Saturday, February 8, 2020

Turks & Caicos
21.45.631N
72.13.429W

Well today was a bit more interesting.  It started the same way; the weather gurus said in no uncertain terms that no one should be heading east for the next couple of days.  Dale ran the bilge pumps on our neighbor’s boat.  Two of the three Canadian boats (the two that are French speaking) have visitors for a few days; and Texas Crewed and we split a rental car to check out another marina on the north side. 

Gene had already rented a car a week ago, so we nominated him as driver for the right hand drive car (left hand road) and off we took.  Bob, the marina owner where we’re at, had explained to us that the Turks and Caicos don’t use traffic lights as it requires money for upkeep and replacement after storms, so they use round abouts exclusively.  The rule is, if you’re in the round about, you have right of way.  Talk about Mr. Toad’s wild ride.  Dale and Renee acted as navigators and I was look out for the names. 

As luck would have it, we found it, although we did pass by and had to come back.  At first blush, it appeared to be out of our price range from the gates and condos leading up to it.  Sure enough, the boats that had slips were high end but we got out and went to the office for more information as we had heard it cost $1/foot. 

Local Fish Eaters

Apparently, there is only one operating dock of the original 4 but Hurricane Irma knocked out 2 with all of the accompanying finger piers.  There is only 1 dock that has finger piers with water and electricity and another that is just the dock, no finger piers, although you’re allowed to dinghy in for water if you want.  If you do decide to use that one dock, you need a dinghy to get back and forth to anywhere else, as there is no connecting pier to it.  It looks to have been a very nice marina at one point but now there are no plans to reconstruct it.  

We took a stroll out to the end to get a good look.  Beautiful boats were at the end and one of the charter fishing boats was cleaning its catch and collecting some local underwater attention.  Yes, I know that they are “only” nurse sharks but if they are darting about expecting food to fall in the water, I wanted to keep sure footing while in their area. 

More Rum!

We headed back to the car and then went in search of a liquor store as Dale and I are getting low on our rum supply and Gene and Renee are wine drinkers.  We each found what we were looking for and then went in search of lunch.  We had been in search of Big Al’s but ended up finding a place called Danny Bouy’s for humongous sandwiches for lunch.  Dale, Gene and Renee had beers but since I’m not a beer drinker, I had the specialty of the day called Liquid Marijuana that was made up of Captain Morgan Rum, Coconut Rum, Melon liqueur, and a couple of other liquors I can’t remember.  Trust me, you only drink one.  With a huge sandwich and watering the drink down every 5 minutes, I considered myself lucky to be still walking without a sway as we left. 

We made one more stop at the grocery store for milk and fresh fruit before making it back to the marina and a much needed nap (at least on my part).  We were sill full from lunch come dinner time so Dale had a snack and I had another bottle of water. 

Guess that its for today.  At least you didn’t have to hear that we were sitting on the boat, reading books and waiting for weather again.