Our Last Visitors for a While

We had our daughter Jessica and her husband, Ryan, down for a week so we decided to take them over to the BVI's.  The BVI's seemed more their style with lots of beach bars, great snorkeling and nice beaches.  We took them to Jost Van Dyke to meet Foxy and of course he had stories to tell. Then we headed over to the bubbly pool on Jost Van Dyke which I think is one of Max and Lexie's favorite places because they get to hike with us to the pool then play in the water  Then we headed to Cane Garden Bay on Tortola and had dinner at one of my favorite places, Myett's.  Then the next day we of course had to head over to Norman to show them the Willy T, which was pretty hoppin'.  Then for the last night in the BVI's we stayed in Great Harbor off Peter Island but on the way over we stopped at the Indians for some really great snorkeling.

We had a really nice sail for the second to last day on our way to Cruz Bay on St. John and checked back in to the US then stayed the night at Frances Bay on St. John.
Then headed back to Charlotte Amalie to do some shopping and  because we were meeting our friends, the Kern's (who stayed with us back in December) and were back in St. Thomas for their Anniversary.  We had dinner at the Green House.  If your ever in St. Thomas it's a pretty good place to eat.

These are our last visitors for a while other than a friend from my work who is down here for a week but staying at a resort.  We plan on meeting up with her and her boyfriend and taking them out for a day sail.  Then we will be heading to St. Marten once we get everything ready and the winds are in our favor.  We plan on making our way slowly down to Grenada to avoid hurricane season.  It will be nice to see some different islands that we have visited yet.

Jess and Ryan driving the boat and enjoying the paddle boards.  Not bad for their first time at both

Enjoying an evening at Myett's 

The bubbly pool on Jost Van Dyke

Ryan toasting Wes for his birthday with a painkiller at the Willy T

Jess enjoying the floatie and a cold Carib

We had dolphins visit us in Frances Bay

Wes snorkeling through the hole at the Indians

Ryan snorkeling

A ray Ryan and Wes saw at Great Harbor off Peter Island

Another beautiful sunset

I think they had a really good time.

Down to Viques

We decided to sail over to Vieques on Sunday. The trip was 31 knots and it was down wind. I let Karen plan and execute the trip because  she really doesn’t get to do that a lot. I think she is a better sailer than she knows, but she lacks confidence. Hopefully if she can do more trips like that she will gain confidence.

Viques is an island off of Puerto Rico and it’s pronounced (B-a’-gus)  It and Culebra are the two Spanish virgin islands. It was used for a bombing range for the Navy during World War Two and some of it is still off limits.

They mainly speak Spanish here but so far most everyone we talked with spoke english. The island seems to have a lot of visitors. More than I thought there would be. The south side of the island is all beaches. They must have twelve different beaches and they all have 10 of 15 people on them. Just about everyone is a tourist and they are happy to talk with you. They also like dogs. Which is very different than St Thomas. 

Even though there are more people there are still a lot of places where you anchor by yourself. Most of the tourists go home in the late afternoon. So we are here by ourselves. That is kind of a nice feeling, having one of these beautiful beaches to ourselves.

The other night we spent the night at a bio-bay. The bay lights up at night when you disturb the water.  We disturbed it with our dinghy and the water coming off the prop lit up. We didn’t see many fish trails though in the water like the last time we were here.

Last night we had a fire on the beach. I always want to have a fire on the beach, I haven’t had one in thirty years because there isn’t any place to have them anymore. But last night I got some wood together and we had a fire. It was just Karen and I and it only lasted one and one half hours but it was fun. I started it with just one match and a little bit of paper out of our garbage can.  I guess that boy scout training payed off.

On the beach

The boat

Lexie with the Frisbee

Lexie and Max fighting for the frisbee

The walkway in Esaranza

A sunset

                                                              Viques's light house

Jen and John came down for a visit

We had my sister Jen and her family of 5 down for a week. There is Jen and her husband John, and they have three boys, Sean who is 10 and Aiden and Kevin who are 8 year old twins. That plus Karen, myself and two dogs made for a lot of bodies on a 32 ft cat.

That said they had a great time.

The kids were fantastic. Sean is a sports expert. He was very interested in the basketball tournament. We tried to find out the scores but didn’t find out until Tuesday.

Unfortunately both our brackets were broken. 

We took them to Culebra, which is one of the Spanish Virgin Islands off of Puerto Rico. There are some really great beaches there. The first night we spent in little Tortuga bay, which is a small island off of Culebra and means turtle in spanish.  And we saw some turtles. We also had a great time swimming to the beach and playing in the water around the boat.

The next day we went to the other side of the island and did some snorkeling, but there was some current. The kids didn’t do that well snorkeling here. Except for Aiden. Aiden apparently spent some time snorkeling in swimming pools and it showed when he got snorkeling in the ocean, so Aiden got some really good snorkeling in and the others had to wait until we got to start from the beach.

We also took a walk up to the light house. The dogs always enjoy that.  It looked like they were starting to refurbish the lighthouse because they had it blocked off where you couldn’t climb to the top anymore.

The next day we went to the island of Culebra, which has some really great snorkeling and you can start from the beach. This made for good snorkeling of all of us.

Next we headed to the town on Culebra. We took them into the town and ate at Zaco’s Tacos.

Since the wind was in our favor we decided to head back to St Thomas the next day.  We sailed over to Brewers Bay for one night and then Longs Bay for the next night. 

All in all it was a good week. Having little guys around was a lot of fun. You forget what they are like when you are not around them all the time. I learned more about video games then I think anyone should know. The details that they go into are incredible. I don’t think I paid that much attention to anything when I was that age. 

One other thing about having kids on board is they don’t need a lot of entertaining. Just find them a beach and they are entertained. They also love to play games. Go fish seemed to be a favorite.

I’m really glad they came down for a visit

Kevin ride the paddle board

Sean riding the paddle board

The kids playing

Aiden snorkeling

The whole gang having fun in the water

Jim and Sally visited

We had Jim and Sally Crowell down for a couple of days. I wasn’t sure how they would do on a boat because they had never been on this kind of boat before, But they did great. I’m always surprised when people don’t get sea sick and they weren’t sick at all. We really have only had four people get sick down here out of the 50 people we have had down.

Since Jim and Sally were only here for three days we didn’t take them far. We went over to Francis Bay on St John. We did some swimming and hung out on the beach.

The next day we did Trunk bay, which had some good snorkeling that day. While snorkeling I saw my first octopus. Those things really change color fast. It was a light blue color, then went to black then went to a brown when it moved next to a rock. It looked just like the rock.

Next we went to Cruz Bay on St John, then we finished by staying in Redhook.

I think Jim and Sally had a pretty good time all in all.

Jim Driving the boat

On the beach

Another beautiful sunset

St Croix

Since we weren't going to have any visitors for a few days we decided to hop over to St. Croix since we hadn't been there yet.  I guess it was a little more than a hop, about 40 nautical miles with a eastern wind at about 17 knots so we had a really good sail all the way over.  It took close to 8 hours but we left early Thursday morning and are spending three nights here.  We anchored in Gallows Bay which is next to the channel leading into Christiansted.   We decided to rent a car so we could tour the island and we took the dogs along, which they loved it.  The island is about 80 square miles and actually bigger than St. Thomas and St. John.  It has some fairly nice beaches and a rain forest.  There are really only two main towns, Christiansted and Frederiksted.  I guess Frederiksted gets cruise ships in once in a while but there weren't any while we were there.  Last night there was a live band in the gazebo in downtown Frederiksted which we listened to for a little while, while we watched the sunset.  While we were driving around we thought it didn't seem like we were on a tropical island but then you would go around a turn and there would be a beautiful beach.  There is a reef that goes almost around the whole island and I guess the diving is awesome (we didn't try it though)  but there  are probably about 80 different dive sites marked on the local map covering the North and West side of the island
We stopped for lunch at Coconuts in Frederiksteda and we met this young couple and when we asked them where they were from the girl said Loveland, Colorado.  We couldn't believe it but it was actually George Lundeen's daughter.  Crazy small world we live in.
We will be heading back to Charlotte Amalie Sunday so we can get ready for the Crowell's visit, then we have Wes's sister and her family coming down, so we will be pretty busy the next couple of weeks

Downtown Christiansted

The Fort in Christiansted

Downtown Frederiksted

The furthest Eastern point of the US

 

Another beautiful sunset over the water

Oh and we got our new trampoline put on.  It only took me three days to get it strung but it was worth it.

J and Anne came for a visit

We had J and Anne down for a week and they are going back today. We did the BVI's and also stopped at Hurricane Hole on St John on the way back. We had never been there so it was nice to go  someplace new. There is a town over on the east end of St John that I didn't know about.
Where we stayed there wasn't much around. We were the only boat there and the star viewing was pretty good.
I think J and Anne had a pretty good time. They got to snorkel quite a bit and J and I dove the wreck of the rhone. That is my favorite dive in the BVI's. When we dove I couldn't get my BC to inflate so I had to kick the whole time we were diving, but we still had a pretty good dive and saw a turtle under the water.
I think it will take a week to get the dogs back to normal. J and Anne spoiled them the whole week.
Max and Lexie always got a little of J and Ann's dinner and they could always go to them for some attention.
Anne developed a taste for Bushwhackers and Velvet cinn. But we told her they only taste good down here.
When we got back to St Thomas we got our new trampoline for the front of our boat. We will be putting that in this week.
Other than that, we have March Maddness this week. I plan on spending a lot of time at Hooters.

                                                           J and Ann on the boat

Sunset at Cain Garden Bay

A tall ship at Norman Island

                                                       J Driving the boat

A little boat work

Its been a while since I blogged so I thought I would take a little time and let you all know what I have been doing on the boat. As Karen said in the last blog we got our new head sail. We should get a chance to try that out tomorrow. 

I also put two new screws in the stays for the mast. The old bolts just rusted off. Then I put some shims in the strut that holds the cutless bearing. This is under water so I got on the tanks and worked under water. That was a new experience. But it really quieted down the port side engine.

I got the water maker working. It was so great to be making water. We needed to get the pump fixed and I got that in the mail on Monday. Now that I have it in, the water maker is working great. I still need to pump the exit water out of the boat but I will get that done today.  

I also started working on some little projects that I haven’t had time for. Like getting all the outlets working. Some of the 12 Volt outlets were only putting out 11.2 Volts. So I ran some new wire and now I have 12 volts on them. I built a little dam to catch the rain water and funnel it into the water tank. That was an easy job but it took a lot of time because I widdled it. 

The engines are running great so in general we are in much better shape than when I bought the boat.

The two bolts with the auto seal on them I replaced. Also I build the dam and the dam on the side to catch water

This is my water maker.

Wes's Parents Visit

Wes's parents visited last week and I really give them big kudos for staying on the boat for a full week after staying at a nice resort in St Thomas for two weeks. See, they are both in their 70's and not as mobile as they used to be and it's not the easiest thing getting in and out of the dinghy and walking around the boat when it's bouncing all over the place. We decided to take them over to Culebra, which is one of the Spanish Virgin Islands  but you have to travel about 18 miles of open water and we had some pretty rough water going over.  His mom got sea sick a couple of times and his dad fell getting in the dinghy when we picked them up at the airport but they were really good sports about it all.
We did manage to have some fun though. We rented a golf cart and showed them the island and visited three beaches and spent a few hours at Flamenco beach, which is really nice.  Wes also gave them snorkeling lessons.

When we got back to Charlotte Amalie our new jib sail was waiting for us - YAY.  So we got that put on.  We haven't had a chance to try it out yet though.  We are thinking we might head over to Christmas Cove or Honeymoon Bay for a couple of days until our next guests arrive next Sunday, which are a couple of places we haven't been to yet.  Honeymoon Bay is on Water Island, which is just outside of Charlotte Amalie and Christmas Cove is on Great St. James Island which is just off the Southeastern tip of St. Thomas.

Max of course had to help with the new jib sail