We just dropped our guests off at the base. The week went extremely well, but I didn't feel I even had time for regular updates on my thread. Our itinerary basically ended up being Norman, Cooper, Saba, BEYC, Leverick, JVD.
There were some motion sickness issues, so we did not include Anegada this time, which is also a bit of a push for a week in my opinion. We hope to go again with this group and visit some of the spots we left out this time.
I was prepared for things to be far busier. We did avail ourselves of the BB option a number of times just to keep things as stress free as possible. Getting up at 7AM is not a hardship to me, I'm typically awake for several hours by then.
One thing I have not seen mentioned is the confusing system of reserving moorings at Norman Island on Dockwa.com. There is no premium, so my wife tried this out for curiosity and reserved a ball close to Pirates. Of course when we got there, we found another boat already on the ball. It was an older 53' Beneteau. Although there were lots of balls available, we politely asked them to move and they did. I don't know how they could have known that the ball was reserved online. It kind of looks like this is an attempt to save labor in collecting mooring fees by dinghy, but I totally do not understand how this system is supposed to work. If someone knows I would be happy to be enlightened.
Coincidentally, we found the same boat on our reserved BB at CIBC the next day. There were some language barrier issues, but this time they did not vacate our ball, citing "engine problems", which came out as "vagina problems" in a heavy Italian accent. That became a bit of a running joke.
Though skeptical of their excuse, I did not want to start a confrontation and CIBC saved the day by letting us use one of their private balls. I later saw the boat exhausting water and it left early the next morning. We joked that the boat should have been named Pinocchio. More later.
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