Tech Trouble

The blog took an unintended hiatus due to some annoying computer problems. My hard drive died. As luck would have it…. there’s a great computer fix-it place in Cruz Bay! My new best friend Evan, along with a few other boy geniuses at Computer Express, got me set up with a new hard drive and got all my info transferred. I’m a recent convert to the practice of regularly backing up my hard drive and it really saved me here.

Evan (L) and genius buddy Daryl (R) - thanks guys!

We’re still roaming around St. John and we made a trip to the southeast side to check out Coral Harbor (no we didn’t go to Skinny Legs). We had a nice night sky and nice morning rainbow and found that we couldn’t leave when we tried to. Our anchor was caught on another boat’s mooring - we were stuck. As luck would have it…. our other new best friend, Dick, was tooling around the harbor hunting on the murky bottom for ‘treasures’. For twenty bucks he dove on our anchor and set us free.

We went to the big St. John festival that ends with a bang, literally, on July 4^th. The fair had lots of street food and music and fireworks, and even the crowning of the festival queen.

This guy was roaming around the fair too.

Folks come from all over the islands for the festival and the unlucky people who took this ferry headed back to St. Croix didn’t make it home that night. We heard there were only a few injuries to passengers, but I imagine this ferry captain will no longer be employed.

We filled our tanks with more rainwater in Maho Bay – about 80 gallons in one day – and spent more time hanging out with the turtles and rays in the bay.

From here we headed over to St. Thomas to do some provisioning and await the arrival of my mom and my niece Carly. We passed through Charlotte Amalie where sea planes and sailboats share the water... 

...then anchored in Honeymoon Bay at Water Island. We wandered around Water Island where Skip’s parents lived for over 25 years.

Saralane, on the far right, in Honeymoon Bay

The old homestead

I must include the requisite smattering of flower and critter photos... all seen on our walk around Water Island.

We were doing some chores on the boat one morning when a fisherman passed by Saralane and did a double take when he saw Skip’s t-shirt with it's “Howdy Bailey” logo. Howdy has a marine business in Norfolk and Skip has worked with him quite a lot over the years. We saw him when we went through Norfolk last fall. Turns out that John, the fisherman, worked for Howdy and is a cousin of Ollie’s (see November post 'Still in Norfolk… sort of'). He said “I’d know that t-shirt anywhere!”. 


The specific chore Skip was about to do was to clean out the dinghy. He’d gotten it untied when John came by and the Howdy Bailey connection was made, but he sort of forgot about it during the conversation. Our dinghy made a break for it again (see March post 'Dinghy Dongs') but John zipped out and got it for us. 

I got a little backed up on the blog so the next one will start with our latest visitors, Carly and my mom…. here’s their arrival in St. Thomas. They’re bringing our replacement underwater camera too so hopefully more fish pix in the next post!