St.Martin to Nevis and back

Well what have been up to since the last update. We headed out to St. Martin in the company of Laima (Beni & Rick from Tremblant) and Tonica (from Nashville, Tenn.). We left in the middle of the night to ensure a daytime arrival in St. Martin. On the way we had a pod of about 20 porpoises frolicking around the boat for a little while. We entered St. Martin on the French side but the swell in the anchorage caused us to move to the Dutch side the next morning and enter the lagoon later. We have seen the occasional mega yacht up to now but what we saw at St. Martin was just incredible. There were somewhere between 20-30 yachts in the 150-200 foot range and a number of sailboats of the same size. We didn’t like St. Martin as it wasn’t easy to get to the beaches and we definitely did not want to go swimming in the lagoon.

We parted company with Rick & Beni in St. Martin. They were still waiting for a part to come in and also they wanted to renew acquaintances from previous years. We headed out by ourselves for Nevis and St. Kitts where friends on Unchained had agreed to meet us. On the way we were treated by the sight of two whales at the surface smacking their huge flukes and creating splashes that were a sight to see. Nevis had a nice town but the anchorages were not great. We could do very little water activities. The volcano on Montserrat was active and blowing ash into the sky and some of it was falling out on our boat. What had been a clean boat up to now got pretty grungy. Also air quality was the pits. After a few days we decided to head back to the Virgins where the water is great and we can get off the boat at any time.

We left Nevis, checked out at St. Kitts, as the two islands use the same customs officers, and headed northwest to the mountainous island of Saba. We overnighted there regretting that we couldn’t spend more time exploring. There was a forecast for a north swell with 12 foot seas and the anchorage we were in was unprotected from this. We left before sun up and we crossed under motor in some of the flattest seas we have ever seen. Again we had porpoises playing around the boat. We arrived back in St. John in the early evening into a bay we were quite familiar with. The only hiccup was that the mooring balls were all taken and we had to anchor overnight before proceeding on the next morning to clear in with US customs.

We will be hanging around the Virgins now for the next couple of months with still plenty of bays and areas to explore. Hello to everybody we hope you are all well.

Hanging Around the Virgins

So there is very little to say as we have been hanging around the Virgin Islands; Spanish, US and British. We have had some great day sails and only had the opportunity to fish a couple of times. We caught a couple of tunnys (small albacore tuna) that were maybe 2 pounds each and gave them away to the Marina people at Crown Bay. Here are some of the pictures we have taken and we hope you enjoy them.
















On Laima having a gourmet supper at New Years.

Doing a 360 in the dinghy to slow down before chatting with Benita and Rick on Laima.

Staghorn coral in the BVI

Menno and Rick having an important meeting on the beach in Culebra

Liz enjoying a day on the beach at Culebrita

Culebra & Culebrita

The Spanish Virgins re-visited

Well the last month or so has been interesting; the recovery from the gall bladder surgery has taken much longer than expected. Just after Christmas an infection set in and we were able to get an appointment with a doctor in St. Thomas. Antibiotics knocked it down and the recovery started to progress nicely again.

We had just about grown roots in Lamshur Bay in St. John USVI and we finally decided to move on. Apart from a couple of short sails south of St. John in order to try and catch some fish we had not moved. On one of those sails we had Benita and Rick on board and we really gave the boat a work out. Winds were 15-25 knots with seas running 6-10 feet in height. The boat handled it beautifully and we saw speeds of nearly 9 knots at one point. That’s humming along nicely thank you very much. We did not see any fish and the only fish we have eaten has been store bought.

Early into the New Year we headed west to Culebra to spend some time in one of our favourite anchorages. Almodovar Bay is located behind a coral reef and when the wind blows out of the east, as it does most days, the water behind the reef is like a mill pond. Liz talks about the cupboard door test; the doors can remain open without them slamming shut or banging. From here we make small excursions to our favourite snorkeling spot on Culebrita and probably the most beautiful beach in the islands. Next week we will head east again to do some cruising in the BVI before trying to head out to St. Marteen and some of the smaller islands in the area.

St. John Pictures

We have stayed here for two weeks because it is so nice. Here are the pictures.

Lameshur Bay, St.John USVI

Two nights after we arrived at St. John, we woke up the next morning to discover a new boat in the bay with us; it was Laima. Benita and Rick had made an overnight passage from Saba over to St. John and ended up in the same bay as us strictly by coincidence. For those of you who do not know Benita and Rick, they are friends from home in Mont-Tremblant that started cruising a couple of years before us. So we’re just hanging out enjoying the greater weather and fantastic scenery.

Given that St. John is a national park, it has been difficult to find internet access and what we have found has been slow, hence no pictures. We have tried embedding pictures of the bay into this little note to see if that works better than trying to up load them directly on to the blog site but it didn't work as well. So pictures will come later when we have better access.

Hi everybody, we have started our third year of cruising on Snow Shoo in the Virgin Islands. We arrived in St.Thomas a little over a week ago by flying from Montreal via Miami. It took us 2.5 hours to cover the distance between Florida and the Virgins; last year we spent close to two months on the boat to cover the same distance. We caught the Roadtown fast ferry to Tortola the next morning and checked in to the Hummingbird B & B. We were delayed leaving on the ferry by a bomb threat at the airport that shutdown the roads including the one from our hotel to the ferry, but we still had enough time to walk down to the yard in the afternoon to inspect the boat and do a few things on board. The people at Tortola Yacht Services had taken good care of the boat and she was wearing a new coat of bottom paint. The first thing to be done was to put up the bimini top so that we could have some shade. The heat has been fierce, 30 ºC with relatively little wind. One big day of work and we were almost ready to be launched the next day. We were told 10:30-12:30 would be the expected time for launch. At 8:30 we found the boat in the slings ready to be launched. So much for “island time”.

Once in the water we turned the key and pushed the starter button and crossed our fingers. The engine cranked over for about 15 seconds and caught. Eureka. We sat at the dock for the most of the day getting things done including a small grocery run to tide us over for the next several days. We had sent out our top life lines to have a new set made up and because of the early launch they weren’t ready and it was only in the middle of the afternoon that we were able to leave Roadtown.

We crossed the Sir Francis Drake Channel to one of our favourite spots in the BVI, Benure Bay. We spent all of the next day there taking stock of everything on the boat and our “to do” and “to buy” lists were started. The next morning we headed off to West End on Tortola to check out with customs. Familiarity with the procedures made everything easy. We had checked out of the BVI by 9:00 and by 10:00 we had checked into the USVI. We were at Crown Bay Marina by noon and fueled and tied up at a dock by 1 in the afternoon. We had sent our various bit and pieces for the boat to the marina for safekeeping.

To buy all the food and other stuff we will need for the next few months we rented a car and hit the stores at St.Thomas. After going to a number of stores we brought back a heavily loaded Suzuki to dockside and unloaded everything on to the boat. We fitted our new main sail on to the mast and left the next day.

We are now sitting on the south side of St.John enjoying the sun and light breezes when we aren’t doing little chores getting the boat ready for the cruising season. Menno has had to go up the mast several times as an adjustment to the jib furler resulted in it hanging up and not allowing the sail go out and in smoothly. This has now been fixed and we intend to do a little sailing tomorrow to see how everything is working.

Spanish Virgins March

Well we have stayed in the Spanish Virgins pretty well the whole month of March. We did a quick hop over to St Thomas the first couple of days in March to pick up Yoli and Chris Wheeler who spent a long weekend with us in Culebra and the rest of the time we kept ourselves very occupied by sailing over to Vieques for a little more than a week. Vieques is the southernmost island and all of the islands belong to Puerto Rico. Viesques was used as a bombing range by the US Navy for more than 40 years and only recently has been opened up to the public. There are parts of the island that are still out of bounds because of unexploded ordinance that you do not want to drop an anchor on.

We spent some time in Esperanza and we drove up to the town of Isabel Segunda one day to see what the north coast was like. The town was really special and we enjoyed our day walking around and a lunch we had in an “ex-pat” restaurant, real food that wasn’t deeply fried. We spent about 3-4 days in Chiva Bay which the military personnel referred to as Red and Blue Beaches.

Then back to Culebra just before the town of Dewey was inundated by Puerto Ricans arriving to watch the Heineken sail boat races. All types of classes were being raced including some might big yachts. Unfortunately the day of the around the island race, there was a complete calm and the race did not happen.

We have met a number of great people including Peg and Neil Brand on Peggy Sue from southern California. We spent more than a couple of weeks in their company. During that time we also took the ferry over to Fajardo in PR to do some shopping and just to look around. These ferries are subsidized and it cost us all of $9 for return tickets for the both of us.

On March 24 we were supposed to head off to St John however we feel that we cannot get any better anchorages than the ones we have found in Culebra so were still in Culebra. We have started to think about what needs to be done when we put the boat back on the hard on April 14 and therefore we’ll probably have to head out shortly in order to give us enough time to get things organized in the BVI where the boat gets pulled. The pictures explain why we do not want to leave.