18:19.78N 64:56.95W

Thurs, Fri & Sat – 10^th, 11^th & 12^th April

On Thursday John from ‘Out of Africa’ (South Africa) swam over to say hello.  We have met them before in various places from Antigua onwards and Sarah went walking with them once in St Maarten so we were very pleased that they had just arrived in the bay.  He had come over to invite us to join them and ‘Sailacious’ (Janice & Steve, USA) for an informal BBQ  on the beach in the late afternoon.  We had a very enjoyable early evening and John was keen to use his newly purchased mini charcoal BBQ to good effect – having recovered the grid from deep water behind his boat in the morning where he had dropped in the previous evening!

The next morning the six of us went ashore and caught a bus ($1 each) into the main town to do some grocery shopping which was a great success and we reconvened on the beach again in the late afternoon for another BBQ.  It seems that these two boats have been travelling together for a while now and this is a very regular activity. The catch this time was that we had been talked by John into bringing our Cobb BBQ ashore and showing him how good it was by cooking a whole chicken! Sarah looked up the technique for Spatchcocking a chicken which made all the difference and we had another great evening and the chicken was a huge success and the Cobb performed brilliantly thank goodness.  We were joined at various points during the late afternoon by various other crews including Devin and Liz from Moosetracks who had been busy most of the day arranging to have tenants evicted from  a house they own in Florida.

On Saturday morning both ‘Sailacious’ and ‘Out of Africa’ tried to persuade us to sail with them to their next destination but we had already decided on a new plan for next week which sees us briefly returning to the British Virgin islands to take part in a Cruising Association gathering in Virgin Gorda on Wed & Thurs.  This will also give us an opportunity to hook up with ‘Balvenie’ for another couple of days (we have got them invited along as our ‘guests’) so it should be a fun few days. From there we can either sail directly to Culebra in the Spanish Virgin Islands as we keep saying that we going to do, or might opt to go and find ‘Out of Africa’ for another couple of days first.  Plus there are a couple more boats due in the BVI’s over the next few weeks who we would love to meet up with one last time.  Decisions, decisions.

So as part of the new Plan A, we left Brewers Bay and sailed round to Crown Bay again where we dropped anchor and in the afternoon picked up some more essentials from the shops there.