Friday, March 10, 2006

St. Thomas, USVI
18.20.204N
64.55.523W


Today’s the day! Gerry & Nicky come in.

We walked to the side of town the cruise ship people miss to do our laundry and stock up on fresh fruits and veggies and make sure that I had all the ingredients for my recipes for the week. Dale was very gracious in not saying anything when I returned to the laundry mat where he was guarding the laundry, loaded down with groceries. The wheels on my poor little cart that I use for hauling both laundry and groceries were barely able to roll on our way back to the boat. I didn’t dare let him carry the bag on my shoulder as it was overloaded too and I didn’t want him to know. When he helped me lift all of the bags out of the dinghy, his only comment was ‘where are you going to put all of this?” I did manage to tuck everything away so that the boat was presentable.

Once again in the anchorage, we had moderate winds punctuated by extreme wind gusts. At one point, Dale had raised one of his pirate flags to welcome our guests. A couple of hours later, a gust of wind tore out one of the grommets and he had to climb the mast to retrieve the flag halyard.

MTNest had also returned to St. Thomas to pick up guests and when they didn’t arrive within a couple of hours of their appointed time, Mike started a grid search of the harbor side trying to locate them. After a couple of exasperated hours, they located Brad & Angie, who had arrived without luggage and were trying to track it down. Something has to be said about priorities when the guys were more concerned about finding the missing meat than they were about finding the missing clothing and jewelry.

Gerry & Nicky arrived pretty much on time and with all of their baggage in tact. We promptly took them out for ’pain killers’ the local rum drinks to welcome them to the Virgin Islands. It’s so good to see them again.