Where to start? We ate a breakfast of eggs, fresh fruit and coffee on the boat and then weighed anchor (dropped the mooring ball) at Peter Island. Getting our money's worth out of our two days with Captain Sam on board, we started with a little anchoring practice on the other side of the bay. With Laura and Larry working the anchor and me on the helm, we dropped anchor, attached the bridle (catamaran equipment that spreads the load of the anchor across both hauls - totally new to us as mono haul sailors), paid out the right amount of chain, set the anchor and received an enthusiastic thumbs up from Sam.
Then we went to retrieve the anchor and as it came up the windlass (electric anchor crank) was acting like it had way more load on it than it should have. And it did. The anchor came out of the water at our bow with hurricane debris that included a commercial fishing net, a tree and about 50 other random object that were tangled up in the pile.
After a lot of fiddling, pulling, cutting and stressful hand-wringing, the "Loch Ness Monster" finally dropped off the anchor and back to the depths of our little anchorage at Peter Island.
Next we practiced picking up 5-10 more mooring balls to make sure we were comfortable without Captain Sam's help. Once picking up mooring balls was old hat, we set sail down the Drake Channel which splits Tortola on the north from Ginger, Cooper, Salt, Peter and Norman Islands to the south. About 10 miles to the west end of Tortola, north through the gap between St. John, Little Thatch and the west end of Tortola, and then we were sailing straight north to one of our favorite places in the world, White Bay Beach, Jost Van Dyke!
White Bay is home to One Love bar, Soggy Dollar and a handful of other beach bars that are icons of the Caribbean. We sailed into White Bay, picked up a mooring ball expertly :) , ripped into shore on the dingy, walked up the beach to Soggy Dollar, ordered pain killers (BVI cocktail that is 4 parts pineapple, 1 part orange, 1 part coconut creme (Coco Lopez) and 2 parts rum with a grated nutmeg garnish) and sat on the world's best beach (yeah, I said it).
The girls and I played a few beach games, we all went for a swim, we did headstands on the beach,
hammed it up for the Soggy Dollar webcam for everyone we knew that was watching for us,
and strolled down the beach to the One Love bar to see how they survived the hurricane. Some day, we will come back to this post and add 15 years' worth of photos of Laura and me, then Laura, April & me and finally, Laura, April, Fiona & me standing on White Bay Beach in front of the One Love bar sign. For today, I will just say they are rebuilding quickly and the sign is back up so we were able to get a 2018 One Love picture (top).
We stayed on the beach long enough to eat coconut shrimp, crab cakes, some salads and a few other small plates and call it dinner. Then back on the dingy to Peace Out before it got too dark. We had an evening swim off the boat, and we called it a night at the end of another great day.
One and Only Love.