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Day 277: Saturday, January 28th: The weather predicted for Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico today would make a porpoise seasick, so we stayed anchored in Little Shark River.

It was a fairly lazy day.  Ruth read a lot and Bill planned routes, times and destinations between catching up on these logs.  The big event of the day was re-anchoring.

If you want to know the details of the problem, read on.  Otherwise, just look at the pictures.

This body of water at this phase of the moon, no moon, causes a "spring" tide, which yields a tidal range of about seven feet.  Of course we had not checked the tide tables - tides in this area are two feet or so, we thought.  We had anchored at high tide in eight feet of water and let out about 90 feet of chain to assure a secure set.  We draw four feet of water, and were sitting in about twelve feet at the end of the chain.  All was well until the next morning when the tide went out.

Visualize: When the tide went out, the anchor was in one foot of water, the boat at the end of the anchor chain was in four feet of water.  We couldn't pull the anchor because it was in too shallow water.  So we had to wait for high tide, around 1:30pm, when we went in and hauled anchor.  We moved about 100 feet north and reset the anchor.  All set to go tomorrow; the anchor and the boat were in plenty of water.

Some of the boats that were anchored with us last night left this morning, and some others came in.  By the approach of sunset, these two boats were anchored downstream of us: