Never Give Up

Thursday 17th June
An amazing thing happened last night that I still can’t quite believe. It does prove however, that never giving up pays off.
We had arrived back at Sopers Hole much later than we intended thanks to the fiasco with the anchor. Once we had picked up a mooring, showered and changed we went over to the Jolly Roger for dinner.
The Jolly Roger is one of my favorite places to eat in the BVI. The restaurant has a lovely location, with a large dining deck that extends right out over the water where you can watch schools of Tarpin swimming around. The food is always good, especially night’s when they have the barbeque going, and the staff are really friendly, service can be a little slow sometimes, but with such an idyllic location you really don’t mind waiting, there is always a great atmosphere, great music and even a DJ occasionally. Anyway, enough about the restaurant.
So we’re sitting at our table overlooking the water and I shake my hand as I’m explaining something and my wedding ring flies off my finger, bounces a couple of times on the deck and disappears down one of the cracks, into the ocean below. We heard it bounce but didn’t see where it actually fell through. Other diners and staff all got up to help us look for it; one of the diners used the light from his phone to shine through the cracks into the water below. For a harbor, Sopers Hole has incredibly clean water and its as clear as crystal so we were able to clearly see the sea bed beneath us, all be it through the cracks in the deck. Everyone is helping us look for a while, but eventually they all gave up and went back to their meals. At the end of the evening when there was only a couple of diners left, we resumed the search. Bob went back to the boat to get a flashlight, and the friendly barman “Big Sexy” as he calls himself, pulled up one of the planks on the deck so we could get a better view below. The seabed was littered with pebbles, rocks and sand. I had already given up; it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. But Bob has never given up on anything in his life, and wasn’t about to leave until he found it. So there we all are, on our hands and knees crawling around the deck looking for my ring, when Bob suddenly yells, “I can see it”. It took the rest of us ages to see where it was, as it was only partially visible, buried in the sand between a couple of rocks. Then we were faced with the next problem, how do we retrieve it? One of the diners, who were helping us reached through but the water was too deep. So Bob went back to the boat once again and fetched one of his tools, a very long, thin rod with a grabber on the end. Using this incredibly useful device, and reaching as far as he could through the opening in the deck, he eventually managed to pick the ring up off the seabed. I couldn’t believe he had found it. Everyone cheered and applauded. Big Sexy replaced the plank in the deck and Bob and I went back to Daisy.
Never Give, Up!