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!
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.
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!
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!
I never got around to writing a blog for this past weekend, and I’m not big into April fools jokes. Instead, I give you a handful of light-hearted pictures to enjoy today.
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!
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.
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!
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.
From Culebra, Puerto Rico, we and our two buddy boats, Caretta and Wild Horses, set off for the U.S. Virgin Islands on May 6th. We were anchored in Brewer’s Bay, St. Thomas, USVI by 2:30pm. Dave & I were able to go almost halfway on solar & battery, but it got bumpy so we had to cave in and turn on the generator. It’s a lovely little bay that I look forward to exploring more next season. This time around, it was just a one-night stopover. We all gathered on Wild Horses for drinks and trip planning that afternoon. We decided to brave any potential cruise ships and check out Charlotte Amalie for a day.
It was a short 6.5 nm jump to Long Bay outside Charlotte Amalie. This is the very bay in which we anchored Indigo Lady back in 2014 after we bought her. We did our provisioning from here. It was a long time ago, and I was very focused on provisioning, but a few things did ring my memory bells when we went ashore this time. First, we used the yacht club’s dinghy dock, just like we did back in 2014. I recognized the building. The cabanas where our signature boat drink, the Indigo Lady, was born are still behind said yacht club. Unfortunately, they were closed while we were ashore this time. I also recognized historic Charlotte Amalie because of the cobblestone alleys and stone-faced buildings (made from ship ballast). All the boat buddies bopped around the historic part of town for a bit. It’s pretty, architecturally, but there’s nothing there but shops and restaurants. When a cruise ship is in, this place is jam packed! The one cruise ship that had been slated to be in port this particular day had canceled, so most of the shops and some of the restaurants were closed. No worries, it only takes one restaurant to feed us, and we found one with a lovely breeze. It was an abysmally hot day, so we all returned to our boats and the breeze after only about three hours ashore.
Our next stop was Christmas Cove at Great St. James Island where we would stay for four nights. Caretta picked up the last free mooring ball and Wild Horses anchored. We were just about to make a second attempt to set anchor ourselves when a mooring ball opened up. Score! We took it. It was right next to the pizza boat. Yes, I said pizza boat. Pizza Pi is owned and run by a young man from New England (MA and NH). Small world. Brilliant idea for a restaurant! We all called in our pizza order early in the day to ensure Pizza Pi could accommodate (if they get too many orders, they stop taking them). The buddies came over for drinks, and at our 5pm pick up time, the boys dinghied over to collect our Pies. Delicious! It was a lovely way to celebrate our anniversary.
It was a leisurely paced few days at Christmas Cove. We all caught up on boat chores. I did some baking and caught up on my blog and sorting photos. The boys dinghied the 3 miles or so to Benner Bay to Budget Marine. Everybody needed something for their boat. Dave came back with four solar vents for our cabin hatches. Now we’ll have more airflow when she’s closed up and on the hard during hurricane season. We all did some pretty nice snorkeling right off our boats. Fish Cay, really a big rock, sits in the middle of the cove and has quite a lot of fish. Our friends on Bitty Rose arrived our last day there and invited everyone for drinks that evening. It was another fabulous night with friends!
From Christmas Cove we moved to Cruz Bay on St. John. Caretta was in the lead and reported back that there didn’t appear to be any room to anchor, so we went north around the point to Caneel Bay where there were dozens of National Park mooring balls open. Score! Two thirds of St. John is National Park, including the waters. There are only a couple of places, all on the south side of the island, where one can actually drop an anchor, everywhere else you have to pick up and pay for a mooring ball. Day use is free; overnight is $26/night. Dave bought a lifetime National Park pass back in Puerto Rico, so we got ½ price off the mooring balls. Woo hoo! Our little caravan picked up three balls in a row on the north end of the bay. From there it was an easy 1.5nm dinghy ride into the town of Cruz Bay where they have a lovely dinghy dock available. Cruise ships don’t come to St. John, but passengers can make a day trip by ferry to the island. Like all such places, the waterfront is all shops and restaurants. We enjoyed bopping around and looking and we found good food for lunch. There is a wonderful supermarket a short distance up the hill where we were able to restock our rum supply inexpensively. On the dinghy ride into town we’d seen our friends on s/v Bye Felicia at the south end of the mooring field. We’d pulled the dinghies over to chat and invited them for drinks in the afternoon. So that evening we had everyone onboard, plus two dogs. Bye Felicia’s adorable Yorkie puppy, Rex, is in love with Ocean. They are so cute together. Rex is about as big as Ocean’s snout!
The next day our boat buddies boarded Indigo Lady and went to Mingo Island for a snorkel/dive on another wall. Our friend Matt on Bye Felicia used to live here and knew of a single mooring ball right over the reef that we could pick up. He said it was worth it and he was right! It was a lovely dive with still a good amount of healthy coral and tons of fish. The following day was a low key day. Dave and I donned our snorkel gear in the afternoon and swam toward the shore and along the beach, surprised that there were lots of fish among the rocks, including a bunch of big parrotfish and a zillion wee fish, likely recently hatched. We had everyone over for homemade pizza that night, and Mike & Victoria brought leftover fried chicken they’d bought ashore.
We wanted to head to Coral Harbor on the east end of St. John to stage for an overnight passage to St. Martin. The only place on the island to clear out with customs, however, was in Cruz Bay. On one of their trips ashore with Ocean, Mike and Victoria checked with customs in Cruz Bay who told them there was no problem clearing out 48 hours ahead of time. So that’s what we did. The morning of the 14th we all trucked into Cruz Bay and cleared out at Customs with paperwork for St. Martin stamped 48 hours later. We returned to our boats and headed the 11.5 nm to Coral Harbor. As soon as we dropped anchor, we jumped into dinghies and headed for Lime Out, the taco boat. Yes, first a pizza boat and now a taco boat! We made our order to go and ate back on Indigo Lady together. Had we had more time, we would have swum over and lounged in one of their “lily pads.” These are basically round floaties that can fit 4-6 people with a little floating table in the middle. That’s something else I look forward to experiencing when we return next season!
We had hoped to see our friends Juan and Alison from s/v Guajira at their new home on the hill overlooking Coral Harbor. Unfortunately, Juan had gotten sick. Bummer! I texted with Alison from the anchorage and asked which house was theirs. We arranged an exchange of flashing lights for 8:00pm so we could “see” each other. It worked! So we flashed hello. Fun!
At about 12:30am, I heard a dull thud accompanied by a deep, rumbling vibration. What the heck was that?! I scrambled out of bed and came up to see a big catamaran up against our sugar scoops (that’s the stern end). “Dave! We’ve bumped into another boat!” Technically, as it turned out, they bumped into us, because according to our anchor circle, we hadn’t budged. The boat was attached to a mooring ball. Hmmm… Did the mooring ball break from its mooring? There did not appear to be anyone aboard, so we couldn’t wake them up to tell them. Dave used our motors to move us forward about 25 feet just to get our stern off the other boat. Then we watched. After about 15 minutes it became clear to us that the boat was not adrift. Their mooring ball had an unnecessarily long line from the ball to the bottom, like over 100’ long! That is not typical for a mooring. When we had anchored, we saw they were on a mooring and a little over 200’ from us. That should not have been too close. Little did we know about their ridiculously long mooring anchor line. On that night, the wind had died and the water was glassy, so boats were just meandering about on their mooring lines or anchors. Since this one had such a long leash, they meandered right into us. But the wind picked up and they returned to their original position. Dave and I pulled in 25’ of anchor rode, shortening our scope from 4:1 to 3:1 and went back to bed. If they meandered again, they wouldn’t be able to reach us.
The next morning, as we were preparing for our overnight passage to St. Martin, a dinghy approached us. It was Juan and Alison stopping by for a quick hello! Juan was feeling well enough to venture out for some homebuilding supplies, and they stopped to say hello. It was a wonderful surprise! Hopefully we will be able to catch them next season for a longer visit.
At 10:00am, the three buddy boats were hauling anchor and setting off on the 95nm passage to St. Martin, which is where I will pick up next time. Until then, stay safe and take care of each other!
PS- I didn’t have time to sort through and edit the photos from our dives, so this slideshow is just the land-based parts of our time in the USVI. At some point I’ll put together slides for the dives.
Life on Lady 