Not Distressed

Day 157, January 13th, 2010

We were sleeping like logs and then both of us were awakened by a bump. At first we were so groggy we hardly realised what had happened. Then gradually I seemed to get the message - flew out of bed (almost tripping and falling over the table as I tried to extricate myself) and saw red lights shining in through the starboard windows. I thought we'd ran aground. "Oh God! What's happened?" John is more upset by me doing strange stuff "What's the matter?" I opened the hatch only to find the Coast Guard boat alongside. They asked me to come out to the cockpit and announced that a distress signal had been sent yesterday afternoon from this vessel. I assured him we were fine but my husband had installed a new radio yesterday. John meanwhile was rushing to get his pants on!!! We eventually understood that they had not got our location with the call and it had taken sometime to locate us. That would have been because the chart plotter was turned off and the lat. and long. had not been transmitted. Anyway, it was all quite surreal. We heard that they had contacted the Cdn. Coast Guard, had read our Blog (haven't got a clue how they knew of this) and with the help of the Blog, our Spot device, and our son James, they had figured out exactly where we were. "This was the first boat we came to!" I was so upset that our poor family had spent such a worrisome few hours. John hasn't got a clue how the distress call went out. He did not press the red button. The coast guard kindly assured us that this didn't matter at all, they were just happy it was a false alarm and at least we know the system works very well!!!

After saying our goodbyes and thanking them for their concern, we immediately went below and called James. Poor guy got the first call at 2:00 a.m. and hadn't slept since then. He already knew we were okay - the coast guard had called him even before the fellas left us apparently. He'd just had time to call his brother Graham to say that all was well! Apparently, James had had to give them our VISA number and that was another method they had found our location - by checking our purchases. They knew the West Marine where we'd picked up the radio!!! This just seems so like George Orwell's Brave New World!!!! Mr. Orwell wasn't far off the mark. We also called our son Chris to assure him all was well. What a dreadful worry it must have been for them all. We are so sorry.

It took quite a while to calm down and warm up again. (Spending 20 minutes out in the cockpit in your pyjamas was a chilling experience!!) This trip is fraying my nerves!!!!

Anyway, we had an uneventful day after all this. Tootled down to the Venetian Causeway in south Miami and we're anchored nicely close to the canal. Almost as soon as we'd stopped a dinghy approached and it was the couple from Myosotis who had spent the better part of a day with us on our way to Middle River. They had heard the distress call sent out by the coast guard on their VHF last evening, asking if anybody knew of our whereabout. Kindly, they had called the coast guard at 10:00p.m. giving as much information as they could. We heard their caption of the story when they came on board for a chat!!! Oh, I forgot to mention that the first bridge we came to this morning also asked us if we had spoken to the coast guard as they were trying to locate us at 1:00 a.m. "Yes, thank you," I answered, "we spoke to the coast guard at 5:00 a.m. this morning!"

Hopefully, things will be a bit more boring for a while!!!