June 06, 2000 -- What a Way to Wake Up!

Mike woke me up early so that we could swap out a capacitor on the generator. We knew that we had one that was bad, and had known this for some time. So we set about changing it. As soon as we pulled the cover off the capacitor box, we easily spotted the problem and swapped out the bad capacitor. Well, it wasn't that easy. Mike wound up reattaching it because he was still concerned about me possibly injuring myself with the twisting that I would have to do to get at it. We had to pull the floor up by the box so we could get to the bottom where the nuts are that hold the capacitors on. Anyway, we got that done, fired up the genset and charged our batteries. At about 7:30 AM, we heard Joye calling the Coast Guard because their dinghy had been stolen during the night. The first thing the Coast Guard asked was if they had a land line available that they could call on. This is something we don't understand. If you are on a boat, with a VHF radio, why do they always ask about a land line? To us, this is just absurd! We broke into the conversation and offered our cell phone. We then headed over to Joye where we met Bob and Shirley. While Bob was on the phone with the Coast Guard, Shirley, Mike and I chatted for a few minutes. She heard several kids out in the water the previous night, and I told her that we had heard Rob and Janet on Emerald Dragon call the Coast Guard because the kids had made some threats about sinking their boat. We found out later that the Coast Guard never came down. There are sometimes when we wonder what is more important the war on drugs in the carribean or protecting the folks on the water. After Bob got off the phone, he and I headed out to see if we might be able to find his dinghy. As a guess, we headed toward the public dinghy dock. As we passed it, we saw a dinghy floating by the rocks just north of the dock and pulled in to investigate. Sure enough, we had found Joye's dinghy! We got it back to Joye, and on closer inspection, someone had definitely tampered with the boat. There was a budwiser bottle label floating in the bottom; the towing strap had been disconnected and several lines had been undone from the dinghy as well. Fortunately, everything ended well, but we took the note and started locking our dinghy at night. After the morning excitement, we called Yvonne and headed out to her place. On the way, we stopped by West Marine, this time with our coupons and purchased what was on our list. We also found a wash and fold place and dropped off some laundry. We had blankets, etc that are just too large for the machine on board to clean that good, that really needed a regular size machine. We headed back to the boat around 2:00 PM. I know we did something, but I can't remember what! Around 4:30, we headed to Vito's for pizza, then arrived back in time for cocktails on Joye. Bob and Shirley have a Hinkley 40. It is a magnificent boat with incredibly cared for wood work inside and out. Meticulous comes to mind, in fact. It is well designed and well laid out. We had a wonderful time with them. Then at the end of the evening, we all headed back to Nightwinds for a quick tour of our boat. When Bob got to the engine room, he had to be pried out by Shirley because he was salivating over our engines! After that, we all said good night