Putting Us Through Our Paces

Watermelon Cay, St. John.

One of the reasons we came up to St. John was to connect with Dave and Alex on Banyan. We've followed their blog for the last year or so and were eager to connect, as we had with Mike & Rebecca from ZeroToCruising this time last year. Yes, we are hopeless groupies. This time however, we gave fair warning through email and when we pulled into the mooring field they were still here, so the connection was made.

We made arrangements to meet up this morning to tackle the Johnny Horn trail over to Coral Bay where we would lunch at Skinny Legs. This trail is incredibly steep up to 500 ft, which wasn't too bad in the morning but by mid afternoon with a tummy full of delicious cheeseburger and the sun beating down, was a bit more of a challenge - ok, I felt like it almost kicked my ass, but we were victorious and made it back to Leinster Bay.

What exactly are the guys checking out?

Ah, a great view of the anchorage.

Doesn't look so steep here, but man this was a well-deserved break.

The reward at the end of the trail.

Recuperative swims and siestas were in order and then we met up once again onboard Mowzer. We are having problems with the display on our chart-plotter and can't get it bright enough to see in daylight, and given they also have a Raymarine chart-plotter, hoped that Dave might be able to 'shed some light' on the problem. Not for want of trying the chart-plotter is still dim but we had a great afternoon swapping stories and getting some great tid-bits of info for when we're out here full-time.

As we've said in the past these are special days when we make connections like this. A few hours spent on a hike, a few more sharing a drink (or two), and we hope we will have the chance to meet up again in some anchorage on some island; who knows where our paths will cross again.

And Away We Go

Watermelon Cay, St. John.

Last errands were completed today with a final run to Pueblo early this morning for missed groceries and then a refuel at Crown Bay, followed by a high rev run around Hassel Island to make sure there were no engine problems. We were now free to head off and away from the hustle and bustle of St. Thomas.

Big Boys in Town Today

When your home is a castle, your backyard can be a pirate ship.

Fun goes on above the water too

There seems to be a pirate theme

With winds dead on the nose all the way up to St. John we put the engines through a further 'test'. For a few minutes we unfurled the headsail but it was short-lived as he winds clocked back to the nose. No worries, we were happy to be out on the water and made our way up to Watermelon Cay where we picked up a mooring ball for an overnight stay.

Our view to Jost Van Dyke sported spectacular colours in the afternoon sun.

We're now on St. John where there is little chance of internet so we'll post when we can and fill you in later...

A Day on the Dock

With Mowzer having been out of the water for an extended amount of time, the folks at CYOA have had their work cut out for them over the last week getting her ready for our arrival and the follow-on charters after we leave. Lots of jobs had been completed and just a couple remained before we can push away from the dock.

So, knowing this is to be savoured, we headed off for the morning in our rental to do groceries, leaving those boat jobs behind. On our return we found B had fixed a leaky thru-hull - definitely a good thing to keep the sea water out of our bilges, N replaced the head light fixture that had gone non-functional and C had been up to the top of the mast to repair a cracked VHF antenna fixture. This was all before lunch and what amazes me is that each if these jobs would probably take us a day to prepare for and complete. Nothing daunted, in the afternoon, B and C took on the leaky port window. We had witnessed ourselves the extent of this leak in the rain yesterday afternoon as the water streamed in the top of the window and ran down to the drain in the shower - so happy that this leak occurred in the head and not the berth!

The guys got busy with various nasty-sounding tools and after a 2-hour struggle were able to get the window pried away from the hull. Other owners who have tackled this job and posted about it online have all sworn that it is a difficult job, and they weren't kidding.

The afternoon brought more rain, heavy at times, but it let up in time for the window to be reset and clamped for an overnight cure. Hopefully it will all be set and ready for us to head off tomorrow.

We treated ourselves to dinner at Hookline & Sinker. Perhaps this guy was on the menu tonight?

Re-Connected

O.M.G. - if the stress of getting ready to get away doesn't kill me, I am determined to enjoy this break.

It's been a year since we were last aboard Mowzer and the saga of why is probably best left to a later blog. Needless to say, 7 months out of the water and a major repair later, we are so happy to see her back where she belongs. A huge shout-out to all the hard work and perseverence by John at CYOA for seeing our repair through the warranty process at Fountaine-Pajot and the crew at the docks for putting her back together so beautifully.

Ottawa was a bit snowy overnight but nothing enough to cause a delay. The torrential rains in St. Thomas this afternoon definitely put a "damper" on our planned grocery excursion. Instead we went on the hunt for a data simm card for a nifty little device I picked up on Amazon. This little baby is unlocked so we can put any company's data card in it and then create our own hot-spot on the boat for any device - like my iPad I am currently using to write up this post. We'll be careful how much we load on it until we get used to how much data we're using but it is prepaid by the week and not too expensive.

Of course for any of you reading from work - I'm still out of reach :-)

In all reality though, sitting on the boat in the evening and being able to download the weather charts for the next day and shoot off the odd post or email is pretty sweet. I don't expect it's like this on all the islands, but we'll enjoy it while it's here.

Step 1: Sell the House

What a whirlwind!  Just as we were coming back from Annapolis and had resigned ourselves to moving back to our house and putting Mom's house up for sale, we got a call from Ben (our agent) that we had an offer on the house.  A few days later we had a deal and a closing date of November 14.

This gave us less than a month to clear out the house, sell a whole crap-load of stuff and get settled into Mom's house where we've been living for the last few months but hadn't really sorted out her stuff from ours.  One friend who came over recently commented that our place was rather like a cottage with a jumble of mismatched furniture.

While we were in Annapolis, on our last evening true to our tradition we found ourselves in Davis' Pub.  The place is a little old neighbourhood pub that probably hasn't changed in 50 years, and on show weekend I imagine it is especially packed.  Tables can be pushed together for a larger group or pulled a scant few inches apart to give the illusion of privacy for a couple - ha!  The benefit of this is that you get to know your neighbours real fast, providing you want to get to know them.  We lucked out and had great folks sitting on either side of us and in particular we struck up a conversation with G & T at the next table who had literally just moved aboard their boat that week and were in the process of selling their house and all their accumulated stuff.

Aha!  now you know where I'm going with this…

They had ended up having an auction to downsize quickly, and as we were weighing up our options (garage sale in November - ugh / auction / rent a storage unit or pod - $$) we kept returning to the little we knew of their experience.  A little online research later and a visit from Corey of Sell My Stuff Ottawa* and we had a date set:  November 3 at our house in Richmond.  Although they take a hefty commission, the deed was done so painlessly that we were pretty impressed.  Sunday morning the cars were lined up down the street, much to the chagrin of our neighbours I'm sure, but I think they got to do a little shopping as well since we heard our BBQ was literally wheeled down the street.

We weren't there during the sale; Corey and his team did all the selling and we had the pleasure of showing up at the end to pick up our proceeds.  Of course not all sold and we still had to move quite a bit of stuff back to our new basement, but it is such a relief to have so much gone.

Next step is Kijiji and then next spring we'll sell as much as we can at the annual Richmond garage sale.

*As an aside on the Sell My Stuff model:  they assess your stuff, take pictures and create an online album, advertise through email, their website and Facebook which gets a ton of people interested including dealers and pickers, they run the sale on the day of, they set and negotiate prices and then they clean up their stuff and leave the house clean and neat at the end of the day.  They charge 35-50% commission depending on the size of the sale (we paid 40%) and then HST on their fee.  Would we use their service again - absolutely!  Especially in the time-crunch we were in.  If we had more time and a better time of year we would have done the garage sale route first, but given the circumstances we are very happy with the outcome.