After our strenuous day yesterday, we were definitely a bit more lazy today with nothing more on the agenda than a trip round to the east end of St. John and Coral Bay.
Coral Bay is a huge complex of protected bays that essentially face the south, some are in the national park and some are not. The easternmost bays (Long Bay and Hansen Bay) have good anchoring in sand and are fronted by small homes along the road. In the middle, the bays are part of the park system and in three of the deep fingers of Hurricane Hole are park day moorings. Finally, on the west side is Coral Harbour where the little town sits. This bay is chock-full of anchored and moored boats, many are live aboards and quite a number look abandoned. Along the perimeters are a number of wrecks that remind one that perhaps this is not the best place to sit out a hurricane.
We opted to pick up one of the park moorings for the morning and enjoy the solitude and serenity of one of the mangrove lined bays in Hurricane Hole.
We are now down to just a couple of days left on Mowzer on this trip and the next time we are aboard we will be deep in a refit to see us set up for living aboard. We spent the morning going over the boat and creating our refit/update list. It's quite an extensive list of new items and some modifications to existing, and over the next few months as we make progress I'll share what we do.
Funny little story: early in the trip we were irritated with ourselves that we didn't bring a tape measure aboard, wanting to take measurements along with photos to provide more detailed specs on installations. On the day that we hiked out of Savanna Bay, I was walking along the road, looking around at all the scenery and what should I spy discarded/lost on the side of the road but a 12-inch ruler. Brought it home, cleaned it up and it has become one of our essential tools aboard!
After all this activity we headed over to Coral Harbour and given that is it exactly two weeks since we visited Skinny Legs with Dave and Alex, we decided it was time for a repeat cheeseburger. We didn't take on the Johnny Horn hike so not sure we earned them quite as well, but they were still delicious paired with a nice cold beer. For Caitlin- do you notice Dad's t-shirt?
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| Rated #1 island hamburger by Dave, pretty good in our books too. |
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| This little boat is smaller than our dinghy but is fully fitted with sails and rigging, a beautiful piece of work. |
We returned to the blue cobblestone beach around Ram Head to pick up a mooring for the night and enjoyed a spectacular sunset at the end of the day. Tomorrow will see us return to the dock in St. Thomas with another fabulous three weeks under our belts and a few more lessons learned and decisions made.
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| Sundowner Painkiller on the foredeck. |
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| Sunset over St. Thomas. |
