Sunday 26th January 2025
It seemed strange and rather quiet waking up to a cottage without visitors. We’ve been here just under three weeks an we’ve enjoyed the company of visitors for two weeks, now we’re on our own, what to do???
The weather has again changed, yesterday was generally glorious but today it is disappointing with rain showers etc., so this morning Christine sorted out the spare room ready for ???????? I caught up with writing the logs and then it was lunch time.
The rain still kept coming so we decided to stay put and do nothing other than discuss future plans (watch this space) whilst watching the rain and dismal cloud formations until it was dinner time. Today being Sunday Christine produced a magnificent roast dinner with superb “roasties” but with limited alcohol; livers, weight and all that!!!
We concluded with an evening of cribbage where Christine reigned supreme.
Monday 27th January 2025
Another lazy morning as the weather is in two minds; “to rain or not to rain” so pottered about until it made up its mind.
By midday things were looking up, it hadn’t rained for a bit and the “blue” was peeping through, so decided to head to Deep Bay Beach after lunch. Deep bay is where Christine and Martin headed out on the dingy in the heavy rain to dive off the wreck last week; hopefully we won’t have that sort of rain today!!
Deep bay is the other side of St. John’s; 6-miles away but it will take bout 30-minutes, mainly due traffic in the town.
We finished lunch, gathered our things and headed off and by this time it was 90% blue sky, result. Our route ran along the harbour and today only one cruise ship, “Tui” and what looked like a monster 3-masted sailing boat; most probably a cruising boat as well but not the usual 4 or 5 ships on the jetty. Last week we were is discussing the logistics of imports, food in particular as there is no real deep water harbour here, even oil tankers stop out at sea and moor onto a fixed pumping station off Runaway bay, and pipe the stuff in. But today we saw a different story to John’s harbour, across the entrance bay there is a container jetty, just like all the rest around the world but very much smaller!!
10 minutes later we arrived in Deep Bay car park, a 5-minute walk across a bridge and follow the path through the undergrowth, then wow. A crescent shaped beach, golden sand, clear blue sea and virtually no one this end of the beach, just as I remember. At the other end is “The Royalton” beach resort, fortunately they don’t “stray” to our end!!! What is our end is a Seafood “shack” Restaurant called “Just Grilling” so we went to take a look and bought a couple of beers. Lobster is their main dish but do offer chicken for those that don’t want a lobster. I asked about freshness and he pointed into the sea where he has a big lobster trap; straight out and onto the “bar-be”; got to go there next week.
Over looking this beach and more importantly, St. John’s harbour entrance is what’s left of “Fort Barrington”, built in 1779 on top of “Goat Hill”, “and you need to be a goat to climb up to it”, we only got 2/3rds up last time we were here and didn’t feel the need to finish the job off this time!!!!!
Back on the beach we got talking to a couple of Canadians who picked our brains on various things before enjoying the cool waters of deep bay; no rain, no wind, just wall-to-wall sunshine, at last. Eventually our time was up so after our customarily walk along the beach to dry off we headed back to the car, though we did bump into the Canadians again and recommended they go to Shirley Heights on Sunday.
Dinner again on our verandah but no wind though the mozzies were biting. We followed this with another disastrous game of crib (for me!!) before heading to bed after a beautiful beach afternoon. We hope tomorrow is as good as we head to Jolly Beach.
