Day 15

We spent our last full day lazily enjoying Reef Bay in the morning.  Some of us slept in, others snorkeled, and a couple of the more daring crew members decided to go back and surf the kayaks in the waves up along the beachfront.  Not surprisingly, Mark was among them and came back with tales of being tumbled by the waves and getting hammered in the rocks and coral, and bashed by his kayak.  Of course that did not deter him from staying out and trying it over and over till he caught a wave for one perfect ride to shore.  Keith, who’s a little more experienced with kayak surfing gave Mark some good advise and told him to “keep flat” should he gets tumbled out of his boat.  As his bruises and scrapes would attest, Mark had a little trouble "keeping flat".

Kathy took the dingy back to the sugar mill to get one last peek at the bats and the old mill.

As you can tell from the lack of photos of these two events, I was the one who slept in.

Once everyone was back on board, we brought in all the drying towels, bedsheets, and bathing suits, then batten down all hatches not sporting tinfoil and duct tape, and tried to decide where to spend our last day on "Hakuna Matata".

It was a landslide vote for Peter Island.  It was close to Tortola where we'd be returning our floating home and we remembered it had a great beach on which we planned to enjoy our final day relaxing in the sun and playing in the surf.

The bay we returned to on Peter Island is called “Deadman’s Bay”

According to some of Mark’s reading before we set sail, Deadman’s Bay got it's name because that is the bay where, not surprisingly, a deadman was found floating.  It was the body of a pirate who had been left ashore on a neighboring island called "Dead Chest".  He was left there by the infamous pirate Black Beard along that famous bottle of rum and several other of his mutinous comrades.  The "Deadman" attempted to swim the half mile to Peter Island.  From the name we can extrapolate that while his body made it to shore, he soul sadly did not.  This fateful tale was the inspiration behind Robert Louise Stevenson's  pirate song "Deadman's Chest" in his Treasure Island novel.  

“Fifteen men and a dead man’s chest,

yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum…”.   

 (A dead man’s chest is a sailing term for a coffin.)

If the poor pirate had made it to that lovely stretch of beach, I can tell you from first hand experience he would have rather liked it there...

 

...and would have enjoyed a nice virgin daiquiri from the nearby resort beach bar...

  So on the deadman's behalf, we enjoyed his sunny namesake:

Here's Keith doing an impressive rendition of "Dead Man's Dingy".

While Kathy soaked up the last rays on sun.

Then a bit of welcome shade under some beach side palapas.

 

We laughed as we watched Connor and Chloe spend a solid hour with their heads underwater yet having an entire conversation with each other top side through their snorkels.

 Chloe spent the afternoon diving for shells:

 

enough to fill up her mask:

Connor snorkeled and shell hunted too:

...and brought me back this heart:

Later Keith went coconut hunting...

I'm not sure if it was hunting or cheating but either way the Keith got the job done--by using a paddle to swat one down.

When we had enough sun and surf we walked over to Peter Island Resort just up the beach.  The boys, so as not to lose the dingy, got the brilliant idea to tie it up to a beach lawn chair… 

 Yeah, that outta hold.

Connor has a real knack for finding simple ways to entertain himself on a Caribbean island:

A little coconut football, baseball, and a few rounds of cricket using an old plank of wood:

and even did some Bowling with a coconut:

 

Keith bowled a frame or two:

While chloe found a nearby swing:

When we’d gotten enough of land we headed back down the beach and thankfully the hearty lashed up dingy was still there.  

and now, A Little Shark Encounter:

(one in which we find out that Connor is indeed 

just as wary of sharks as he is of the jellys!)

This was our last night and we were all a little slap-silly as we motored back to the boat.  Keith soon noticed that our dingy had an unusual amount of water inside it and upon further inquary, he discovered that in our severely relaxed state none of us had bothered to put the plug back in the inside of the dingy after draining it of water.  Now the water inside the dingy was on it's way to being equal to the water on the outside of it.  Keith quickly put the plug back in but upon standing up BEFORE coming to a complete stop he accidentally flicked his loose snorkel into the water.  As it was making a rapid descent, I lurched forward to snatch it before it sunk too deep and Keith decided this would be a good time to help by falling backwards into the ocean with me in tow.

Now, not only was his snorkel sinking but so was both his and my pair of sunglasses that were--heretofore--atop our heads.  Quick thinking Connor jumped from the dingy and dove down and snatched my sunglasses that were half way to the sandy bottom.  Not one to shun a little tomfoolery, Mark jumped in too and went on the hunt for Keith’s snorkel.  As luck would have it, Kathy and Chloe were transporting our leftovers and quickly departed the madness before we could throw them overboard too.  

That left the four of us all laughing and enjoying a careless and refreshing watery reprieve...or so we thought.

Shortly after recovering his sunglasses, Keith swims to the boat, climbs aboard, and hunts around for a mask so he can go on a more intense manhunt for his lost snorkel.  With my sunglasses safely in the clutches on Connor's hand I'm still scanning the sandy bottom with Connor and Mark for the darn thing.  

All of a sudden Connor comes lurching out of the water.  It was as if he had come to the surface, stood up on the water, and took two giant steps atop the water, and leaps onto our boat.  As he jumps onto the deck he says, “I just saw a shark!”   

I didn’t believe him as we’ve seen some pretty big fish on our trip and figured he’d just misidentified some sort of large underwater creature.  But then Mark jumps out of the water almost as fast and as miraculous as Connor had done, and starts saying something about a shark too.  I’m still in the water minding my own business looking for the lost snorkel. 

But then I survey the water around me and sure enough, there’s some sort of shark swimming around our boat...the same boat I was swimming around.  It didn’t take long for me to clear out of the water too.  The thing was only about three or four feet long but we've seen enough "Jaws" movies that we know sharks, no matter what their size, always have the right of way.

We all scrambled on deck looking for our masks and hastily stuck them to our faces and knelt on the deck stairs and plunged our heads into the water to get a closer look.  We stared in disbelief.  

The boys decided that the dingy offered a better viewpoint and pulled the little vessel in and carefully got aboard.

In the delirium of our own mini "shark week" the boys forgot the concept of weight and balances and almost tipped themselves over in the dingy!

I grabbed my camera and Kathy ran for the fridge to look for leftovers that would make perfect "chum".  She began feeding the thing to see if she could get it a little closer so that we could take a better look at it.  As she bated the thing with food it began to go crazy.  It started acting more and more, well, shark-like. 

The shark was not real keen on cameras and didn't slow long enough to get a totally unblurred shot of him but here's the most decent photo I got:

The thing ate a huge piece of chicken, bone and all, IN ONE BITE.  Hungry little fella.  Once he started feeding he was way more aggressive and instinctively made jerky darting movements and circled back around staying close to Kathy's cafeteria.  Lucky for him it was our last day on the boat and we sorely needed to clean out the fridge.  

Who knew sharks liked leftover peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?

Keith's snorkel was no longer a priority.  We were having a little cautionary fun playing with the new fish in our fish tank.

Another adventurous end to a fabulous day.