Ana, Joe, Jon, Maya, Loreta, Zdravko
On Xmas we went to Ana and Zdravko’s. There we met her niece and her family. She’s a musician (W/ loved it because her forte’ is the piano), Joe her partner, and Maya and Johnny
Jon da Budding Photographer
their children. Now they’re all “normal” people as normal as any family in the 21st century can be.
Joe N Maya
What was interesting was that Loreta has given concerts twice at Carnegie Hall. Yep! She’s famous and she plays a hell of a piano! W/ found her on You-Tube. She also has a crazy band called the Texas Slavs, writes music, plays and teaches piano.
So while Ana, Zdravko, W/ and I caught up on the years past we quizzed the clan about life in Texas, on the big stage, etc. Even Joe was on stage in Carnegie Hall when Loreta played a concert there with tendenitis in her right wrist. Joe went on stage and comically oiled her shoulder. Sounded like a hoot! But to be there playing. Amazing!
W & Zdravko
Two days later we went to Brewers Bay to shorten the head stay. Calm and quiet; very little boat traffic. Perfect place. Up in the am, eat some breakfast and muscles W/ hauls my petite frame up the mast to remove the headstay from the mast head. I remove it; lower it and she kindly lowers me back down. So now we’ve cut off the 5″ (stretch) and I’ve taken off the terminal end and we hear a siren from what sounds like an ambulance. Well that’s weird; this generally is so quiet here; oh well, we keep working. A couple of minutes later the siren is louder and we hear a voice hollering “Hello”. I go up on deck and the Department of Natural Resources are 3 meters away. “Yes” I say. They kindly and firmly tell us we need to move… now, immediately, soon because there is kindof an emergency! Yeah right. I tell them it’s really difficult as I have some of my rig taken apart and they acquiese a bit and say soon, I can come back at 6pm tonight though! Damn, Double Damn, Damn. Luckily the mast will be fine as long as we’re not pounding. I have the headstay up and both intermediates and the backstay and both port and starboard shrouds. So we motor 5 miles away in basically calm seas to a small cove on Water Island called Flamingo. We had been there years ago sitting out some nasty wx and had looked at stopping there yesterday but a 100′ ship was anchored right in the middle. Fortunately the 100′ er was gone. So we anchored and got to work.
As we finished up we decided that it was too rolly there so we would look at Honeymoon Bay, Elephant Bay and if they were all too crowded or rolly then back to Charlotte Amalie. They were TOO crowded. Years ago when we were here only about 10% of the boats were anywhere near those two bays that there are now! There had to be 20 boats in Honeymoon and about 75 or more in Elephant Bay! Jerry from Percephanie tells us that all the people in the bays basically work on St. Thomas. He calls Elephant Bay and Long Bay (the one we’re in) the employee’s anchorage.
So we’re in Charlotte Amalie and to find out what all the fuss was about we picked up a local paper while doing the laundry. Come to find out Vice President Biden and his family are here to vacation with some friends on Water Island. Funny that DPNR wouldn’t let us anchor in Brewers bay (there were a total of 4 boats there), sent us to basically Water Island and that was where the VP and family were staying with about 150 other boats!
Then as I’m scanning the paper further I see that President Jimmy Carter and his family are vacationing in St. Croix. Now out of the three of them maybe Carter is the only one the majority would consider “Great”, I mean he did win a Nobel Prize and was President of the most powerful country on Earth at the time. The others you may choose to say are notable. But hey; there are more pro football players then VP’s and how many people in the world can claim to have entertained at Carnegie Hall. Not I!
Fair Winds