Tuesday, December 28, 2010
For breakfast I had coffee (of course) and my last two eggs fried up with my only bread (one single hot-dog bun) but it was tasty and for dessert I watched Avatar to the end and set off for Sandy Cay and some beach time. The beach was quite crowded so I swum around, then had more coffee on the boat decided I needed to re-provision. Sailing the relatively short stretch across to Tortola I put up only the genoa and drifted comfortably until a saw a huge spinnaker unfold behind me and confirmed via AIS that the yacht Tenacious was following me. Alas, the AIS also confirmed that their speed under only spinnaker was faster than my hull speed so I didn’t even attempt to race.
The market at Soper’s Hole is well-stocked but freezing cold throughout; when I made it into there I realized that the shelves were almost completely bare of fresh produce, they’d obviously not been stocked up over the holidays; either that or the charter guests had ransacked the place. I did get some “Egg Beater” so I’ll see how that works as a substitute for eggs in my breakfast pancakes.
The weather was cloudy and gusty, and I was in no hurry and with nothing to prove so I set the equivalent of 4 reefs in both sails (normally what one would do in storm conditions) and comfortably sailed to Trellis Bay, even when the true wind speed went over 20 knots and even higher in gusts. I didn’t have to touch the sails once on the whole trip and was feeling quite smug, having beaten 3 catamarans on the same stretch; but my fall came soon thereafter. The mooring balls were almost all taken, I picked up 2 pennants that turned out to be torn and then found one close to shore which looked good, but I had 2 failed attempts to pick up the ball and then someone came by on a dinghy and assisted me – the first time I didn’t manage to pick up a ball on my lonesome.
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