Flipped catamaran in Village Cay Marina

I’ll spare everyone the saga of going back to Road Town to extend our visas past New Years and the number of offices and people we had to talk to – more bureaucracy that only drove me nuts and made me wonder if it was even worth it. We had gotten word Stephen and Maureen aboard their boat Minuet had made it to St Thomas and we would see them for Christmas – it was time to do some grocery shopping!

We headed over to Penn’s Landing Marina on the east end of Tortola. More destruction with lots of sunk boats present. We were particularly nervous with our approach because we were taking a mooring in what looked to be much too shallow water surrounded by wrecks. The wrecks were truly there, but turns out the water is much deeper than the charts indicate so we were fine on our mooring.

Look at the mast on this one – so sad

The marina doesn’t have many amenities right now – no fuel, which we luckily didn’t need. They did have water, so we planned on topping off our tanks the next morning. And they had showers – lovely to take a long (ie. 5 minutes in cruisers time) shower without panicking about wasting water on board.

Since it was the holidays we decided to treat ourselves to the Red Rock Restaurant for dinner that night. It’s probably the only fine dining restaurant open in the whole island chain and it didn’t disappoint. We had complimentary cocktails since we had picked up a mooring – if there had been four of us we would have gotten the mooring for free. We split an appetizer of beef kebabs with the most tender yet charred beef and chimichurri sauce on the side. Trip had pork for dinner which he demolished in record time and I had a chicken schnitzel so big I had to take half of it home for leftovers. Amazingly they had one of our favorite Rodney Strong Pinot Noirs for very little markup from retail, so it was a nice way to celebrate early.

Red Rock Restaurant – decked out for the holidays

The next morning we dinghied over to the remainder of the dinghy dock behind the grocery store. We first went off to the laundromat (Merry Christmas to me now means clean sheets and clothes) to wash a few loads and then to the grocery store, which was surprisingly well provisioned for a) an island post storm and b) two days before a major holiday. I cobbled together exactly what I’d need for Christmas dinner with the Judds. Once that was complete we brought the boat over to the marina dock where the marina manager Justin was waiting to help us tie off. He was kind enough to comp us our water since we only needed half of what we originally thought (we’re getting better at conserving than I thought, especially with all the water we’re drinking down here to avoid dehydration).

Unfortunately Trip had also discovered that the new dinghy light we bought in Road Town didn’t work, so we sailed back over only to find that the store had closed early for the holiday. The good news was that we got word that Stephen and Maureen had made it to the BVI so we sailed back to Benures Bay for a holiday reunion.