Georgetown And The Poison Wood Tree

We have been here in Georgetown for about 2 weeks, enjoying the town, the people,  and the free water provided by the local market for cruisers. I can completely understand how people can spend the whole winter here. There are daily activities such a yoga, beach walks, bon fires, basket weaving classes, est…  to keep you busy. As long as you are awake by 8 am and have your radio tuned to channel 72 you won’t miss the list of the days activities, because they are announced on the morning cruisers net. It feels like day camp for adults! It’s an interesting environment and we have made some good new friends. The more wa came across people heading south we found ourselves tempted to continue on from here. We spent a week playing with the idea of preparing to head toward Panama, we attended a couple meetings, and Josh bought a used tiller pilot for Full Moon.
We were getting excited but stopped ourselves and took a good look at the living conditions for underway time. Full Moon doesn’t have a sea berth, we are still finding all kinds of things that fly around the cabin. Our galley is not very safe for underway cooking, and we would like a better berth if we took on an extra crew member. We have quite a bit of exterior work to do as well. Finally we decided to chock this trip off as a good shake down cruise and head back to the states the end of the season.
Today (Feb. 20) we hung out on Peregrin, a sailing vessel we met a couple days before Georgetown. They are another young couple which is always fun since there aren’t many of us out here. Another young guy who single hands his boat ” Island Belle” stopped buy to see if we were interested in going for a hike on the island. Sure, sounds like fun, and everyone could use a chance to get off the boats. We dingyied into a little hurricane hole and found what looked like it may have been a trail at one time. We tied the dingies off to a tree and pushed through the brush until we found a real trail. We hiked to the beach and then back into another trail heading toward a monument on the top of the island. Along the side of the trail We found a tree with a sign on it “This is Poison Wood” hmmm that doesn’t sound good. Trevor from Peregrin noted that the tree looked familiar and we may have pushed through one of these on our way through the brush! Well we wwould double check on the way back to the dingies. We made it to the top of the island and got a beautiful view of the harbour. As we walked back we took special notice of the details of the poison wood tree. Once we found our “trail” to the dingies we found that we tromped through several of these trees! Yikes!  As soon as we made it back to Peregrin Trevor pulled up the internet, the signal wasn’t strong but we got the impression that it was not good and we needed to try to get any of the oil that could possibly be on us. We scrubbed up with soap and jumped in the water hoping the sharks would not mistake us for a tasty snack. We were slightly relieved that none  of us were itchy and rashy until we found out the the rash can take up to 3 days to show up and is twice as bad as poison ivy.
So here we are waiting for the torture to begin, delaying our departure from Georgetown incase we break out inthe middle of a sail.