Monday May 15, 2000
We are currently anchored in Salt River Bay, St. Croix, USVI. Columbus anchored here in 1493 in search of fresh water but didn’t stay long after his shore party was attacked by local Carib Indians. We’ve had a much friendlier reception, from a cruising family that we met last year on the way down. We met Keith and Cyndi and their two daughters, Nikki and Alyssa ages 11 and 9, in Salinas, Puerto Rico. They were on their way to Virgin Gorda where Keith had decided to take a job building boats (he’s a shipwright by trade). Shortly after we bade them farewell in Virgin Gorda last June Keith found a much better opportunity building a 65 ft. luxury catamaran in St. Croix for a former client of his. The boat is near completion and the owners, financiers and Keith and Cyndi will be sailing it to Hawaii next month where it will go into the owners’ charter business which Keith will be managing. The girls will be flying to the U.S. to stay with their grandparents until joining their parents in Hawaii. Sounds like a pretty neat deal for them all. Anyway, they’ve been renting a house for the past month and they have a car. They had us over the other night and fixed a fantastic chicken fried steak dinner. How did they know I’d been craving that?! Today Cyndi is going to pick us up and take us to K-Mart (that’s what Claudia has been craving).

Our passage from Martinique was the best sailing passage we’ve made yet. We weighed anchor Wednesday morning in St. Pierre at the base of Mount Pelee with 15 knots of wind from the ENE and 3-4 ft. seas. The second night out, however, the wind died completely so we had to motor the last 16 hours into St. Croix. We spent the first 2 nights here anchored at Christiansted which is a very quaint and historic town. We took a bus to the large Plaza Xtra grocery store which is one of the best things about being back in the U.S. (American groceries, not buses).

We have to play the tides to get in and out of the Salt River anchorage so we plan to leave early in the morning for our day sail over to St. Thomas where we’ll be hanging out for awhile.

Tuesday May 23, 2000
Okay, here’s what really happened. Instead of staying at Salt River for two days, we were there for a whole week. After we saw the yacht that Keith is building and they said it would be launched on Friday, we decided that we would definitely stay to witness that event, which we did. During the week we spent a lot of time with Cyndi and the girls, getting to do laundry for free at the house with their full size washer and dryer (it’s the simple things we find pleasure in these days), surfing the internet, swimming in the pool and going to K-Mart and the grocery stores. We even got to go to church with them on Sunday. It’s also pretty cool being adopted by a family that is moving to Hawaii. There was another thing that kept us very busy last week. There was another cruising boat at Salt River that we met last year, “Free Spirit” with John and Nadine on board. John is working for Keith building the catamaran. Claudia found out that Nadine has a large collection of old radio dramas on cassette and that Cyndi wanted to copy them. Well, we don’t have a way to copy from cassette tape to cassette tape but I did figure out a way to copy from cassette tape to our computer and then to CD and then from CD to cassette tape which is a very slow process but we got them done and now we have a fine collection of old radio dramas on CD!

When we arrived at Salt River we came in on a high tide at about 4:00 pm. However, during the week the tides went from two a day to only one and the high tide occurred in the middle of the night. Monday morning at first light we made our exit, clearing the bottom by the narrowest of margins (luckily the bottom is sand and we could have powered our way through except in the lowest of tides). We motor-sailed the 34 miles up to St. Thomas and dropped the hook in the clear, turquoise water at Honeymoon Bay, Water Island, St. Thomas, where we’ll do some much needed maintenance and repair, including finishing our paintjob that we started in Trinidad (it will be good to have both sides the same color again). In two weeks our friends Laddie and DJ will fly in from Houston to scope out the VI where they’ll bring their boat later this year to put into their new charter business. We’ll let them work for a couple of days and then we’ll get into vacation mode and check out all the fine anchorages in the area.

Till next time,
David and Claudia