Sunday, May 02, 2010
At 4am the rains finally moved in, the first since I’ve returned to the BVI. All the hatches were open and it took a while to get them closed and take down my provisional LED lighting system which hadn’t been waterproofed. Then I used dirty T-Shirts to sweep up the water below decks before going back to sleep. The rain showers continued all through the night and as I write this a 7:30am the hatches are still closed and rain is still coming down.
I departed at 10:00 and had a great first real sail, tacking 7 times all day but going over 30 miles to the North Sound. The wind started picking up as I got closer and bad things started happening. A sudden gust of wind blew my favourite Tilley hat overboard as I was tacking the boat and when I finished with the ropes and looked back I couldn’t locate the hat anymore and knew that I’d have little chance of finding it by the time I got the sails down; I’d rescued the hat-overboard once before but that was when it was new and still had $50 tucked away in the brim.
I finally passed close enough to the small freighter on the rocks to get some good pictures, and subsequently got a lot of nice pictures of the Baths and boats around Spanish Town on Virgin Gorda. But when I wanted to take a picture of the North Sound entrance I couldn’t find the camera, it had disappeared with nary a trace and I can only assume that it is now lying at the bottom of the sea. Although I have a small camera along, the one I lost was a Sony DSC-N1 which fits in the underwater housing, so now I am left with no means of taking underwater pictures. Oh well, I’ll have to go shopping in St. Martin to see if I can find a replacement camera.
Once in the Sound I motored to a mooring ball at Leverick Bay and took the dinghy ashore to see if the store was still open on Sunday afternoon it. It was, so I bought some spices, a frozen steak, and finally found some Carib beer which had been out of stock at the store in Nanny Cay. That night I had a wonderful steak on the grill with potatoes and onions – basic and simple fare but very tasty after a day of sailing.
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