We’ve Been Robbed!!!
Friday August 26
We decided to leave late this morning because we were only going to go to a Anchorage nearby and didn’t need to get there very soon. As we were thinking about leaving Austin by and told us that she was going to make jewelry with the looper girls on her boat that afternoon. Colletta and I were excited about doing this too, this so we decided to stay one more night at the Marina instead of going and anchoring out. Phyllis had an unbelievable supply of jewelry beads, leather and all kinds of things for making jewelry. I had some pieces to make earrings from a matching necklace that I had so she put these together for me. I had found and interesting shell on Shakleford island so she made me a very nice necklace using the shell that I had found. Again, we went to the pool in the afternoon and then had 5:30 docktails with our new friends.
In the early morning around 3:15 AM a fan in our stateroom fell over. We felt it was due to a wake from Waterman heading out fishing. We heard some noise in the sundeck and John thought it was a chair moving in the wind. He went up to tie them down and you discovered that one of our folding bikes was missing. John came back in the boat to get dressed and woke me up and told me that the bike was missing. I went up on the deck to check out the bikes and saw a 19 – 20 year old standing right by our boat. He was barefoot and shirtless. I told him”where’s my bike! I want my bike back”. He claimed that he worked for the Marina and had gotten a call about the electricity being out. I told him to just give me my bike back. He said that there were 3 bikes up at the top of the dock. By this time John came up from the boat dressed with his flash light and followed the kid out to the end of the dock and got our bike back.
We asked the kid his name and of course he lied. He still claimed that he and his friend were helping out the Marina. We had gotten our bikes back so we didn’t try to detain the kid. When we got back to the boat we called 911. This Island has been described as Mayberry without the sheriff. As we waited for the county police to come John decided to check out the rest of the boat. He found that they had also stolen a pair of stabilized binoculars and our ditch bag (a bag that you have at the ready in case the boat is sinking and you need to evacuate the the boat) with all kinds of safety equipment in it from our upper helm. We figure that it all adds up to over $3,000 dollars worth of stuff.
We are glad that we that no one was hurt and we learned some lessons from this. The police came and told us that there was a drug problem on this island. Who would have thought that this little island town that we had come to grow so fond of would be a place of drugs and thieves. Maybe it’s more like Rockford than we thought.
