USVI | Cement Donkeys

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.

Slave housing for those who harvested sugar cane

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!

Kora’s support ship complete with helo pad.

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.

The Credit Card Debacle – Great Lameshure Bay, USVI – March 19, 2023

The trade winds are going to start to kick up again starting Wednesday night and we needed to get to the Virgin Islands before then. Culebra ended up being a bit of a bust anyway. We were there on a Sunday and the grocery store closes at 1:30 (which we didn’t know) so no fresh bread for us. Then, all the restaurants were closed as well since the town had no water. We ended up finding one small place to stop and grab a quick beer and headed back to the boat. We had an uncomfortable moment and didn’t want to leave the dinghy too long anyway. There was a group of teenagers hanging at the dinghy dock and one of them asked if ‘he and his friend’ could take our dinghy out and drive it around the bay…uh no! What? Best we got back and prep to head out Monday morning to USVI.

Our trip over to USVI was uneventful and it was a good day to get over here since the winds were now predicted to start picking up on Tuesday to 15 knots and then by Thursday gusting to 35 knots. We originally planned to stop at Christmas Cove but the only moorings there were private and there was no room to anchor so we stopped over to Rendezvous Bay, which was a bit rolly but much better. Sailing Hubby had some work to do and the next morning we settled into Princess Bay. We needed to scrap the bottom of the boat, so we set up shop for a few days. Since we had a few days, we drug out the paddleboards and both of us learned to paddleboard!

One of the days we headed into Coral Harbor to check out the town. It was as fancy as I expected it to be but still a couple nice restaurants. We had lunch at “Skinny Legs” which actually had a veggie Reuben and this made be very happy! The next day we tried out the swim up bar…Lime Out. That’s when it happened…our credit card was stolen. It started with a text alert from chase. Then since we track all of our finances through personal capital we could see the day that someone charged three flights on Allegiant Air. Chase caught one of the charges but missed the other two. Our credit card company removed the charges and we now have a new card being mailed. The problem is, it’s being mailed to our land address which means we won’t get it til we get back to the states. Oh well – good thing we have a backup. So, instead we decided to take advantage of the USVI national park on St. John and take this nice long 5-mile hike with friends. Hopefully today we get to snorkel around here before heading to the British Virgin Islands in the next few days.