Day 6, Friday, April 26 - Chillaxing on Francis Bay Beach

 

Friday it was another beautiful sunrise. 

We decided to meet at Francis Bay beach to relax. 

We know the way, but every time we leave our place, google shows an alternate route to the left on King Hill Road, it is over a mile shorter. I said let's take it. Apparently google is not up to date, it seems it was a few hurricanes ago when it was passable. We were impressed with the rock crawling ability of a Jeep, they are a true off road machine. 

So we reset and went to Francis Bay and were pleasantly surprised that it was not crowed at all, easy parking and a prime spot with shade. 

We had 'Stumpfest' with Jimmy Buffet music coming from my phone under the stump.

We swam and played on the beach, it was quite relaxing. 

We even took about a mile walk/hike on the Francis Bay trail to the ruins of an Estate House and Sugar Boiling Factory. The trail goes around a large salt pond with much of the trail on elevated boardwalks making it an easy hike. 

This area is known for sea turtles so we donned our gear and set out in search of turtles. We were a bit disappointed that we did not find any. We did find a ray and it was a good snorkel.

As we were having a few refreshments on the beach, we noticed a few snorkelers hanging by one of the markers in the bay.  I asked one of them when they came in, sure enough there were turtles. We hit the water again.  

We got some prime Turtle Time. There were several large turtles feeding and they had Remoras that were feeding on their shells. It was cool to watch the Remoras switch from top to bottom of the turtle whenever the turtles came up for air.  We just hung out and watched them, very cool. 

After our beach day we stopped at Lucy's for a cocktail.  We arrived right about when they close, 4PM, but the owner served us with a smile. We had fried plantains, French fries and drinks. Lucy's has an awesome setting and it was a very nice place to have a drink. 

We stopped at the Love City Market and picked up frozen pizza for dinner. We were going to go to bed early but the girls started a Star Wars puzzle and we all got sucked in...we worked on it until 10:30PM.... It is fun when you can say things like "give me Chewbacca's left eye". 

Saturday is our last vacation day on the island, we plan to go out for breakfast at Cinnamon Bay Campground.