Thursday, July 6, 2000
Bonaire
Well, we’ve been in Bonaire for a full week now. You would think that by now we’ve seen a good deal of the island, spent many hours snorkeling and diving the superb reefs and would now be reporting all these fine adventures to you. Sorry, not yet.

We arrived in Kralendijk, Bonaire, Wednesday morning, June 28, after as near a perfect passage as we should ever expect. The winds were just aft of the beam blowing 15-20 knots, a little gusty at night, and the seas were seldom over 6 feet. We averaged 6 knots over the entire passage and were often making 7 – 7.5 knots for extended periods. We both agree that we rather enjoy sailing off the wind for a change! After making landfall, the last leg of the journey was about 5 miles to Kralendijk, directly into the wind. We started the engine, which had remained silent for 3 days except for a couple of short periods for recharging the batteries, furled the sails and started heading in. Five minutes later we were hit with 40 knot gusts and the heaviest squall we’d ever seen. We were glad to have already had the sails down and the cockpit enclosure panels down, too. We made slow progress against that storm but it eventually abated and we turned into the Harbour Village Marina and tied up to the fuel dock under clearing skies. We had left St. John, USVI, Sunday morning, June 25, at 0830 and were dockside in Bonaire by 1030; 74 hours “anchor to anchor” and our friends Rob and Deb from “Cavu” who we met in Trinidad were waiting at the dock to take our lines.

There is no anchoring in Bonaire. The entire coast is a protected Marine Park where they’ve installed moorings so as to protect the reefs from damaging anchors. We rationalized to ourselves that since they charge nearly $6 per day for the moorings and the weekly rate for a slip at the marina is only about $20 per day we would treat ourselves to the amenities of the Harbour Village Resort and Marina for one week. As it turned out, the primary amenity that we availed ourselves of was the cable TV. We spent (wasted) countless hours watching HBO, Discovery, CNN, A&E, etc. Even got to catch a Rocky and Bullwinkle marathon on the Cartoon Network. Oh well, one week out of the past year and a half probably didn’t corrupt us too much. Another thing we took advantage of was electricity that we didn’t have to make ourselves. Apparently, Claudia mentioned to Deb that we had made copies of all those old radio dramas back in St. Croix and Debbie responded that they have a whole lot of those kinds of tapes, too. So while we remained indoors watching all that TV, Claudia was doing several sewing projects and I was back to that slow process of recording tapes to the computer and then to CDs.

Our week of being plugged in is now over. We moved out to a mooring yesterday and it is GREAT to be back out in the open. The water here is extremely clear and we’re anxious to actually get in it soon. In 2 weeks our oldest son, Randy, and his soon-to-be-new-wife, Karen, will fly down to Bonaire for a visit and their honeymoon. This will be very special … it’s not every bride that gets to honeymoon with her new in-laws! We’re really looking forward to meeting her!

And now some back-tracking. After spending time in St. Croix we sailed up to St. Thomas where we could easily receive our forwarded mail, 800 numbers work and we could arrange some warranty and non-warranty equipment repairs, American provisions could be procured and our good friends Laddie and D.J. from Houston would come for a visit. As I may have mentioned before, Laddie and D.J. have been preparing their Westwind 42 sailboat/home for their new venture. They will be bringing it down to the Virgin Islands this fall and starting a charter business. They’ve been researching and working on this project for a couple of years now and it will be exciting to see them get to put their plans into reality soon. They spent the first couple of days meeting with various principles in the charter industry in St. Thomas and carting us around making provisioning stops. Then we sailed away to St. John and the BVIs for some vacationing fun. On their last full day, our friends from Dallas, who we last saw in Trinidad last November, Randy and Lonie, came sailing into St. Thomas on a cruise ship. By prior arrangement we picked them up at Red Hook and sailed over to St. John for the afternoon. After everyone had left we decided that we still had more heavy-duty provisioning to do before sailing south, so we rented a car for a day and spread lots of provisioning dollars all over St. Thomas. It’s still hard to believe that Claudia was able to fit all that stuff on the boat! But we weren’t through yet getting to visit with old and new friends. Shelley Haaker, a sales manager at that company I used to work for (the name escapes me now, it changes a lot), and her boyfriend, Brett, and each of their kids came to the Virgin Islands for a week’s bareboat charter. It was a short visit for us because our weather window was opening up but it was good to meet Brett and the kids and catch up on the real-world-business-crap-goings-on that Shelley has to deal with on a daily basis and that I have to struggle just to remember. Sorry, Shelley.

Anyway, that catches you all up on what we’ve been doing. So, what have you been up to?

David and Claudia