as an AIS target. They are moving in the wind also so when they do (plus GPS reasons) the computer program tells you that an AIS target is approaching, beep beep, AIS target, beep beep, AIS approach, beep, beep, no sleep, beep beep , no sleep . . . I never went back to sleep and at 5 Barry woke up and agreed to get out of there. By 0540 we were sailing away from the terrible Bay of Penises. Penis? I thought you said virgin. Our books say that the bay was named the Baie of Verges because of the obvious shape of the lava turrets surrounding the bay but that Catholic priests changed Verge (penis) to Vierge (virgin). I think if you google you can find a photo and judge for yourself. Oh, and the reason our anchor did not hold? We think the mud was the consistency of chocolate mousse. Don't even tell us all the mistakes we made. We already feel bad enough.
We had a fast sail back in good wind and now we are back in our old spot, recuperating and preparing for another island. Upon returning we both snorkeled, I with a Black-tipped Reef Shark- Don't worry, it was smaller than I am and whatever it is that they eat doesn't resemble humans. I found no sea snakes nor sting rays. After, I was taking a shower when we were approached by a speeding shore boat. I leapt down below to grab a dress while Barry greeted the young couple from the catamaran in the next cove over . They were totally comfortable coming to visit a naked lady bathing in her cockpit - my kind of people. We had a nice chat in spite of the fact that they don't speak English and we don't speak French. They are from Nice, France and I said lavender, they said Wauquiez (our boat is French) and we said oui and the rest was sign language and pointing. It was great! They showed us a nice fish that they had just caught.
Yesterday I realized that you can save yourself a lot of dirty dishes, heat from the oven, unhealthful ingredients and hassle if you just pour Trader Joe's cornbread mix straight on top of your soup instead of going to the work of cooking it!
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