St. John, USVI
Leinster Bay
18.21.928N
64.43.366W

We awoke today to the roar of airplanes taking off over our mast. Apparently, there is a runway just opposite the restaurant where we ate last night and just beyond where we moored. Not your usual alarm clock.

After breakfast, we slipped our mooring and pointed our bow downwind in Sir Francis Drake’s Channel between the islands that comprise the British Virgin Islands. We rounded Beef Island, with Virgin Gorda on our left, rounded again along Tortola leaving Ginger Island and Cooper Island behind us. When we reached Norman Island, we headed toward “the Indians,” which had been too rough for us to snorkel on our way up to Virgin Gorda. Today they were decidedly calmer.

We had to pace back and forth a couple of times waiting for a mooring ball to become available but once we snagged one, we pulled on our snorkel gear and jumped into the water.

Again, we were awed by the fish and coral within the nooks and crannies of the Indians. Dale did his usual trick of free diving through the underwater tunnels while the rest of us bobbed around until he appeared on the opposite side. I’d tell him to his face that he was showing off but in truth, we probably all wished we could do the same.

We returned to the boat and Nicky and I looked through the fish book trying to identify all that we saw. I guess the most interesting were the pale blue filefish.

The guys slipped our mooring lines, raised the sails and again, we raced against anyone who dared to go in the same direction; we almost always won.

This time at Leinster, we dinghied to the beach and walked the path that led to the Annaberg Sugar Mill. We climbed the wooded steps that the Park Service built up through the trees up to 1700’s stone structures that had been a windmill, boiler room, furnace, storage rooms, and slave quarters surrounded by stone fences. We poked around the buildings, marveled at the view from the top of the hill, took a few pictures and then turned around and headed back down the road, walked the long path back to the dinghy, and dinghied back to the Palace. Another full day.
While I was making dinner, Dale was running the genset. Then it quit; all by itself. Not a good thing. When Dale and Gerry opened up the access panel to the genset, it was extremely hot. Dale was very calm about it all; in fact, I was very calm about it. He said that it would take a long time to cool and that he’d look at it in the morning. I agreed. If the dang thing was going to break, I was glad that an engineer was on board. Dale can fix a lot of things but its always better to have two mechanically inclined heads instead of one.