Monday, April 6, 2020

Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, USVI
18.20.016N
64.55.440W

The avian alarm clock went off this morning at the crack of dawn and continued relentlessly for the next couple of hours, so there was no choice but to get up and start the day.  Dale began a bit later by calling Budget Marine to see if first, they were open and second, if they carried float switches.  The guy he was transferred to said that they didn’t have float switches but when Dale asked if they had bilge pumps, he readily agreed that they lots of those.  Dale took the information into consideration and decided that it was worth the $2 trip over to see what they had, as you can’t have bilge pumps without float switches.  Sure enough, when he and Gerry make the trek, they found an entire wall of bilge pumps and their accompanying “bilge float switches”.  Apparently, you have to use the full name to make any headway. 

In the meantime, the guys had left one of the dinghies behind so that Nicky and I could make a grocery trip.  As Nicky wasn’t quite ready, I thought I’d make a couple of quick calls to straighten out a bill I thought had been paid a year in advance.  It ended up taking me an hour to clear up.  The long and short of that little episode was that their online account information didn’t match their in house information and their IT department had to fix the problem.  I’m getting less tolerant in my old age, so when they were going to give me the IT department telephone number to call, I told them it was their problem but until it was straightened out, I wouldn’t be renewing my contract with them.  I probably need to up my St. John’s Wart dose. 

I eventually locked up the boat and jumped in the dink to head over to Opal.  Oops, forgot the key to the dink, so I crawled out, unlocked the boat, found the key, locked the boat back up, started down the steps and remembered I needed to take grocery bags with me (just not quite used to that yet). So back up, unlock the door, grab the bags, lock the door, down the steps to the dinghy, place the key where it needed to go (I think it works on some type of contact method; when the key is in place there is no contact, so the motor starts.  To stop the motor, you pull the key out.) then over to Opal.  Nicky saw me coming and was perched on the back ladder of Opal ready to step/fall into our dink.  Off we went to the dinghy dock, pushed and shoved our way in, secured the dink, walked to the street, found a couple of shopping carts previous boaters had left at the gate, and walked over to the grocery store to stand in line outside of the store.  Eventually we were allowed in and shopped at our own pace as the guys weren’t with us.  By the time we were done, the guys had returned and were waiting for us to help load everything back into the dinks and return. 

Park Monument In St. Thomas

By the time the groceries were put away, it was lunch time and Nicky and I had already talked about a Roti run.  If nothing else, it would be a little exercise if they were closed.  Luck was with us and they were opened.  Not sure if I mentioned this before but Roti’s are an Indian curry dish of chicken and potatoes in a type of tortilla.  We took our treasures and walked to the park.  Of course, it was empty of everyone but the chickens.  So we used the checkerboard table as our picnic table and spread out for a leisurely lunch before waddling back to the dinks. 

Later in the afternoon, the guys tested Gerry’s SSB to see if it was working and presto!  We could hear him.  Whatever he did, worked.  Apparently, he gave it a good cleaning, greasing and reattached everything.

The rest of the afternoon was spent mindlessly filling time.  There’s only so much reading you can do and I had just finished reading Atlas Shrugged which has to be as long as War and Peace (which by the way, is amazing (Atlas Shrugged) in that it was written back in 1957 but described what is going on in today’s political and ideological climate with amazing foresight).  I pulled out some adult coloring books for just such an occasion and discovered I had a duplicate book, so I searched through my pencils and found a set that I could take to Nicky.  She had mentioned that she hadn’t brought hers and wished she had done so.  I bagged them up and took them over to her. 

We finished the evening eating left overs and watching a news program out of Puerto Rico (sort of).  We watched it when the boat would swing in the direction where we could actually see and hear the program.  At one point, we just had to turn it off before someone, who wasn’t taking a high enough dose of St. Johns Wart, threw it out of the hatch.