May 16
This morning, Seabbatical checked in for the last time this season on the Coconut Telegraph. They are hauling out later today in Jolly Harbor. While on the SSB, I also checked in with Chris Parker the weather guy we listen to daily. Being in Cane Garden Bay, we are concerned with the timing of the forecast north swell. Cane Garden Bay gets quite uncomfortable in a north swell, so we'd rather not be here. Chris said the swell should come in overnight, so we decided to stay one more day. The swell won't impede us leaving first thing in the morning.
We noticed that the entire beach had been set up with beach chairs today. There must be a cruise ship in Roadtown, and they bus people over here to the beach. We spent most of the day on the boat, and watched the beach show through the binoculars. The chairs on the half of the beach where the six or seven restaurants are were pretty much filled up. The other half of the beach, where the chair vendors are people who set up all their chairs and then have a cooler of drinks to sell, was pretty much empty. I felt sorry for the little independent guys who did all the work of setting up and then putting away a couple hundred chairs for nothing.
Mid-afternoon, we went to shore. Unfortunately, we have already noticed the north swell starting to pick up. This is about twelve hours earlier than forecast. Once we were ashore, we went to Tony's Welcome Bar (formerly Stanley's). Sitting at the beach bar, we could see that the swell was indeed increasing. It looked like there were a couple of empty moorings way in the north end of the anchorage and other boats up there didn't seem to be rolling at all. We considered going back to the boat and moving, but didn't. About 17:30, I asked the bartender what time they started serving dinner. His answer was, "Whenever you're ready". So, we moved to a table and ordered dinner. I had a rack of excellent ribs.
After dinner, we returned to the boat. The swell was causing the boat to roll pretty good by now. We again discussed moving, but it was almost dark now, and we decided against moving in the dark. We also abandoned the idea of taking showers tonight. Trying to stand in the shower with the boat rolling back and forth just didn't seem like a good idea.
GPS N 18-25.556 W 064-39.525 Nautical miles traveled today 0. Total miles 10476.
May 17
Well, the roll continued all night, although by morning we could already tell it was subsiding already. Just the same, we were out of there as soon as the sun was up. The swell doesn't really affect you when you are away from an anchorage and underway. So, our trip west to the western end of Tortola was a nice gentle motor. We turned the corner and picked up a mooring in Soper's Hole for the day. Soper's Hole is tucked way in a notch on the western end of Tortola, so it was not affected by the swell at all. We took the showers we should have had yesterday, and relaxed. While sitting in the cockpit, we observed a blow-up chair and two other blow-up beach toys drifting by on their way to St. John. In the past week, we have rescued a big boat and two dinghies. I decided blow-up toys were not worth my effort to rescue. Before they got too far, a dinghy from another boat took off after them. Unlike what I would have done though, they apparently believed in finders keepers, because they took the toys back to their boat, deflated them and put them below. Their boat was not possibly where the toys had come from when I first saw them. Oh well. At lunchtime, we went to Fish & Lime (the former Jolly Roger). We were amongst only three lunch customers. The food was good, but it will be interesting to see if they make it through the slow season since they just recently opened after what looks to be a good sized investment in the renovation.
We returned to the boat and spent the rest of the day reading. Tonight is our last night of total play, as tomorrow we go to the marina to begin the job of preparing the boat for storage.
GPS N 18-23.142 W 064-42.255 Nautical miles traveled today 5. Total miles 10481.
May 18
We had a slow morning. We can't check into the marina at Nanny Cay until noon, so there is no rush to get going. We did have to raise the dinghy, so about 10:00 we started doing that. We had the dinghy up and were both standing on the aft deck coiling lines while we watched the boat ahead of us drop their mooring. The boat was a very nice monohull, about fifty feet long. It looked much nicer than your average charter boat, and I originally thought it was a private boat. There were two older couples aboard. One person had gone to the bow and dropped the mooring lines and then returned to the cockpit. As we watched, the boat slowly turned sideways to the wind, as a monohull drifting will do, and kept coming towards us. I was not concerned at first, because all four people were in the cockpit, and certainly they watching what they were doing. As they got closer, and I realized that they were all paying attention to something in the cockpit, and NOT where the boat was going, I got a little more concerned and moved to the port side of the boat, which they were now approaching. When their bow was about ten feet from ours, I started yelling to them. They all looked up to see why I was yelling, and the captain finally put the boat in gear and back away from us. They either had no clue how they were drifting, or perhaps they all had lousy depth perception, or maybe both. They turned and motored past us with nary a wave or "Sorry". At this point I figured they must be charterers. I went below and did a quick Google search on French Maid, the name of the boat, and found that indeed it was chartered from BVI Yacht Charters. I went to their "Contact Us" section and dashed off a note about perhaps checking their charterers out better before turning them loose in such a nice boat. They actually sent a nice note back apologizing and said they would talk to the guy. I think we need to find out why we have recently become a magnet for drifting boats after all these years.
We were underway about 10:00 for the drive to Nanny Cay. It was straight into the wind and current, so even though it was only five miles, it took almost two hours. When we got to Nanny Cay, our first stop was the fuel dock. I backed into the fuel dock and we filled up. I asked the fuel dock guy if he knew when Catsy would be back in. Jim and Amanda, who crew Catsy are old friends from Grenada. We know they have been in St. Maarten for the past few weeks, but should be back soon. They usually do their turnarounds here at Nanny Cay, so they know them well. But, he wasn't sure when they would be back. The guy at the fuel dock told me what slip we were going to, and said he would meet us there. We climbed back aboard and a first for us happened. The two dock guys cast off our lines, and I hadn't even started the motor yet. Fortunately, it was quite calm inside the marina, so no harm was done, but I got excited for a minute. We moved around to our slip, which of course had the finger pier on the other side than the fuel dock, which meant Barb had to scurry around and quickly move lines and fenders to the other side before we got to the slip. It all worked perfectly and we tied up.
The wind today was blowing almost twenty knots, but inside the marina, it was almost calm. The trees and buildings of the marina complex make it a whole different world inside. This is both a curse and a blessing. The curse part is because 80° feels pretty hot when there is no wind. But the blessing comes in doing things like taking down the sails. That's why even though we have five days to take the boat apart, we dropped the foresail within half an hour of getting there. The forecast is for the wind to keep getting stronger all week, so even with the marina's protection we figured we should get it down while it was calm. We secured it on deck and went to lunch.
In the afternoon, we took the foresail up to the large lawn behind the hotel and folded it. We then started some of the other tasks of getting ready, although we can't do a lot of stuff until we move off the boat into the hotel on Monday. We went to happy hour at the Beach Bar and then had dinner at Peg Leg's. In the evening, I took advantage of the good internet we have here to watch the NASCAR race online.
GPS N 18-23.906 W 064-38.145 Nautical miles traveled today 5. Total miles 10486.
May 19 - 25
I'm not going to bore readers with all the gory details of getting the boat ready to haul out. We got our hotel room Monday and then started in earnest taking things apart. Any time we decommission, we store a lot of things on the bed in aft cabin. That's why we have to be in a hotel room. This year was different though, because in addition to all the stuff (solar panels, enclosure canvas, cockpit cushions) we normally put in the aft cabin, we are moving everything from the v-berth (our garage) to the aft cabin. This is because we are going to have some fiberglass work done while we are gone, and they need access to the v-berth and we don't want fiberglass dust on everything. As usual, we found things to dispose of, Barb cleaned everything, and I did the mechanical stuff. Our haulout is actually scheduled for Thursday afternoon, and by the end of Tuesday we were pretty much ready. Wednesday I lined up the two contractors who are going to do some work while we are gone, and made sure I had all our paperwork done for the yard. Thursday morning, we stopped by the marina office just to make sure our 13:30 time was still good. Keith, the yard manager asked if we were ready to go now, and I said sure. So, we went back to the boat and fired her up. A dockhand just happened to be on our dock, so he cast our lines off and off we went. We got to the haulout slip, where I turned around and backed into the slip. Nanny Cay has two haulout slips and two Travelifts, and we were using the smaller of the two. They were working on hauling a large catamaran in the other slip. Two guys took our lines and got us tied in the slip. They then fired up the Travelift and got the slings in place to haul us. As they lifted the boat and came back to the very end of the slip, we stepped off the back. They lifted her up and backed her out of the water. The bottom had some barnacles on it, but not too bad. They scraped the barnacles off and power washed the bottom, then moved her into the yard and blocked her. They will later move her to the long-term storage yard after the contractors are done with their work. The two jobs to be done are replace the motor mounts and fix the fiberglass in the v-berth where the bulkhead had delaminated from the hull a bit. We did the last few tasks of storage, like take the bimini off and flush the motor with fresh water and then bid her adieu for the summer.
Just down a few boats from where MoonSail got parked, we found a catamaran that we had heard about. The boat is a brand new Lagoon 45, which was being put into charter in Dec 2012. As I understand the story, the owner of the boat took it out for a week before it was going to be chartered. He put it on a reef near Sandy Spit off Jost Van Dyke. There are very few places in the Virgin Islands where you can hurt a boat, which is what makes the area so attractive to rookie charters, but he found one. The boat spent a day on the reef and then was towed off. Not sure what did more damage, the reef or the pulling it off, but the bottom of both hulls are gone. What was even more amazing to me was to see the cheap construction of the hulls in the first place. The fiberglass was maybe ¼ inch thick and cored with balsa below the waterline. For non-boaters, my hull is not cored above or below the waterline and is about ¾ of an inch thick. The boat is for sale by the insurance company for $100K from what I hear. I can't believe it is salvageable, and it really is sad to see the waste. I have a couple of pictures of the boat on my picture page.
We don't fly out until Saturday, so we have one full day of hotel life an no boat work on Friday. Unfortunately, the weather has been less than perfect, so a nice day by the pool wasn't in the cards. But, we learned that Catsy is here, so we went over to see Jim & Amanda. We found Amanda getting the boat ready for their next charter and Jim off on an errand. We made plans to get together later for drinks and dinner. When we returned to Catsy in the evening, we had a couple of beers aboard and got a tour of the boat. Catsy is 62 feet and quite nice. We then went to dinner at Mulligan's, which is a sports bar just outside of the marina property. It was a cool place and I wish we had known it was there earlier in the week. We didn't make too late a night of it as we have a taxi scheduled to pick us up tomorrow morning at 05:15. It was great to catch up with Jim & Amanda again, and we are looking forward to see more of them next year.
Morning came early starting with our 04:30 alarm going off. We got our stuff together and dragged our three large bags and two carry-ons up to the hotel driveway. Our taxi was there right at 05:15 as scheduled, and we were off to the airport. Our trip today is going to be a little odd. Our original plan this season was to haulout at Jolly Harbor again. So our return tickets are from there to Newark. When we changed our plans and decided to stay here, our choice was to throw away those return tickets and fly out of St. Thomas, which then involves two taxis and a ferry, or fly from Tortola to Antigua and return on our original flight. The cost worked out that flying back to Antigua was the way to go, so we leave Tortola at 07:00 and fly to St. Maarten, then St. Kitts, then Antigua. The good news is that this was all on the same plane, so we never got off. By 09:15, we were in Antigua. Our flight to Newark isn't until 14:00, so we have almost five hours to kill. Since the Liat portion of the trip is not connected at all to the United portion, we had to come through Customs as if we were staying, then collect our bags, and then recheck them with United. Unfortunately, as is always the case at an island airport where any given airline only has one or two flights a day, the United ticket counter didn't open until 11:00. That meant we had to drag our bags around wherever we went. We had not even had coffee before leaving Tortola, so breakfast seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, the real restaurant at the Antigua airport is on the second floor, and there is no elevator to get there. So, one at a time, I lugged the bags up the stairs to the restaurant. As I was about to go up with the last bag, a worker guy asked if we wanted to store the bags. Where was he a few minutes earlier. We had breakfast and killed two hours, then dragged the bags back downstairs and got in line. Being so early, we didn't have to wait long before we got checked in. We went through security and now had a couple more hours to sit and wait for our flight. The flight was pretty close to on-time and we got to Newark. After our day of just waiting and sitting, we now were faced with huge lines at both Customs and Immigration. It took two full hours to get through both lines. We were finally in the rental car for the hour and half drive to my brother's house about 20:00.
May 26 - June 19
We spent two weeks at my brother's house in New York State, and then drove to Ohio. We have to get the house in Ohio ready to put on the market, and hopefully I will be getting some IT work soon. Our plan this year is not to return to the boat until late January. This will allow us to spend the holidays with family, and attend one of our favorite Parrothead events, Pardi Gras, in New Orleans in mid January. So this will be the last website update for awhile. Thanks to everybody who follows our travels, and have a safe summer.