Tag: usvi

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!