Monday 11/29

Roger here.
Lene is typing next to me at the internet cafe about the other days to date.
Yesterday we swam, with flippers to the beach, about 200 yards off our starboard side, past the day-tour boats bringing snorkelers from St. Thomas for $90 per capita / day (including a lunch). I lost my snorkel tube the day before and so I can just duck my head in the water with the mask if I want to see the coral and the fish.
Returning to the boat we showered in the cockpit and had lunch and decided to take the dink to the resort and go to town (Cruz Bay) known as Love City by the locals, as evidenced by the names of many businesses here. But we were intercepted by the Caneel Bay personnel who saw our walking shoes and told that we could walk on the grounds but not off of them. So we dinked back to the boat and motored it into Cruz Bay, to essentially the same spot where we anchored to check in with US Customs.
Then a very busy and profitable time: The US Post Office where we mailed the SSB part to Bellevue WA for repair and a postcard to our granddaughter, Alexandra; a barbershop which caters mostly to black people, who gave me what Ilene calls a great haircut (I don't care how it looks as long as she likes it); a gas station which was quite a walk to get 1.5 gals of unleaded for the dinghy; spent an hour talking with a group of mostly Americans, living here; Barbeque at "Uncle Joe's", a semi-street vendor, and then returned to the dinghy, thence to the boat, where we had planned to spend the night, but found a bright red warning sticker from the National Parks Service, warning us that we had overparked in a three hour anchoring and "no overnight" zone and threatening us with a fine.
Now it was pitch dark though still lighed in the harbor, we pulled up the anchor and headed back to the mooring field at Caneel Bay. There was a more-than-half full moon but clouds and rain came up obscuring that light source. The chart plotter got us out of the channel and the harbor and close to our destination, whereupon we used our so called million candlepower flashlight to spot the mooring bouy, then its pick up eye, and on the fourth or fifth pass we speared it with the boat hook and got on the mooring. It was hard for me on the foredeck to handle both the big flashlight in one hand and the boat hook in the other. Ilene patiently circled back time and again until we got on, but then I noticed that our dock line, which holds us to the mooring penant's eye, was fouled on the port fluke of our port anchor, which means that it could saw through and leave us to drift onto the rocks. I started to tug on it to free it and it was Ilene who said why don't I put the engine in forward to ease the tension. Isn't she smart! It worked in ten seconds, no strain, and then to bed.
This morning we made french toast with our coffee, took the dink to the beach, cleaned the sand from our feet with a dish towel, put on our hiking shoes, hiked to Cruz Bay (definitely not a trail to take at night!) and plan to take a bus the length of the island and back for $2 per person.