Exploring the area

Mark fixed our dinghy on Nov. 28th. He took it back to the beach and ended up replacing the carburetor. Mark had bought a new carburetor for the motor last year but only needed it now. The new carburetor lets more fuel through so we now have a more powerful motor – cool!! Of course we had to take it out for a spin!!

It was too late in the day to go exploring that day, so after breakfast on Nov. 29 we took the dinghy out for a tour around. There are a few beaches in the area but probably this most popular is Green Cay Sandy Spit. (Not to be confused with Sandy Cay which is rumoured to have been featured in the helicopter opening scene of Gilligan’s Island.) This little island truly is just a spit!! Lots of sand and not much else except for a few palm trees. The cay forms a sheltered area between Little Van Dyke and Green Cay. Several boats were anchored around this area and the shallow water and rocky reefs helped control the wave action. It was pretty windy on Saturday and we saw a few people sailing west with the wind behind them. We sat in the sand looking west and watched the sailboats zoom by!! We also saw a few kite surfer (it’s basically a surf board attached to a sail) racing around, even in some fairly big waves.

When we left Sandy Spit, we were travelling with the wind and waves so Mark opened up the throttle on the dinghy motor and we had some fun!! Definitely there was more power coming from the motor because the new carburetor throttle actually opens more than the old one! We had a bit of fun zooming back to the boat where we picked up our snorkel geared and headed to a little bay nearby called Manchineel Bay. There was a nice beach for the dinghy and we snorkelled for about an hour. We saw a stingray, some new coral types and lots of fish.

Today (Nov. 30th) was a fairly quiet day. We had a slow start because we had a rainy night (lots of close up and open up – it’s too hot to not reopen some hatches and the dodger when it stops raining). One positive about last night’s rain – it was also windy!! We woke up with our batteries still well charged (nighttime is hard in our house batteries because we charge them (mostly) with solar so they discharge at night running the fridge and freezer). Mark did a few jobs including recalibrating the tachometer with the new pulley system. Our tachometer was reading high and now it’s much closer (but still a bit high – oh well).

Tomorrow it’s December 1st!! Crazy! We’ll be moving over to Cane Garden Bay on the north side of Tortola to do a bit of grocery shopping and maybe some laundry. All the islands are very close together here so it doesn’t take long to move to a new anchorage. The challenge is finding a place to anchor and not have to pay for a mooring ball.