Good and bad news

Serafina
Rob & Sarah Bell
Wed 21 May 2014 02:50

18:18.9N 64: 57.5W

 

 

Sat, Sun, Mon & Tues – 17th, 18th , 19th & 20th

 

Well let’s get the bad news out of the way and that is to say that the ship we are waiting for is still anchored near the Panama canal, apparently waiting for an urgent delivery of Lube oil.  It has been a long and rather tortuous process getting the truth out of the shipping company as they are only chartering the ship and so have no direct control.  But each day passes with another rather lame excuse and flurry of short sharp emails from people like us.  Turns out that there are 20 boats booked onto this ship and so there is a lot of pressure building at this end.

 

But we seem to be making the best of things and using the time to get jobs done on board in preparation, however to avoid cabin fever we have had a few jaunts ashore and this included a visit to the excellent little market on Saturday morning and the near obligatory trip to the Barefoot Buddha on Monday for coffee (and a shared cake…)

 

We were going to sail round to Crown Bay on Monday to do laundry and fill the water tanks, but with the latest delay to the ship we chose to leave this a day.  So on Tuesday we finally got to lift the anchor again and made the epic half mile trip through the narrow gap between the islands round to Crown Bay. The timing was quite good as the anchorage in Charlotte Amalie had become very unpleasant with a big rolling sea running in from the south and we had just had quite the bounciest night for months.

 

We took on water at the fuel dock and then anchored by the mooring field once again beside Oasis of the Seas who had just arrived again. We rode ashore on the dingy and did all of the laundry and met up with Lis on Dina 2 which is a Danish yacht who we had been told by various others to keep an eye out for as they are shipping out on the same boat as us. However Lis is flying home to Denmark and leaving an agent to load her boat – seems quite a sensible option right now!!

 

Then we spotted Sean Macmillan sat on his beautiful Spirit yacht ‘Flight’ and so we had a chat with him too.  Sean has just flown back out here (we saw him in Antigua a few months ago) to oversee the loading of 7 Spirit yachts onto three different ships over the next few weeks. So we have agreed to meet up with him one evening during the next few days.

 

However the other reason for coming round to Crown Bay was to meet up with James and Patti on ‘La Adventura’ who we last saw up in the USA.  They have a number of very good friends here in St Thomas and were anchored in Honeymoon Bay and were happy to let us use their friends’ mooring buoy there. Brilliant and very kind of them since there was quite a swell running all day, but this mooring was well inside the bay and pretty flat (very flat compared to the last week in Charlotte Amalie!).

 

So Patti and James came over for drinks and we were able to catch up on their travels, trials and tribulations. Honeymoon Bay is actually a good spot to be, although it is heavily frequented by the trip boats entertaining folks from the endless stream of visiting cruise ships, but what did surprise us was the appearance in the evening of mosquitos – big bad b’stards and these are really the first ones we have come across all season.  We knew things might be dodgy when Patti & James arrived clutching a can of Repel mosquito repellent!