We spent a couple of days in Montego Bay getting groceries and internet situated for work. It’s a nice enough place. The guys on the dock work hard all day and then fire up spliffs in the evening while they handline fish off the dock to bring home for dinner. Ali and I enjoy spending evenings, after the kids are in bed, just sitting up top watching life go on aboard the cruise ships. The weather is nice, stars are out, and there’s not a care in the world.

The family has been playing a lot of Ravine lately. And when there aren’t enough willing parents to join in, the kids create their own game out of it. They do this with all of our card games and board games. I don’t know at what point we adults lose our ability to imagine the way kids do. Watching them come up with rules, on the fly, for a new game, and then keep adjusting and creating as the game goes along, is a lesson for me. I’m not exactly a play-by-the-rules guy, but even I must seem like a strict disciplinarian when it comes to playing games. These two don’t need our adult rules in order to have fun.

Lowe asks me sometimes if I want to play Cover Your Assets (one of our favorite family games). “Not the real game,” he’ll say. He usually asks me this when Ali is making dinner and Ouest is reading a book. So we sit down with the big deck of cards and he hands me a big wad of cards and says, “Your uncle died and left you all this money.” And then pretty much immediately he takes a bunch of my cards and says, “Tax day!” and then continues to do this until dinner is ready, with only small variations. My job, for the most part, is to accept my gifts, and pay my taxes. As an adult, figuring out why this is fun isn’t easy, but seeing how hilarious and fun it is to an eight-year-old makes you laugh regardless.

Taking advantage of some shore power to get the fridges defrosted by throwing a heater in there. We really could benefit from replacing the seals on the fridges, but haven’t gotten around to that. Defrosting is only necessary every few months, so the search for, and replacement of seals, always falls way down the list of to-dos.

We told our friend in MoBay that we were going to head out, stopping in Discovery Bay on our way east.

“Discovery Bay, mon. Ha, you mean they bay Columbus “discovered”? You know what we call Christopher Columbus? Christopher Come-boss-us.”

That word, discovered, grates on a lot of people, in a lot of countries.

My own little explorers, not affiliated with any particular country, king, or queen, were happy to be in a big bay with a nice 10 knot breeze for a few days. They’ve gotten really good ripping around in the sailing dinghy, and especially liked to torment Ali by doing loops around Bumfuzzle while cutting the corners by mere inches.

“Careful! Careful! Careful!”

And if the wind died down and things got a little too tame, they’d stand up and rock the boat to keep it interesting.

This is really the only thing we did for a few days. Discovery Bay doesn’t have a ton on offer. There is a private beach thing with dolphins trapped in a cage as the only real “entertainment” on tap. The kids were convinced that I should swim underneath with my tools and free them. I assured them that would likely end with me in a Jamaican jail and the dolphins still in a cage. They were unperturbed.

There were a couple beach bars on a decent stretch of beach, but the patrons of these establishments were so absolutely wrecked that hanging out there with kids was completely out of the question. So, we just hung on the boat and waited for the calm weather due in a few days.