The Lone Seahorse – St. Croix, USVI, February 16, 2024

This was our first time to St. Croix Island.  We missed this heading to Grenada due to not having a weather window to come over.  St. Croix is not a very protected island and is known for it’s terrible swell, so we were thrilled to get a chance to come over directly from Puerto Rico!  You see, there are seahorses here and I have only ever seen one at the zoo.  We jumped on the opportunity and took the salty 6-hour sail to drop anchor near Frederiksted Pier.  I had a good feeling since on our sail over we saw dolphins!  It was the first time this whole season and there were about 20 fishing and jumping out of the water right next to us.  Perhaps Buddy and Biscuit had not forgotten about me after all 😊.   I was too excited to take any photos.

Of course, we had something break which is typical and Ron took the necessary time to trouble shoot the starter on one of the engines and he took apart the switch in hopes this would fix it.  Luckily, we had a spare on board, and he was able to replace it.

This is a cruise ship stop and I was thrilled to learn they have very good vegetarian taco’s here!  It must be the luck of the dolphins, so we had to see seahorses right?  Well, we ended up snorkeling the pier 4 separate times and we saw only one.  Seriously?  The first time we swam to the pier by simply jumping off the boat, however we both got stung so much by the jellyfish that even after showering with vinegar we had to wait a while for all the feeling to come back.  We did get smarter about it as we went and took the dinghy the next 3 times. 

You see seahorses are masters of camouflage amongst some of the most beautiful soft coral either of us had ever seen.  Not only that but they only like very calm water and are about the size of a Q-Tip.  This makes them terribly difficult to see so we only saw the one on our first dive.  However we did see a lot of other cool sea life including octopus, rays, turtles, and even the first spotted eagle rays we have seen this year.  This was right up there with Blue Tang Reef except the coral and sea life was very different and certainly more colorful. 

Frederiksted itself is a sleepy little town and unless there is a cruise ship in town you would think no one lived there since very little was open.  We stuck around on cruises ship day just to see what the town was like when it was open, and I will say it livened up quite a bit.  Suddenly, the beaches were packed, there were trinket stands open all along the shore way to buy souvenirs, and all the shops and restaurants were open. 

However, we only needed to see that once and as always, weather forced us to take the trip back over to St. John USVI the next morning.  Remember I said St. Croix has no protection?  Well, the winds were picking up and the anchorage had gotten quite full of swell.  It was only another day sail until we got to a very nice, protected anchorage just in time for happy hour!  It would be an early night since we planned a nice challenging hike the next morning.

We took the chance to head out early the next morning before it got too hot to do the Petroglyph Trail.  This was a 3.5 mile out and back trail (7 miles total) which was rated as “difficult” in the all-trails app.  It didn’t turn out to be half as hard as many of the other trails we had done and well worth seeing the spring fed waterfall and petroglyphs at the end!

We were both exhausted after the hike when Ron did a double check of the weather and it appeared we would have an opportunity to leave the next morning for St. Marten, no wait, it was directly to Antigua.  It’s nice to literally go where the wind blows.  There was one issue…Antigua required an exit certificate which we did not have and were not in the right place to get.  This will require us to go over to Cruz Bay to customs via the dinghy which was 5 miles of open water.  This is a VERY long dinghy ride, but we could not take over Mariposa or we would lose our mooring ball and we were lucky to snag in the first place. 

This was not one of the stupidest things Ron and I have ever done (that would be in Barbuda) but it was close.  At least we realized it before Customs closed and we ended up with all the necessary paperwork.  I guess we are heading to Antigua in the morning for our 24-hour sail.