Rodney Bay - Pigeon Island

It's been a quiet couple of days here in Rodney Bay. Quiet except for the incessant jet skis, that is. There are several huge resorts along the beach and of course all of them have their own armada of beach toys -- hobie cats, banana boats, etc. I've come to tolerate the jet skis, but yesterday two yahoos on a hobie cat came a little too close to our boat; they almost didn't turn in time. I do wonder sometimes if there are ever any accidents.

Speaking of accidents, Saturday morning Kevin dinghied over to the fuel dock to fill our jerry jugs and watched two boats damage themselves while getting fuel. The first one was a catamaran -- the wind was blowing him hard onto the dock and instead of using his engines to maneuver himself off the dock he just put them both in full throttle forward and tried to power off the dock. Worked really well until he tried to turn the bow to the wind, his transom scraped pretty hard against the pilings and he got pushed back up against the dock. Ouch. Then a powerboat beat up his props trying to tie up inside the T-head where the water was too shallow for his boat. I guess we're just glad it wasn't us. When the wind starts pushing you around, docking can be a real pain in the butt.

That afternoon we decided to head over to Pigeon Island where we'd heard there was a good book exchange. So we took about twenty paperbacks and headed across the bay. We pulled up to the dinghy dock and a woman wearing a National Trust shirt asked us to pay the park fee of US$5 per person, even though we were just going to trade books at the bar. So we paid our fee, traded our books (at least the book swap was free), and decided to explore a bit since we'd already paid for it. Pigeon Island (not really an island -- a causeway built in 1970 links it to the mainland) has an interesting history. The first European to settle on St. Lucia was a Frenchman named Jambe de Bois (literally "leg of wood", yep a real live pegleg), and he used the island as a base for raiding Spanish ships. Later the Brits established Fort Rodney on the island, and even more recently the US used the island as a signal station in WWII. Imagine getting that plum assignment, instead of being shipped off to Normandy. Although the locals must not have been too happy about the outpost, since the interpretive display referred to it as "the US occupation", failing to mention that the US paid to lease the island and established the station to keep an eye on Martinique (a French territory) after the fall of France to the Germans. But who wants to split hairs? Anyway, after a bit of a hike we reached the fort which was high up on the hill with views of both the bay and the Caribbean Sea. Big kudos to Kevin for doing the hike with a backpack full of books.