June 26, 2010 I am back in Lexington now. I had two teeth break so I'm back here getting them fixed. That little task will be done next week and then I'll head back to the boat which I left at the boatyard on Gibson Island, MD.

I haven't been real good at keeping this updated lately so I'll try to bring you up to date on what I've been doing for the last several months. I was in St John from about Nov. 22, 2009, until I left to come back north about May 20, 2010. Most of that time was spent a VIERS where I still volunteer. The work this year was a little different. I reworked all the bed frames at VIERS. There were about 60 frames that I had to shorten 2 inches because they were longer than the mattresses. About 15 of them needed to be widened because we were switching from single mattresses to twin mattresses so the frames needed to be about 6 inches wider. I also built about 12 new twin size frames. That kept me busy for a few months.

After the bed frames were done I got to build about 40 new screens for the new kitchen. Last year we had started rebuilding the kitchen. It got a new concrete floor and the roof was raised about 4 feet to provide more headroom. The old roof was raised and reused but all the walls were rebuilt so all the windows needed new screen. There is no glass in the windows, just screens. A new pantry and a large bathroom were also added so there were windows added there too. The frames are built from 1x2s that were ripped from 2x6s. Over a thousand feet of 1x2s were used so this was not a quick job either. They had to be ripped, painted and then cut and assembled into frames. Then 1/2 inch hardware cloth was added, the screen added and a second frame added to the back to hold everything together. Not a hard job but it took a fair amount of time.

During the slow times, I reassemble the 15 hp outboard that I had taken apart last year when the motor mounts broke. The parts finally arrived and that little task was taken care of. I use the VIERS inflatable dinghy and the 15 hp outboard while I'm there so I had a little extra incentive. My little 3.3 hp outboard doesn't move the 12 foot inflatable to well.

We also got a new 50 hp Tohatsu outboard for the VIERS 16 foot Twin-V boat. That required loading the boat on its trailer and taking it to St Thomas on the car ferry. I was a little worried about backing it onto the ferry but Jamie did it in a very impressive manner. Pete Regan and I went over to bring it back and had a little problem on the way back. The trailer is rarely used but it is always in salt water when it is used. Somehow it never seems to get rinsed off after use so the salt water sits on it and rusts everything. The spring on one side of the trailed had rusted so much that it collapsed on the way back. This let the fender come down and ride on the tire and one of the fender bolts cut through the rubber as we drove. We were coming up the hill from Cruz Bay when it happened and it was a while before we could pull off the road. Once we saw what the problem was we found an old 2x4 and shoved it in under the spring to hold the finder off the tire. This worked until we got to Coral Bay where we launched the boat. Then it was about an 8 mile trip back to VIERS. The engine wasn't through it's break-in period yet so we had to go very slowly. We eventually made it back with no more problems. The new engine is nice but it seems to have a problem with the alternator and doesn't keep the battery charged. I left before that was fixed but hopefully it's been taken care of.

Other tasks included building 12 new display cases for the museum. Randy has gotten a bunch of new artifacts to be displayed in the Tektite Museum. There is a 40 year anniversary of the end of the Tektite project this fall and he wanted them ready for that. One of the 'new' items is a rebreather that was used during Tektite. The rebreather replaces the normal SCUBA gear and works by scrubbing out the carbon monoxide from the air they use and adding a little oxygen to it. This means there are no bubbles emitted. Pretty neat!

I made a couple of shopping trips to St Thomas The first trip was also to take Randy Brown, the VIERS director, to the airport for his flight home. We stopped to eat at Victor's Hideaway which is on top of a hill overlooking Crown Bay. Crown Bay is one of the two places where the cruise ships come in to dock. Since it's deeper that the one down town, the bigger ships come in there. That day the Oasis of the Seas was in port. It is the largest cruise ship in the world and was on its maiden voyage. Since it was the maiden voyage, it was only carrying about 3,000 people plus crew. It normally carries over 6,000. I've seen it there a couple of other times and saw it go by St John a couple of times just after dark. It is a BIG ship

The other big ship I saw in Crown Bay was the Dockwise Yacht Transporter. This is like a big ocean going dry dock. They load it by submerging it far enough that the yachts can pull in under their own power. The yachts are blocked and supports are welded to the deck of the transporter while still under water and then they raise it back up so the yachts are out of the water during the trip. It looks like it could hold a dozen or so good size yachts. They have a regular route between the Caribbean and Europe and I think other ships that cover other parts of the world. The owners can live on the yacht during the trip. I've heard that it's comparable price wise with hiring a delivery crew and it saves the wear and tear of an ocean passage. The big gray thing in the picture is a yacht although probably the ugliest one I've ever seen.

It wasn't all work though. I did a fair amount of snorkeling, trying to get in at least an hour a day. I didn't always make that but I did get some nice pictures and even a few short videos. I'm working to put a page of them on this site but haven't gotten it done yet. I've tried to identify the fish but there are several that I haven't been able to find. I also got a couple of videos that I'll get on there sometime. There is a wide variety of sea life in >Lameshur Bay with lots of fish, sharks, stingrays and misc. other stuff. Jamie, the manager at VIERS, got some nice pictures of a whale shark that was about 15 feet long. One of his pictures was on the front page of the St John newspaper.

Other than the snorkeling, I try to do at least a short hike every day. I usually go about a mile or so but with about a 30 story building climb at the end. It gets the heart going pretty well and I think I may have lost a little weight last winter. I got a few longer hikes in also with the longest being about 8 miles. St John is a great place to hike, especially if you don't mind a few hills. I have been looking up at the hills north of Lameshur Bay as long as I've been staying there thinking how beautiful the view from the top would be. This year I hiked to the top of the hill to left in the picture. The view was great! Bella Vita is sitting there at the bottom of the hill with just a couple other boats behind her. The building is the VIERS lab and to the north of it is the mangrove swamp. It used to be full of really large mangroves but they died when a hurricane plugged up the entrance to the swamp about ten years ago. The mangroves live in salt water but they need fresh salt water and when the entrance got plugged, they all died. Another storm a year or two later opened it up again and the mangroves are starting to grow again but it will be decades before they approach what they used to be like. In the background is Little Lameshur Bay with the sugar mill ruins on the beach. I also have wind surfer at VIERS but I've pretty particular about what winds I'll go out in. It's a bit of a hassle getting it out and assembled (Yea, I'm also getting lazy) so I only use it when the winds are strong and steady. The hills around Lameshu Bay seem to make the winds get gusty and that makes it hard to sail the wind surfer. Pete, a volunteer from New York City uses it more than I do.

We hosted a group from NOAA for a day last winter. They were in St Thomas mapping the bottom south of st Thomas and took a day off to come over and see VIERS. We gave them a good lunch, a tour of VIERS and went for a nice snorkel including catching the first Lion fish caught on the south side of st John. They were very appreciative and invited five of us on a VIP trip they were doing the next day. We got up VERY early and took the ferry to St Thomas for the trip. The ship was the Nancy Foster and is about 180 feet long. It was originally built by the Navy as a torpedo tester. It was taken someplace, like the Straits of Jan de Fuca in Washington, where it was moored while they fired the torpedoes. It was designed for calm waters and they said it was not very comfortable in rough seas. I think the limit for the mapping was 4 foot seas. Anything larger and they stayed in port. They gave us a nice tour of the ship, a demo of the mapping systems, lunch and a demo of the ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle). It is operated by a guy in the ship who watches on a closed circuit TV. It can go down to about 900 feet but we were only in about 200 feet. It was a very interesting day and definitely worth getting up early.

The Lion fish mentioned above is a fish that is native to the Pacific Ocean but has somehow gotten in to the Atlantic. It is very invasive and will eat most anything. It has no natural predators in the Atlantic so the fear is that it will take over the reefs and kill off the other fish. It's a pretty fish with long frilly fins but is poisonous to touch with a toxic venom that can be fatal to humans. I think about 8 have been caught in the Virgin Islands and they have been found in the Bahamas, along the US coast and in Bermuda. The Park Service is serving as a clearing house and taking reports of sightings and arranging to have the caught when found. Apparently they don't move very much so once they get a sighting most can be caught. The picture is from Yahoo.

Only a couple of guests this year to go sailing. Steve Applegate came done for a week and we got in a quick trip to St Croix in a week of not real good winds. Sally Shafer also came down for a week with even worse sailing weather. We got in some snorkeling along the way back from St Thomas and then spent a day on a really nice sail up the Sir Francis Drake channel in the British Virgin Islands. The rest of the time was spent snorkeling around Lameshur Bay which is not a bad way to spend some time.

I left St Thomas on May 21 for the trip north prior to hurricane season. My plan was to go north of Puerto Rico and the Turks and Caicos and then about 100 NM east of the Bahamas so I could duck in if the weather got bad or if I had boat problems. This was pretty much what I did except that I went about 300 miles east of the Bahamas just to shorten the trip. The trip was very slow with light winds most of the way. There were a few times that I was going to slow to be able to steer the boat so I just dropped the sails and floated for several hours until the wind picked up some. That makes for a slow trip but at least the seas were calm for the whole trip. I was almost to Morehead City, NC, before I got in my first 100 NM day. Since the winds were so light, my wind generator couldn't come close to keeping the batteries charged so I had to motorsail a lot to charge the batteries. I don't like doing this but the real problem was that I was running low on fuel on fuel, both diesel for the boat engine and gasoline for my little Honda generator, and when the forecast was for some nasty weather near Cape Hatteras I decided to go into Morehead City and fuel up and clear customs. After a couple of hours ashore I headed back out and went up around Hatteras and into the Chesapeake. The bad weather in the forecast never happened and I had a nice sail around Hatteras and up to Norfolk. Since I had cleared customs in Morehead City I didn't have to stop in Norfolk and went about 45 miles up the Chesapeake before stopping in Mill Creek off the Great Wicomico River. This is one of my favorite anchorages on the Chesapeake and I spent a couple of days there just relaxing and catching up on my sleep. From there I went up to Mill Creek off the Patuxent River for one night and then up to the Rhode River just south of Annapolis. From there to the boatyard on Gibson Island is only about 26 NM but the winds came around right on the nose so I had to motor the rest of the way.

I got back to the boatyard just in time for the Lord Nelson Victory Tug rendezvous being hosted by my friend Natalie at the Gibson Island Yacht Club. There were only five boats there this year but a few other owners showed up for a weekend of festivities. I went to few of the activities, mostly the ones involving food it seems, and had a good time talking to the owners. They are a really nice group of people.

After that I drove back to Lexington and am still here. I'll be going back to the boat after the fourth to do the required maintance. I'll have it pulled out and sand and paint the bottom and a couple of other things. I want to have the steel thickness checked again to make sure it is not rusting badly on the inside of the hull. There is a large section of the hull that I can't get to for inspection so it has to be checked from the outside. If it's OK, she'll go back into the water. If not, I'll have to cut out some sections and have new steel welded in. I am also thinking about installing a new autopilot. My current autopilot can not handle a boat the size of Bella Vita and I need one with considerably more power. When single handed, it's necessary to have a good automatic steering system. My wind vane works well when offshore, when there is wind, but there are times when the autopilot is better. After that I may head for Maine again if there is still time left. Natalie wants to take her boat to New York so I may go with her on that trip too. Then it will be back to St John leaving about the first of Nov.