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.

Cruising the Virgins

Well it’s been a while since we added to our blog. What have been up to? Well we spent a week at the Cooper Island Beach Club (CIBC) where we were fed three meals a day and more or less rested and recovered from our last couple of months on the boat. It took us at least three days before we stopped rocking every time we looked at the tiled floors. The CIBC was a quaint little place where we had a small cottage without 110 V electricity; just 12 V like on the boat. Water was heated by solar energy and we were rationed to a fixed amount in the cistern located up the hill in the back of the cottage. We had a good time and met some interesting people who had been coming there for years.

When we left CIBC we started to look for little anchorages where the charter boats do not go. We found several and have spent the last three weeks in these little quiet bays learning how to cruise and slow down without making long passages every day. Off Peter Island we stayed at Key Cay and watched the sea turtles swim by almost every day and collected conch and had them for supper. At Virgin Gorda we stayed in two small anchorages and watched the mega yachts float by. Oh yes we did laundry as well at the Leverck Bay Resort. Necker Island, owned by Sir Richard Branson, was nearby and we dinghied over to say that we had been there, we couldn’t afford the $30,000+ a night to rent the island.

Norman Island was our next destination where we found a little bay on the northeast side that was sheltered from the wind. We met Elaine and Derek from Chester NS who had the same boat as us and we had a number of nice evenings with them. We will most likely hook up with them again in Culebra which will be our next destination.

We just checked out of the BVI and checked into the USVI in record time, less than 5 minutes and only a single question from the US customs agent. We write this in St.Thomas Harbour as we wait for our friends Yoli and Chris from Lauderdale to join us for a long weekend in Culebra. More later.

British Virgin Islands

After having left the Spanish Virgins on January 24 or so (it was a Saturday) we headed for St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands (USVI) and arrived by noon time. In fact the whole time we were in Culebra we could see St. Thomas in the distance. The long voyages were over and we were into line of sight sailing. After having been in Culebra for a little over a week and in anchorages where we were the only boat, St. Thomas was a shock.

On arriving in St. Thomas there were priorities to deal with; a hair dresser appointment for Liz, and a stop at the local diesel engine shop to pick up a spare part we had chased from the Turks & Caicos to Puerto Rico. This one only cost us $8 instead of the $25 we were charged in Puerto Rico. When you need the part you pay whatever it costs.

St.Thomas was a culture shock, we were back in the consumer driven USA. What was a treat was the grocery store at the marina. It carried all the things we were used to seeing on the shelves. We had to control ourselves so that we didn’t buy all sorts of things that would have spoiled over a few days on the boat. We headed further east along the coastline of St. Thomas to a marina where we put in for a few days to get laundry done and all of the other mundane things we take for granted when we’re at home.

We then skipped by the rest of the US Virgins and headed directly to the BVI (British Virgin Islands) a total of 10 miles further east. We arrived in the BVI on February 3 and decided that we would hang out here for a while. Check in with customs and immigration was just a formality on the westernmost island of the BVI, Jost Van Dyke. We dinghied up to the dock and entered the police station to inquire where customs was and to our surprise found a customs officer manning the front desk.

The next day we sailed and motored up to Cooper Island to visit the Cooper Island Beach Club (CIBC not to be confused with the bank). After two months of passage making and finally getting the boat down to where we wanted to be we decided we needed some “land” time. It turned out that there was a vacancy for the following week and we took it. More to be said about that later. In the interim we found a quiet little bay behind Peter Island where the bareboat charterers do not go. It’s scary watching these people, often 8 on a boat, jockeying for the best places in the anchorages without any regard to what’s around them and seemingly little if any experience in boat handling. We almost lost our dinghy to one boat where the fellow was so focused on what was further ahead of him that he passed within 15 feet off of our stern and failed to see our dinghy. We wondered if we had been this bad when we chartered here 15 years ago.