The Biggest of the Big – St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, January 22, 2024

We spent our week in St. Martin by eating all the good French Food and drinking $1 happy hour beers at Soggy Dollar.  Added to this we also met a nice Canadian Sailor and hung out with him for a few days before his girlfriend came into town and we headed out.  We did some provisioning and Ron got a new lure to try and catch some fish on our way over to the Virgin Islands.  There was a small break in the weather and after a week, we took it and did an 18-hour overnight sail to the US Virgin Islands.  We have been to BVI many times and since the customs folks are not all that nice and it’s very expensive, we decided to skip it this round and head directly over to St. John’s Leinster Bay.  Ron even caught a couple of fish on our way so the new lure must be working!

Mariposa was on a mooring ball a couple of days while we hiked the beautiful natural island. The first two days we did the Johnny Horn Leinster trail and while it wasn’t long, it was a lot of uphill. There were cool ruins and an old sugar mill where salves used to process the sugar cane into sugar and molasses.

Word soon came from our weather service that there was another major blow in weather coming straight for us and would last another week.  So, in that case we headed over to St. Thomas for a few days of civilization before jumping back over here for the upcoming weather forecast.  St. Thomas was very busy, and they had 3 huge cruise ships in port while we were there, and everyone thought we were tourists on vacation.  Kinda funny. 

Once of the cool things we did happen to see was the largest, most luxurious sailboat ever made.  It’s 400 feet owned by Jeff Bezos of Amazon.  The crazy part if there are 38 crew members for 18 guests and while it cost $500M to build, it costs $50M to keep it running every year.  It was just delivered last year, and it is gorgeous!

Now we are back at St. John’s for the next few days to see how the weather picks up.  We started out by doing some snorkeling and we swam with turtles, rays, a little shark, octopus, and tons of fish.  It was pretty cool.  More to come on that I’m sure since we will be here a week.