Our vacation was a smashing success. Lots of beach time, a bit of snorkeling, some fun walks, and meeting new friends. This is the beach at Cinnamon Bay, about a one minute walk from our tents. Rough living.

Local wildlife included donkeys, mongoose, and a few of these critters.

At night the frogs come out of their homes on the bathouse wall.

Hermit crabs are everywhere and range from baseball size to this little fella.

The jungle is full of ruins of the old sugar planations.

Looking across to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. Oh look! A square-rigger.

From Ram’s Head you can see the waves crashing in from the east–to our right here, the next landform is Africa.

Through mutual friends we met a great gang of oldtime locals who ended up here after sailing all over the world. Here we are helping Thatcher put up his newly repaired mizzen mast.

Glade joined the band.

And back to Cinnamon Bay for sunset.

Back at the shop we jumped back into Roly Poly

She’s so cute I can hardly stand it. 57″ shorter than a standard Briggs dory, and just 1″ narrower.

We finally got some snow! Early morning light from my bedroom.

Since we had nothing better to do on the weekend we removed Cricket and Glade’s old crumbling shower and put in a new tub.

Cricket has joined the Resistance.

Bill brought Peace River, a 1972 Briggs boat we refurbished back in 2017, back to the shop for a dropped footwell and bilge pump system.

While I had my head stuck in Peace River’s footwell, Cricket and Glade blasted out a whole new boat for Bill to use in shallower water–an open version of our Chub design. Here’s Cricket building the fly deck.

Glade closing down the foundry after a day of casting bronze parts for the new boats

And since we were casting, one of our cows was missing her right ear, so we made her a new one.

We often will start a build centered over the spot where our big two-ton hoist cable hits the floor. But we kept losing track of just where that spot was. So we asked our friend VK to draw us an X to cast and embed in the floor.

The new Chub came together pretty quickly.


And that pretty much wraps up the ’24-’25 boatbuilding season at Fretwater. Cricket and Glade are already on their second river trip and it’s only mid March.