The days here in October have been unusually warm this year in the Leeward Islands. I discussed this yesterday with my taxi cab driver Bobby. He said this type of weather is typical of July and August and is so unusual for October. Today was even more so as the humidity rose all morning and then this afternoon it rained and rained. There was only a short period of about 30 minutes of heavy rain but hours of drizzle as the sky was too rich with water vapor.

We were planning to spend the day on Leu Cat since it was football Saturday and we had Internet access using Mary Margaret’s 15-year-old laptop that runs on Microsoft XP. My laptop’s fan has stopped working and after a while the computer overheats and turns to molasses before it shuts itself off.

We discovered that the Internet WIFI bandwidth is very limited, like so many of the other smaller islands here in the Caribbean. Our Michigan football game started at 1530 and for the first hour it was great. We were able to listen to the play-by-play broadcast, given by my former high school buddy, Jim Brandtstader. He and I played some high school football together. He went on to play at Michigan as a tackle and finally ended up being the voice of Michigan football each Saturday. He has become really good at it and both Mary Margaret and I so much love listening to him do the play calling.

However, today, after about an hour, the Internet turned into molasses as more and more of the locals here in St. Eustatius fired up their computers and went onto the Internet. We could still get the game on Game Tracker, which is a neat little program that puts into writing the play by play of the game. But we could no longer listen to Jim do his announcing. I ended up reading out loud what the Game Tracker wrote so Mary Margaret could also follow the game. Michigan won its 7th straight game, this time against Illinois, 41 to 8. We are now ranked 3rd in the country and should move to be 2nd as our archrival, Ohio State, was upset by Penn State. Whoo Hoo!

Tomorrow we hope to go snorkeling on what is supposed to be a great reef that runs along the shoreline. Then on Monday we hope to tour the island. We have decided to leave on Tuesday and sail straight back to Grenada. It is about 330 nm and we should arrive Thursday. This will give me time to get a local SIM card for our cell phone so we can listen to the Michigan vs. Michigan State football game next Saturday. This is our big in-state rivalry and MSU has beaten us consistently over the last 6 or 7 years. Fortunately, Grenada has pretty good WIFI bandwidth so we hope we can listen to the game. We shall see…