December 6, 2008

I'm here at VIERS and getting back into the swing of things again. Last Friday I went up to the camp for dinner and when I came back to the dock on the way to my boat, my dinghy was gone. I had tied it both front and back but hadn't locked it as I normally do but it couldn't have drifted off by itself. I went back up to camp and Jamine, the manager, and I got some lights and went back down to see if we could find it along the beach. A guy on one of the other boats said he saw it leaving about 6:00 heading toward Cruz Bay. We checked both Greater and Little Lameshur and couldn't find it so I went back up to the camp to call the police. The police just told me that I would have to come in the next day and file a report. We had also called the local park ranger and he said he would come down to the dock in the morning to see me. I took one of our kayaks out to the boat and back the next morning and started to get the VIERS inflatable dinghy ready to go look for my dinghy. When Dave, the ranger, showed up he said there was a dinghy up on the beach in Little Lameshur. We went back to look and it was mine. They had pulled it up on the beach and tied it to a rock so it wouldn't drift away and left it there. The only thing missing was the propeller. We towed it back to the dock in Greater Lameshur and I went on to breakfast and work. I got a new propeller and everything seems fine now. I am pretty sure it was two kids from a large Lagoon catamaran sailboat that was in Little Lameshur.

Nothing else exciting has happened here. I did notice that I had a broken blade on my wind generator again. I still had two good blades left from the last time I broke one so I went up the mizzen mast yesterday to remove the blade assembly. I replaced the two broken ones and went back up the mast to replace the assembly. It wasn't much fun but it is nice to have the free power. My batteries were so low yesterday that I had to run the engine to charge them back up.