agility @ sea

Ted’s birthday extravaganza has been an absolute blast. Wonderful people, incredible location, fun events, excellent food, and impeccable service and attention from the island staff. Yesterday a large catamaran was chartered for a day trip to the Tobago Cays. We snorkeled with turtles and then were treated to a beach bbq complete with massive quantities of lobster, delicious salads, and plenty of beer and wine.

This morning we intended to dock Agility on the main resort dock for a couple of hours and open her for tours, but first had to untangle some fishing line from the starboard prop. That turned into a major project. We were about to give up and began researching haul out facilities, but managed to brainstorm and determined that the shower pump handle could be used for leverage. Success!!! Now Tim is reassembling the prop.

In the meantime, a relatively large catamaran chose to anchor about 20 ft away from us despite plenty of space in the bay. That’s always annoying, but we were trying to behave ourselves when their jib came loose. They didn’t have a sheet attached to the clew so it was wildly flopping around in 20 knot winds while the crazy people were trying to catch it with their hands. In case you don’t understand the terminology, the jib is a smaller sail forward of the mainsail, the clew is a metal fitting that a line (rope) goes through to allow maneuverability of the sail. The clew is small, but heavy, and if it hit someone in the head it could kill them. So seeing three people jumping up and down trying to catch the clew was vaguely terrifying. We kept yelling “furl, furl” and making a furling motion with our index fingers. They finally caught on, but did seem quite angry with us. There was a toddler on board adding to the alarm. Plus they were so close we probably would have had blood and brains spattered on Agility. Ha ha. Joking about that.

For now, all under control, although the nutty neighbor is now messing around with his mainsail. Oh no! Now he’s up in the bosun’s chair screaming his head off. We may need to move. Ugh.