Friday, March 27, 2020

Francis Bay, St. John, USVI
18.21.859N
64.44.875W

It was another quiet night and although we woke early, I laid in bed daydreaming while Dale fixed his morning coffee.  I heard Gerry approach in his dinghy and start telling Dale that noonsite, a website for cruisers by cruisers, was saying that the USVIs were starting to limit interisland travel.  This was exactly what I was afraid of when we left St. Thomas but Dale was much more calm about the news.  Needless to say, I was up and dressed in a heart beat.

Today was the day that we intended to scrub Opal and the waterline of Texas Crewed.  So we lowered the dink, loaded it up with the hooka, our dive gear and the various brushes and scrappers and crossed over to Texas Crewed to spread the message.  Gene was even less willing to accept the information as they had previously learned that not all things on that particular site are always true.  OK, obviously this needs further investigation.  We dinked over to Opal and started to transfer all of the equipment to their boat.  By this time, Gerry had actually contacted the Department of Resources on St. Thomas to verify the information and had been told:  no, it was not true.  So back to our original schedule of cleaning the 2 remaining boats and staying until Sunday before heading back to pick up our batteries, which are supposed to be delivered on Monday and check the post office to see if our mail has arrived. 

Gerry had cleaned the bottom of his boat about a month ago and Texas Crewed had scrubbed their waterline only 2 weeks ago.  Embarrassingly, both of the boats were completed in less time that it took to do just our boat.  Dale said Gypsy Palace won the dirtiest bottom, Opal came in a distant second but that Texas Crewed didn’t have enough to even be in the competition.  Sorry guys.  Once those were done, we returned to our respective boats and back to our regularly scheduled days of reading, blogging, napping, catching up on e-mails, or just internet surfing, etc.  Certainly not like the first time we made this trip when, like junkies, we were constantly looking to find a WiFi connection. 

Dale started getting antsy about 3pm, so we grabbed our garbage, sent quick messages to the other boats to tell them of our run to the garbage cans on the beach and then dinked over to each of them to pick up their bags.  Once deposited, we took a slow circuit around the anchorage to see the shoreline, stopping (or I should say slowing) to look at an old building on one of the smaller islands that had obviously been there for years that was still standing.  Dale wasn’t going to beach our dinghy on the rocky shore for a closer look.  Once back on the boat, he located our night lights for the dinghy and made sure they were in operating order so that we could start using them after dark.  We’ve only used the dink after dark a couple of times but sitting the cockpit and watching others, we decided it would be better if we did, as we do have the capability. 

This evening we gathered on Opal for our evening sundowners.  Nicky had outdone herself, serving shrimp, a cheese plate and pub mix.  I offered a couple of different varieties of quesadillas and Renee brought a selection of crackers with a homemade cheeseball.  None of us went home hungry.  Once again, as Nicky would say, we put the world to rights, laughed, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves before heading home with our dinghy light shining for all to see.