Charlotte-Amalie, St. Thomas, USVI

Carnival Valor (out of Puerto Rico) … that was the only ship in port today.  It still made for a quiet time.  At least the stores were open.

We walked town.  Believe it or not, we didn’t visit one jewelry store!  But we were on a quest for cheap alcohol to replenish our stocks and ended up quite successful.  Back home, we buy Captain Morgan Spiced Rum as our preferred beverage.  But, when that is too expensive (not on sale), we opt for the less expensive brand “Admiral Nelson”.  We can usually get it for around $10-$12 back home.  Here … we found it for $2.50/bottle!  We refrained from emptying the store of its entire stock and settled on 4 bottles.  That should get us through a couple of days!

So … what does one do when they’re in St. Thomas and they’re hungry?  Hooters, of course!  There is a Hooters near the cruise ship terminal.  We were going to dine in but the cost of 20 wings was $20 (or there abouts) and beers were about $5.00/each.  Ouch!  They had a take-out special that included 40 wings, curly fries, cheese sauce, coleslaw and baked beans … for $29.99.  That was a much better deal.  We ordered it to go with plans to go to a place we’d seen that serves beer ($2.00) and frozey drinks ($6.00).  Just as we reached that spot, we felt the drops begin.  First, just one or two but we glanced at the hillside, just a short distance away, you could see the darkness.  The grey wall of water was moving quickly in our direction.  We scurried back to our dinghy and headed back to Soulmatie.  It drizzled on our trip back and we were BARELY staying ahead of the downpour.  Within seconds of us reaching Soulmatie, the storm hit.  It rained hard!

But, we sat in our nicely enclosed cockpit and enjoyed our Hooter’s feast.  The rain here is much like in Florida.  You can have a torrential downpour in one minute and then it’s bright and sunny again only minutes later.  This was one of those storms.  It passed over us in about 20 minutes and the rest of the day was wonderful.

I don’t think we’ve had a hard rain like that since we left the US.  Unfortunately, it reminded us that our bimini top (the “roof” of the enclosure) has several spots where it leaks.  It’s the original top that came with the boat and the leaks have only been getting worse.  They’re all at the seams.  We need to find a way to seal it up until we can get a new one made (some place down the road) but they’re expensive and that wasn’t in our budget.  I guess, if we can just continue to dodge raindrops, we won’t need to replace it … right?