This
is our second day anchored in this beautiful spot. Marina Cay is
a little island that has a dive shop, a sunset bar not yet open
for the season, a beach restaurant and a Pusser's store selling
Pusser's rum, and Pusser's branded souvenir stuff -- clothing,
mugs, luggage, gifts, etc. The island is beautifully landscaped
and has a small number (six) of accommodations for rent.
On Friday, we met Alfred, the refrigerator guy in Road
Town at Village Cay Marina. He worked most of Friday and a lot of Saturday installing
our new refrigerator condenser, finding and fixing leaks and finally putting
in the refrigerant, so we now have engine driven refrigeration again. This morning
the milk had ice in it, so it is working fairly well. While he worked, we made
good use of our time in the "big city" of the BVI, which means, laundry,
bank, internet cafe, remove garbage, fill water tanks, search for miscellaneous
items (shore power cord, speaker wire), clean and rust protect the engine, scrub
things that we had overlooked (make use of shore water supply), trip to the Tico, the drink
store which has the best prices around for wine, ginger beer and juice, and finally,
once refrigeration was confirmed, major provisioning at Bobby's, the super market (because
you can roll the cart right up to the boat). Some of these errands required using
the dinghy to get to the store, and during one of these, the well-trained Captain
Lance noticed that the outboard engine water cooling was not streaming out the
back. Fortunately, we were able to clear the clog and the outboard is once again
peeing like a horse.
We left Road Town at 3pm and headed out to the middle
of Drake's channel, where we once again sailed around hailing "Sara Ann",
the charter boat containing friends Jim
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and Susie. And this time, we scored,
found they were  spending
their last night at Cooper Island, so we set off in that direction
to join them. We all had a lovely evening, sharing a meal on board
and regaling each other with our adventures of the week. In the morning,
they loaded us up with all their uneaten provisions,
and set off to turn in their boat. We spent the day lolling about
and planning to do nothing but read and swim, but Lance decided
to install our new radio/cd player, so it wasn't all play. We set
off for Marina Cay in the afternoon, took 3 tries to get the anchor
set, and then got ready to bake our dinner, only to discover, as
usual, another thing to fix. The oven won't stay lit, so we need
to do some investigation of the thermocouple and the solenoid,
which will involve some heavy lifting. That's just the way it is,
I'm getting used to it. Stuff breaks, and you fix it.
In the morning, Aragorn, a local artist came by selling
local fruit and handicrafts. He sold us the biggest avocado I've ever seen, grapefruit
and little bananas, all of which were exceptionally delicious.
Yesterday we had a fantastic snorkel here in Marina Cay.
We swam directly from the boat over towards Great Camenoe island, and found a
fairly healthy reef. Along the way, a 4 foot barracuda eyed us suspiciously,
a small sea turtle ignored us, a jelly fish undulated magically along, and a
herd of yellowtail snapper and sergeant major fish started accompanying us everywhere
we went. This reef is not particularly colorful except for some of the largest
and healthiest purple sea fans I've seen.
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