Thursday July 17<br><br>Today was a planned stop at The Moorings. For the last several trips we have always booked for 10 days of sailing, with a night in the middle back at their marina for laundry, and some “get the kids off the boat before they go crazy” time. We also had a couple of mechanical issues for the mechanics to review.<br><br>Even though we had shore power A/C we had booked a room. This was a good thing since the A/C wasn’t working. As we found out at the end of the trip, a pump had been submerged in water from a cooling system leak and needed to be replaced. The lack of A/C didn’t affect this stop so we told Moorings not to bother investigating.<br><br>Elise went to the laundromat, Diana went to the pool and bar, and the kids settled down with a DVD rented from Renport while I took a nap. That evening we decided on pizza at Pusser’s. Perhaps not the greatest food in the islands but the pizza is fairly decent and the kids love the place. The British Navy frigate Iron Duke was in port and it appeared most of the crew had congregated at Pusser’s, not drinking pain killers or Pusser’s rum as one might expect, but rather putting a healthy dent in their beer inventory.<br><br>After dinner Elise and Diana decided to go up to the sailors and get a few to pose with them in a picture in front of the Pusser’s rum sign. The way these guys went after the ladies made me realize how long they must have been at sea! Several moon shots, grab shots, and whatever, we got the ladies out of harm’s way and back to Mariner Inn.<br><br><br>Friday July 18<br><br>We got a late start out of The Moorings so decided to head for Little Harbour Jost van Dyke instead of our planned trip to Cane Garden Bay. I’m not real fond of anchoring at CGB with all of the mooring buoys in the way so I figured we’d have some lobster at Little Harbour and motor to CGB the next day.<br><br>Decided to eat at Sydney’s. For $35 we had the largest lobster I’ve ever seen. At other places we’ve paid close to this amount for half a lobster. Food was good and also bought many $$$ worth of souvenirs.<br><br>Watched a sailboat come in over the reef at about 10pm. It was a dark night but I guess the skipper felt his radar gave him enough good information.<br><br>Saturday July 19 and Sunday July 20<br><br>Motored across the channel to Cane Garden Bay. The kids love CGB because the beach is fun to play on, there’s no surf to worry about, and you can grab lunch from several places on the shore. We decided to spend two nights here to make up in some small way for not making the trip to Anegada.<br><br>Having eaten ashore so many times, we decided to cook both nights in CGB. However the first night we discovered the stove would not stay on longer than 5 minutes, so we were forced to do all of our remaining cooking on the barbeque.<br><br>We began to here on the weather forecast about a tropical depression which had formed to the southwest of the island chain. It was expected to hit by Tuesday morning and the USVI were under a tropical storm watch.<br><br>Given that we were due in by noon on Tuesday, we began to consider heading in a day early. On Sunday we checked with The Moorings but they said they weren’t concerned about the storm and they would contact us if it became an issue.<br><br>Monday July 21<br><br>The early morning weather was basically the same as the day before, i.e., the weather was supposed to deteriorate by that evening and possible tropical storm winds would hit the BVI on Tuesday morning. Based upon this forecast, we decided to head back to The Moorings by Monday afternoon and spend the night on board in a slip with our wonderful shore power A/C.<br><br>We motored down the north shore of Tortola and through Thatch Cut. When we got to the other side I decided to raise the sails. After playing with them for a bit we decided to take them all down and motor like everyone else was doing.<br><br>Got to the marina in the early afternoon and had them look at the A/C. When told it was DOA and wouldn’t be fixed that day, we decided to get some rooms at the hotel. <br><br>Ate dinner and the hotel and packed up the boat which needed to be turned in by noon the next day.<br><br>Tuesday July 22<br><br>Went down to the boat to finish packing and unload the boat. Met with the debriefer to fill her in on the variety of mechanical problems we had encountered.<br><br>Elise and Diana went shopping while the kids watched more DVDs and I did some work over the internet.<br><br>That night we had a wonderful dinner at Spaghetti Junction with some friends of a coworker of Elise that live on Tortola.<br><br>Wednesday July 23<br><br>Up early to get bags together to head down to West End for ferry to St. Thomas. As I detailed in another post, going home this way for us at least, with our way too heavy bags and young kids, is probably not as good as a trip out of the airport.<br><br>After we finally made it to the departure area in St. Thomas we found the plane was going to be a couple of hours late taking off due to a bad tire that had to be replaced. My one fear about taking the Delta flight out of St. Thomas is that since it is their only flight, if it gets delayed or cancelled, we don’t have many options. Especially when on frequent flier tickets. We did finally leave a couple of hours late and were able to reschedule onto a later flight from Atlanta to Houston, getting home about 2am on Thursday.