Category: US Virgin Islands

Another Cruising Season

Greetings from the United States Virgin Islands (USVI)!

Yes, we’re on Indigo Lady. Yes, it’s going well and we’re enjoying ourselves. I haven’t posted this season because I haven’t been feeling the blog. I’m feeling it a little now, so figured I should go with it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into detail of the nearly three months we’ve been onboard. I will summarize.

We got to St. Kitt’s on January 5th. Lady was launched on the 9th after a little work, a good cleaning, and the application of her new logo and lettering. Then, miracle of miracles, we were presented with a weather window to head to the USVI on the 13th. We were on a mooring in Christmas Cove at the island of Great St. James, USVI by 9:30am on the 14th. It was an uneventful crossing, other than the pod of dolphins that greeted us just after sunrise. That’s always a welcome event! 

My folks were onboard with us for most of February. We spent the first half of the time in the USVI and the other half in the British Virgin Islands (BVI). We got to spend time with our friends Juan and Alison who live on St. John. My folks were on board with us when we met them in Mayaguana, Bahamas in 2023, so they were excited to catch up with them again. Despite being in their 80s, my folks still snorkel with us, although we need to be sure to choose calm conditions. Every afternoon involved at least one game of cards (what Dave grew up calling Michigan Rummy). They were happy to be someplace warm while snow and below freezing temperatures rocked the northeast US. That late February blizzard messed up their return flight, but they eventually made it home (three days later than scheduled).

Shortly after my folks left, Juan joined us aboard Lady and accompanied us to the Salty Dawgs Sailing Association’s BVI Rendezvous March 3-10. It’s well known in the cruising community that one should avoid cruising to a schedule. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to organize a meetup without scheduling it. So we were presented with big winds and bumpy rides between islands the entire week. Alas! None of the trips were very long, so we managed. The reward was a week of socializing with a wonderful group of people. The final event was supposed to be a raft-up of boats off Prickly Pear Island in North Sound of Virgin Gorda. (A raft up is when two or more boats tie up to each other at anchor.) Unfortunately, it was too windy to do this safely without damaging boats. We couldn’t do a dinghy drift, because we would have drifted all the way across the sound. So we settled on tying dinghies up to an anchored catamaran. We volunteered Indigo Lady. It was still bouncy on the water, and the sun was beating down hot, so we just invited everyone onboard. At one point we had about 24 people in and around our cockpit! The lowest step of our sugar scoops (steps on our stern) was under water. We had a blast! It was a wonderful way to end a fun week together.

Salty Dawgs on Lady

We returned Juan to St. John and enjoyed dinner that night with his wife, Alison, and her mother who was visiting from Florida. We took the next day to decompress from the week of socializing (and bumpy cruises). Then we dubbed our way back to Brewers Bay on the west side of St. Thomas, where we’ve made friends with several of the cruiser inhabitants of that anchorage. It’s been nice to find this little “neighborhood.” We spent a few laid-back days snorkeling, and spending a couple of afternoons/evenings chatting and playing games with our neighbors. 

Eventually we returned to Charlotte Amalie to do another mega provisioning run with a rental car. Then we headed back to St. John to meet up with our friends Ian and Linda who were vacationing on land there. We spent this past week meeting up with them at some point each day, exploring the island by car and doing some snorkeling and hanging out on Indigo Lady. 

Linda flew back to the US yesterday afternoon and Ian is now aboard with us for the next week and a half. We plan to launch hookah to finally do some diving rather than just snorkeling. Looks like the next three days will provide an opportunity to dive a few of the more exposed dive sites. 

Our friend and neighbor, Jessica, is coming to visit us in mid-April. She’ll be our final visitor this year. Then Dave and I will spend our remaining time dubbing around the US and British Virgin Islands before hauling out for hurricane season and flying home.

That’s our cruising season in a nutshell. We spent our 2024 cruising season here, so I haven’t taken many photos on land or under water. When we snorkel/dive these days, my focus is on capturing photos of fish I don’t already have photos of. Otherwise, we’re pretty much just living our lives, but on a boat in warmer climes. 

If the mood strikes me again, perhaps I’ll update you about our potentially shifting cruising plans. Ha! Now I’ve got you wondering. Well, you’re just going to have to wait…

Until next time, stay safe and take care of each other.

A Tour of Indigo Lady

Howdy folks! Sorry I’ve been silent for so long. My life on land does not inspire me to post about cruising very often. We’ve been spending a lot of time on land, and also taking friends and family out on Dumbledore for day trips. No big New England cruising plans for us this season. But now I have something to share that I didn’t have to create. So here you go.

One of my favorite parts of cruising is meeting new people, both the locals in the countries we visit, and other cruisers. Dave & I enjoy meeting cruisers of all ages; it gives us different perspectives on cruising and just living life in general. I also follow a lot of cruisers on social media, and occasionally we run into one of them. That happened this spring when we were anchored in Brewers Bay on St. Thomas in the USVI.

One afternoon, a young man dinghied over to introduce himself. He’d seen our boat before in the Bahamas and had been curious about it. Turns out that the young man was Adventureman Dan, whom I follow on social media. He chatted with us a bit, then asked if we’d mind if he interviewed us for a full boat tour and discussion about our solar electric setup. Of course we said yes. So here’s installment one, the boat tour. In the next week or so he’ll be posting a second video where he talks with Dave about the details of our solar electric system.

The video is a little over an hour, but if click to watch it IN YouTube, Dan created a clickable table of contents that allows you to choose to watch certain segments of interest. The table of contents is in the description under the video (click …more and scroll down a bit).

Since Dan posted the video yesterday, Dave has received about 20 requests for information. We’re looking forward to seeing more solar electric boats out there!

Thanks, Dan, for the fabulous video!

If you’re interested in learning more about Adventureman Dan, check out the rest of his YouTube channel, Facebook, or his Instagram- adventureman_dan.

Until next time, stay safe and take care of each other!

USVI Dives 2024

I have finally caught up with my dive photos from our time in the USVI. I managed to get my count down from about 250-300 photos/videos clips to 56 photos and 10 video clips. I’m going to attempt to stop taking so many underwater pictures. How many photos of barracuda does one need, really? I’m going to try to focus creatures of which I don’t yet have pictures. Sure, that’s gonna work. 😂 There are some sea creatures I enjoy so much that I can’t help but take just one more photo. (I’m looking at you, porcupinefish.)

I don’t have a fancy underwater camera, so the camera doesn’t always capture the way things looked to my eyes. I use Photos and iMovie to edit the lighting aspects of my images to get them closer to how I saw them. Nothing fancy; I don’t want to misrepresent the reality.

I spend quite a bit of time trying to identify the creatures I capture in photos; I like to know what I’m looking at. Take my identifications with a grain of salt, though; I’m not an expert. We have a good set of identification books onboard by Humann & DeLoach, but sometimes my pictures don’t jive with the books’ pictures and descriptions, in which case I can only attach a general level identification- sponge, parrotfish, etc. I’m especially bad at identifying specific sponges and corals, so when I name those in a slideshow, you may just see “pretty orange sponge” as a label. Those who know me personally, know that I used to be a biology teacher, but I’m not going to bore you with taxonomy. I will, however, say that sponges and corals are animals; perhaps not everyone knows that. Now you do. 

In this post I have divided my underwater finds into two separate slideshows- “scenery” and “creatures.” Just enjoy the scenery; I didn’t label anything in that one. The “creatures” slideshow names the organisms and organizes them into “not fish” and “fish.” No label beyond the name of a fish indicates that it’s an adult. Some reef fish young don’t look like the adult version, however. You may see me include in my labels: Juv (juvenile) or Int (intermediate) if the picture is not of an adult. For parrotfishes and wrasses, IP (Initial Phase), indicates an adult, while TP (terminal phase) identifies a sexually mature adult male. You can, of course, ignore the labels and just enjoy the pretty pictures.

We’re in the BVI for another couple of weeks and have a friend coming to visit a week from today. (Looking forward to having you aboard again, Ian!) At some point I’ll sort through my BVI dive photos, but since we’re not done diving here yet, that won’t happen for a while. Don’t worry, I have other things to write about.

Until next time, enjoy the USVI dive pics, stay safe, and take care of each other!

From our dives at Sprat Point on the south end of Water Island, at Buck Island off St. Thomas, and at Cow & Calf.
From the same dives as mentioned in the caption of the Scenery video.

Riding out big winds in the BVI

Our final night in the USVI was spent on a NPS mooring in Waterlemon Bay on the north side of St. John. The morning of 4/6 we had a final USVI snorkel around Waterlemon Cay where I saw my first octopus in the wild!  As usual, I was dubbing along quite a bit behind Dave, when I looked over at him to see him waving me over, his eyes fixed on a small coral head. I kicked over quickly and followed his finger to… a rock? The rock twitched, and it had an eye. It was a small octopus about 6-8” from head to tentacle tip. It was not happy that we were watching it, so it moved under the coral, where the fish it had replaced showed its displeasure by repeatedly nipping at it. The octopus went back to the coral’s surface, then swam on to another piece of coral. It was so exciting! After our snorkel, we set off to clear into the BVI at West End, all of 1.5 nm away. That done, we had lunch, then headed over to Benures Bay on the north side of Norman Island, a place we’d anchored when my folks were with us last month. We had a couple of days of calm seas ahead of us and we wanted to make the most of them by doing some diving. The first location was around the western side of Norman Island.

We hauled anchor right after breakfast the next morning and headed around the corner to the west side of Norman Island before it got crowded. It’s a popular spot. There were two things we wanted to do, a reef dive and a cave snorkel. We picked up a mooring ball between the two, loaded our dive equipment into dinghy, and grabbed one of the dive moorings at Angelfish Reef on the SW corner of Norman Island. At first, I was unimpressed. The reef is in a sad state, but once we got around the point to the south, there was much better coral structure, which means lots of nooks and crannies for fish. There were also a fair amount of sponges and corals. The highlights of the dive were the large eagle ray that passed within a few feet of us, and a 4’, ~80 lb snapper that emerged from a rock overhang. We believe it was a Culebra snapper. It was huge!

After our dive, we returned to Lady, grabbed a quick snack, and offloaded our dive-specific gear. Then we headed to the dinghy tether at the caves. There were three caves to explore. They do not go inward very far, and the water inside is not deep. We could easily stand in each. Most of the fish were schooling just outside the entrance to each cave, but two of them had schools of glassy sweepers inside. The cave farthest north was the deepest and required a dive light; it got dark pretty quickly in there. Dave illuminated the school of glassy sweepers, but, alas, none of my photos of them came out. Fortunately, I had video of them from an earlier dive; I just hadn’t yet identified them.

Dive and cave snorkel complete, our next stop was Deadman’s Bay on the eastern end of the north side of Peter Island. We went by way of Dead Chest, a rocky little island just outside of said bay, to scope out its three purported dive sites. The mooring ball for the western dive site was missing, but we found one on the north side and two on the south side. After a quiet night anchored in Deadman’s Bay, we popped across to the south side of Dead Chest with Lady and picked up one of those two moorings. The reef right below us was unimpressive, but Dave followed an easterly ridge and we found the good stuff. I haven’t sorted through those pictures yet. I’m backlogged on my BVI dive pictures. Back aboard Lady we had lunch, then set off for the anchorage we had selected to ride out the big winds that were forecast.

The big winds were predicted from the NE-ENE for several days, so we needed a place protected from those directions. Our other criteria were that it have cell signal so we could tend to some business, and so I wouldn’t lose my 3+ year streak on Duolingo, and we wanted to be able to anchor rather than pay $45-$55/night for a mooring ball. Many of the anchorages here in the BVI have been filled with mooring balls, greatly reducing the space available to anchor. It’s peak season here, too, so there are many boats vying for the same anchorages. We opted for the south side of Peter Island, which is not frequented by many charterers or liveaboards, and settled in at South Bay. We were there five nights, Monday-Friday. In hind sight, we probably could have spent Monday & Tuesday night elsewhere, done another dive or two, and been fine. The big winds didn’t really kick in until overnight Wednesday. Then it was very windy, overcast and rainy most of Thursday & Friday. Hind sight is always 20:20. Such is life. 

We weren’t completely idle while in South Bay. Tuesday, the day after we arrived, we hauled anchor and popped over to Key Bay and the wreck of the Willy T2. We’d already dived on the wreck, but we wanted to spend time on the extensive reef arms between which it is sandwiched. We returned to South Bay afterward. We cleaned our hulls. Dave made water, and he replaced the starboard engine room fan and a bilge switch that had failed, which he discovered when he went down to replace the fan. He also replaced the dying fan in our cabin. I did laundry and some baking and spent many hours sorting through and editing dive photos from the USVI.

This morning we decided to head elsewhere. We went around the west end of Peter Island and up into Drake’s Passage and found it manageable until we got past the east end of Peter where it’s more exposed to the open ocean. The seas were bigger there and it got a bit bumpy. We aborted our attempt to check out Cooper Island and turned toward the east end of Tortola and Buck Island, which was supposed to be a pretty sheltered, shallow anchorage. We dropped anchor in 10’ of water inside three other boats anchored there. It is indeed pretty sheltered here, just a little wrap around swell from the SE point of Buck Island, but not bad in a catamaran. We went ashore for a bit of a walk; it had been 4 days since we’d set foot on land and we wanted to stretch our legs. Dinghying back to our boat, we swung by our neighbor’s catamaran. They were about to head over the shallows into Fat Hogs Bay to go to the Riteway market, so we followed along. Fresh produce- yay!

Not sure where we’ll be off to next. The wind and seas will decide that. I ran out of energy to put together a slide show of dive pictures for you, so for now, enjoy the short video of that octopus we saw.

Until next time. Stay safe, and take care of each other!

While we were waiting…

This cruising season has felt like a lot of waiting. We’re used to waiting for weather windows, of which we fortunately don’t need many this year, but this season has been about a different kind of waiting. While we waited for a weather window to get from St. Kitt’s to the USVI, we were simultaneously waiting for our new battery cells to arrive in St. Thomas. Once they were in the USVI, we waited for winds and waves in the harbor to die down enough to be able to get the batteries onboard safely. Then we waited for my folks to arrive. We waited for our new freezer to arrive. We waited for the Salty Dawgs meetup in the BVI to start. Just as the meetup was starting, we learned that our current boat insurance provider would be dropping Caribbean coverage. That launched us into four weeks of waiting for a new policy to pan out, which included waiting for various responses to our numerous emails requesting policy and survey quotes, waiting for the day of the insurance survey we eventually booked, and waiting for the survey report to be finished (the latter happened quickly). Then we waited for the final insurance approval, which, thankfully, also arrived quickly. Yes, we have a new insurance policy that will commence as soon as our current one expires. Yay! Now we’re just waiting for wire transfer information to pay them, but that’s the icing on the insurance cake at this point. 

While we were waiting for insurance to pan out, it also meant waiting to determine the rest of our cruising plan before heading to wherever we would haul out the boat for hurricane season. This also meant waiting to book said haul out facility, as well as the lodging we’ll need during the boat closeup process. We are extremely lucky that our new policy allows us to keep our boat in St. Kitt’s again for hurricane season, so we don’t have to alter our original cruising plan. Hooray! This isn’t a cruising season where we’ve had to make a lot of miles, so we have had the luxury of being able to wait comfortably, and we have been enjoying ourselves. There are far worse places to be waiting.

There are some advantages to all this waiting. Since we’ve been staying close to good cell coverage areas in order to deal with insurance, we’ve been near easily accessible on shore WiFi where I’ve been able to do some data-intensive online stuff over WiFi rather than using our data. We’ve done a lot of snorkeling. We reconnected with cruising friends we made last year. A little over a week ago, we spent several lovely days in Brewer’s Bay where we made some new cruising friends, including Connor, Blake (@captain_blake_sparrow on IG) and Dan (Adventureman Dan on FB and IG). We’ve also had some of the best diving since Puerto Rico last April; three awesome dives in two days!

With the insurance monkey off our backs, we will continue our explorations, hopefully only with the typical waiting for the right weather conditions 🤞. Our current plan is to head to the BVIs for a few weeks, and from there to St. Martin for a few weeks before returning to St. Kitt’s. As always while cruising, we’ll see how that goes.

It will take me a while to sort through the dive pictures, but I’ll get to them eventually. For now, enjoy this slideshow compilation of our various snorkel excursions thus far. Until next time, stay safe and take care of each other!

Moving on to St. John

My folks arrive late on 2/13. We had rented a car for the day to reprovision for four people for a month, and to be able to pick up my folks at the airport so they didn’t have to get a taxi. We were all safely aboard Lady in St. Thomas Harbor by a little after 8pm. 

We kept it low key the next day so my folks could recuperate from their prior long day of travel. Our big adventure was taking them on the Safari Bus from one end of the island to the other and back, something Dave and I had done the week before. We got off in Red Hook for lunch at Duffy’s Love Shack, because it was so yummy last time. This visit, we were treated to their metal shark in motion. Dave & I thought it was just decoration on our last visit, but it’s actually animatronic. When somebody orders a drink called The Shark Tank, Love Shack (by the B-52s) starts playing loudly, the shark’s mouth starts munching, fog and bubbles are spewed out from the other end of the bar, and everyone starts singing. Well, the customers start singing. We asked our waiter how many times a day he has to listen to that song- about 10 times a day. I bet that wears thin.

The following day, Friday, we left St. Thomas for St. John, but first we popped up to Mingo Cay for a snorkel. There is one mooring ball there, right over the reef. We snorkeled and dove there last year with our buddy boats, Caretta & Wild Horses. It’s a great snorkel for my folks because they can do it right off Lady’s sugar scoops. After our snorkel we had lunch, then headed over to Caneel Bay where we picked up a National Park Service (NPS) mooring ball in Caneel Bay on the west side of St. John, just north of the town of Cruz Bay. We and our buddy boats had spent a few days there last year. We dinghied into town so my folks could check it out, and we stopped for a drink at High Tide’s happy hour, right on the water. The right side of the ferry dock, facing it from the water, is being renovated, but the dinghy dock was still open. However, we had to wade ashore in knee deep water because access through the ferry terminal was closed. We didn’t realize it at the time, but there’s also a dinghy dock on the left side with dry access to land through the terminal. We used that the next day, much drier and no sandy feet.

Saturday morning we headed back ashore to visit the NPS Visitor Center. First of all, their dinghy docks are all gone! Looks like they’re being rebuilt. We dropped my folks off at the Customs dock so they could walk around to the Visitor Center, then Dave & I went around to the dingy dock to tie up, on the dry access side this time. Then we ran into my folks coming back from the Visitor Center. Closed! Our pamphlet and the sign on their door said open daily 8am-4pm. Nope. Bummer! I called later and got their message that says their current hours are M-F from 8:15am-1:15pm. We stopped there briefly last year with our boat buddies just for some information and a park map, but we didn’t look at the exhibits. Oh well. We’re in the area through April; I’ll get there at some point this year. Instead, we walked over to the Catholic Church so my folks could find it the next morning, then returned to Lady for a dip in the water and a relaxing afternoon.

Sunday morning we dinghied my folks into town for Mass. Dave & I found a little coffee shop just up from the water. I enjoyed a latte and used their WiFi to tend to some boat club stuff. Dave went for a walk. When my folks got out of church, they met us there and bought us pastries to enjoy later. They enjoyed a coffee each while I trotted up the hill to the Dolphin Market for some produce, then we returned to Lady for lunch rather than eating ashore again. It gets pricey.

On Monday of this week, we left Caneel Bay for the north shore of St. John to explore the bays up there. During the winter months, the north shore is often impacted by northerly swell from cold fronts moving south and east from the U.S. If the swell is sufficiently large or short period, it can be uncomfortably rolly in those bays and landing a dinghy ashore can be treacherous. There can also be rip currents along the beaches. The first half of this week, however, was perfect for the north shore. We spent one night in Hawksnest Bay and two in Francis Bay, all of about 2.5 nm apart. In between the two are Trunk, Cinnamon and Maho Bays. We all snorkeled in Hawksnest. It was disappointing. These reefs are in a sad state. Maybe I’ll write about that another time. Dave & I dinghied to a couple of the beaches to check them out. Gibney Beach on the east side of Hawksnest is the legacy of an old island family. On the east end of this beach is the ruin of Oppenheimer’s house. Yes, the a-bomb Oppenheimer. Dave & I dinghied to Cinnamon Bay from Francis Bay to snorkel (again, disappointing) and then explore the sugar mill ruins across the road from Cinnamon Bay Campground.

About 2/3 of St. John is National Park, including the coastal waters around it. There is no anchoring in park waters; you must use the mooring balls provided. Fortunately, between all the NPS bays, there are about 200 of them. They cost $26/night, but since Dave is old enough for the lifetime senior pass, which we purchased last year, we get them for $13/night. Sweet deal! They are well maintained, and that must be quite a task for the NPS, because not everyone uses them properly. Thus far we’ve been fortunate to find balls open in each bay we’ve chosen to stop at, despite this being peak charter/cruising season.

As I type, we are transiting the west side of St. John en route to Reef Bay on the south side. If we’re lucky, at least one of the two day-use moorings will be available so we can dinghy ashore to explore the sugar mill ruins there before moving on to one of the other nearby bays with overnight moorings. We plan to go up into Coral Bay on Friday so Dave and my Dad can help our friend Juan trouble shoot his engine. The ladies will do their own thing.

We’ll spend the next week and a half continuing to explore St. John before heading up to the BVI for a bit. More about that next week. Until then, stay safe and take care of each other!

St. Thomas & New Batteries

We’ve been in the USVI since January 21st and all but one of those days has been spent at St. Thomas, mostly in St. Thomas Harbor. The first week and a half was all about provisioning, getting our new batteries to Indigo Lady, and then Dave installing them. In that timeframe we left the harbor just once to cruise offshore to empty our holding tanks, then we went to a little anchorage on the west side of Hassel Island to make water. Making water in St. Thomas Harbor would be ill advised; harbor water tends to be icky. The next day it was right back to St. Thomas Harbor. 

For those who don’t know/remember why replacing our lithium-iron-phosphate batteries was important, here’s a quick synopsis. (If you know the story, skip to the next paragraph.) The original batteries were purchased with our entire solar-electric system when Dave did the original conversion in 2016-2017. By 2019 we started having issues with them and ended up replacing them, from the same company, in August of 2020 as a partial warranty. So yes, we paid for our batteries again, about half of the original cost. Within a year, the new batteries were giving us trouble! Despite the best efforts of a particularly helpful engineer at the company, and several upgrades later, at our expense, Dave was done with that company. Their batteries were never going to be capable of serving our needs. It was then that he started thinking about how to replace them. Go with another company or build them himself?

Back to the present. Dave ultimately determined that it was far more cost-effective to buy battery cells and build his own batteries than to buy premade batteries from another company. Purchased batteries cost about $28K, while the cells to get the same capacity as those cost about $7600, and that included the cells, shipping and all the parts to make the batteries come together. It took Dave four days to build the two battery banks, one in each hull. Even better, they work! We haven’t made any long trips on them yet, just a few 5-8 nm hops, but those were done entirely on battery & solar, and the batteries recovered beautifully. We were able to cruise at about 6 knots each time- woo hoo! 

Dave finished the batteries on January 30th. Other than one day and night spent at Christmas Cove at Great St. James Island, we continue to stay at St. Thomas. We’re not straying too far because my folks are coming on the 13th, assuming the impending snow doesn’t delay them. Cold fronts come through regularly this time of year and we don’t want to get trapped someplace, unable to get back here in time to meet them. We also had to ride out three days of big winds and rain last week, and St. Thomas Harbor is a good spot to do that. Still, we’ve managed to enjoy ourselves enough. We met a local, Ralph, who stopped to inquire about Lady when he was dinghying by. He gave us lots of helpful local information and helped us get the new batteries onboard. We’ve visited with him a few times. We met up with friends we met cruising in the Bahamas last year for errands (thanks Juan & Alison) and lunch. We learned how to use the Safari bus, and even rode its entire route one day out to Red Hook on the east end of St. Thomas and then out to the University of the Virgin Islands on the west end. We’ve been in Brewer’s Bay for a few days. Yesterday we dinghied to shore, locked dinghy to a tree, and walked up to the UVI bus stop to catch a Safari into town for the weekly farmers market, where we also met up with our new friend, Ralph. We hung out for a bit and bought some great produce. I am now in possession of a breadfruit that I have to figure out how to work into a recipe. I’m thinking it’s going to end up in a curry. Yum!   

It hasn’t been a show-stopping 3+ weeks, but it’s been enjoyable nonetheless. I enjoy getting to know an area and feeling comfortable in it. Did I mention that it’s comfortably warm?  Temps are generally in the low-mid 80s during the day, and not humid yet. We’ve even had to put on long sleeves a few times at night when the sun sets, the winds are up, and temps dip into the mid 70s. It’s awesome! 

Once my folks arrive, we will head to St. John as soon as we can to explore that island from land and water. In early March, we will all be heading to the BVIs. I’m going to try to post weekly from now on. Until then, stay safe and take care of each other!

Here’s what the harbor looked like during those big winds.

St. Kitt’s to USVI- following seas & dolphins!

We finally got our chance to leave St. Kitt’s, only not for St. Martin, as we’d originally planned. The conditions just weren’t conducive for that NNW course and wasn’t going to be for the foreseeable future, 1-2 more weeks. The conditions were good, however, for going straight to the USVI, so we took it.

It’s been a long time since we’ve made an overnight passage with following seas. I’d forgotten that winds 12-18 gusting to 23 with 4-6’ seas, even on a short period, are fine when they’re on your stern pushing you forward. For the past few years, conditions like that were a no-go because we were most likely going to be heading into them and getting slammed. It took my brain a while to embrace the reality. A phone call with Chris Parker (weather router we use) helped, because he confirmed the weather window and that it would hold more than long enough for us to get to St. Thomas, 141 nm away. We hauled anchor in Basseterre, St. Kitt’s at 5am on Saturday morning, 1/20 and arrived at the mouth of St. Thomas Harbor, USVI about 7am Sunday morning.

The passage was blissfully uneventful. Well, there were no bad events. There was one really wonderful event- a visit from a very large pod of dolphins just before sunset. There had to be at least 3 dozen of them playing in our bow waves, riding the surges that funneled between our bows from the stern, and jumping in the waves all around us. It was amazing! They stayed with us for about 15 minutes before the final stragglers peeled off. It was partly cloudy, but there was a brilliant half-moon and we could see a fair amount of stars. The light reflected off the clouds, lighting our horizon such that it was never pitch dark. I personally do not enjoy pitch dark night crossings, so I was quite happy being able to actually see all around us.

We were making 6 knots with our motors set at only about 4kW each. A fish hit one of Dave’s lines, so we had to slow down to reel it in. He cut back the power on the motors, but we were still moving too fast. We had to actually stop both motors to reel in the fish and we were still making 2 kts. That’s some push we were getting! We would repeat this one more time before Dave gave up on fishing, because both times it was just barracuda. When I came up for the 12-3am watch, I cut our speed down to 4.5 kts because we were going to arrive in the dark, which is not good for anchoring. Dave cut our speed even further when he came on at 3am, and by the time we were about 2-3 nm out from the harbor, the motors were set at about 1kW each because the sun still hadn’t risen. 

The sun rose just before 7am, but a cruise ship was also arriving. The pilot boat waved us off from the harbor entrance. We could have entered and anchored before the cruise ship got there, but whatever. Instead of waiting out the cruise ship, we altered course to the western entrance to the harbor and went in that way. We were anchored in 15’ of water just east of the Coast Guard dock by 8am. I ran up our Q-flag and submitted our entry via the CBP Roam app. Then I started tidying up the boat from all our passage gear and snacks while Dave tried to catch a nap. I awaited the call from Customs. The call never came, but an email did, about an hour after I submitted our entry (it was Sunday, after all). Welcome to the USVI; enjoy your stay! We were officially cleared in, so I replaced the Q-flag with the USVI courtesy flag and had breakfast. We just relaxed the rest of Sunday and slept pretty hard that night. 

As I write this on 1/24, we are still anchored in the same place. We’ve done some planning and reconnaissance for collecting our new lithium batteries and doing a big provisioning run. Hopefully tomorrow we will start acting on all that. Hopefully early next week our new batteries will be successfully installed and we can give them a good test run by heading to another anchorage. Please keep your fingers crossed for us.

Until next time, stay safe and take care of each other!

Caribbean Cruising Season 2023 Recap

We’re back in NH. We rolled into our driveway around 2:30am last Saturday, the 17th. Our New England boat, Dumbledore, has been launched. We’re working on getting him ready for a 4-6 week cruise along the coast of Maine starting sometime in July. Until then, we’re visiting family and friends, and getting in a bunch of appointments.

Between January and mid-June, we put on a lot of miles and visited a lot of islands. Here’s a recap.

  • Miles traveled (nm):   ~1300
  • Countries visited:        9
  • Nights at anchor:        89
  • Nights on mooring:     42
  • Nights in marinas:       16
  • Nights under way:      5
  • Nights ashore:             7

We started in the Berry Islands, Bahamas, on January 8th. After that we went to Turks & Caicos, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, St. Martin (both the French and Danish sides), St. Bart’s, and ended at St. Kitt’s. We stayed in 46 different anchorages, 6 different mooring fields and 6 different marinas. We took road trips with friends to Santo Domingo, DR and Old San Juan, PR. We made overnight passages from Rum Cay to Mayaguana; from Turks & Caicos to Luperón; from Luperón to Rio San Juan; from Escondido to Puerto Real, PR; and from the USVI to St. Martin.

We did a lot more “making miles” than I would have liked, but we did finally get to the actual Caribbean Sea, which was our target this year. Next season we plan to confine our travels to the area between St. Kitt’s and the Spanish Virgin islands. It will be lovely to spend multiple weeks in each country next.

Thanks for following my adventures. I will post about our coast of Maine travels this summer, but perhaps not as frequently as I typically do.

Stay safe and take care of each other!