A belated entry from George Town

Here’s another Georgetown entry which didn’t get published as planned on Thursday, March 1. Phone and internet service were down in Georgetown on both March 1 & 2.

Shortly after publishing the Blog on Tuesday, we took Maia over to monument and met with a group of folks who are sailing south to the Caribbean. We took some time to introduce ourselves, and after a bit of discussion, we ended up breaking into 2 groups…the group that was taking their time heading toward the southern Caribbean and those of us who wanted to high-tail it to the Virgins and Leewards. Dionysus is a Hallberg-Rassy 39 who will be leaving shortly to the Virgins and Splendido is a Beneteau 57 who will be waiting for another couple of weeks before heading to the same area. I expect we’ll see Dionysus on the way since we are comparable boats on the same calendar, and we are just hoping to see Splendido on the way because they are such cool guys. At the end of the meeting, we decided to wait another couple of days to leave. Directly after the southbound meeting there was an ARG meeting (The Alcohol Research Group) and we decided to hang out a bit longer to investigate their scientific method. No one hung around too long though, because the windless beach was inundated by a swarm of mosquitoes like we’ve never seen…the going explanation is that there was a rain storm 2 weeks ago and the monsters have just reached maturity. I don’t believe anyone continued any beach carousing on Tuesday night…a good night for everyone to recuperate from the George Town 24-7 party.

The George Town Regatta Opening Ceremonies were planned for Wednesday, Feb 28. We spent our morning exploring Stocking Island and then headed to Volleyball Beach (and the Chat & Chill) mid-afternoon for the festivities. Food and Drinks were provided by Chat & Chill and there were pet contests and pirate contests. This was the first time we realized just how many families with young children or teenagers are spending the winter in George Town; the kids were certainly very active in all the festivities and it seemed like they really love this lifestyle. We hung out some with Bev & Arne until they had to judge a contest, and then we spent a little time with Tim and Carol Ann from Ozymandias (Happy Birthday Tim!). A dance started just around sunset and we hung out on the sidelines with Michael and Jeremy from Splendido. We were all definitely pretending to be too-cool-for-school, talking about how we weren’t going to dance like the rest of these fools…that only lasted the first 45 minutes and then we got sucked into the scene and danced the night away. The four of us had been sarcastically taking bets on when The Electric Slide would play and were surprisingly disappointed an hour later when we found out the DJ didn’t even have it. He placated us by playing the Macerena (sp?), and the teenagers, who are actually too-cool-for-school, just about died of embarrassment for being there. We had such a good time hanging out with the guys from Splendido, we really hope to see them when we are in the BVIs; it looks like they’ll be there just about the time Nicol is visiting with us! The evening came to an end around 10 pm (George Town midnight…when you start partying at noon it ends pretty early) and we took the long dinghy ride home through the beautiful city of anchor lights.

We woke up on Thursday morning and Chris Parker gave us the good weather news. We need a cold front weak enough to sail in but strong enough to make it all the way to the Caribbean and that rare front is what is coming through this weekend! We really hadn’t thought it would be possible to sail all the way from the Bahamas to the Virgins, but that is what it is looking like right now. We did have to alter our plans a bit to use the predicted winds to our best advantage; our current plan is to sail 45nm to Rum Cay on Saturday, March 3 and we’ll anchor there overnight. On Sunday we’ll head out for a 630 nm mile run down to Culebra, Puerto Rico (also known as The Spanish Virgins) which should take approximately 5 days. We aren’t too nervous about the length of a run since we did well over 500 nm at one time in busier waters. We are pretty happy that it looks like we’ll get this all done in one shot without having to visit 3 or 4 other islands and customs & immigration officers. Of course, this is the weather we are talking about, so we have routes planned to take us into any of the islands in between if the weather is not as predicted. If the winds are extremely favorable next week we might even be able to sail directly into the US Virgins but we’ve heard such wonderful things about Culebra and it is a little day-sail west of St. Thomas, so we can head over there any time.