Category Archives: St. Thomas

BVI, Isla de Culebra, Puerto Rico, St. Croix, St. John, St. Thomas, Virgin Gorda, Virgin Islands

Alive and Well Aboard Ma’alahi

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A question for you:

Which of the following excuses is the biggest reason we have not written in such a long time?

a) We’ve been too busy having fun
b) We’ve been too busy with boat projects
c) We’ve settled into such a routine that we just don’t think about it
d) I’m just too lazy
e) The computer has been broken
f) ALL OF THE ABOVE

(in my best gameshow host voice): Well, if you guessed “f, all of the above” then YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!!!!

Even though we’ve been in the Virgin Islands since mid-December, we’ve moved around a lot … never more than one week at any anchorage at one time. We’ve done two tours of St. Croix, spent lots of time in St. Thomas and explored parts of St. John that we’d missed before. We’ve spent big bucks fixing and replacing broken boat parts, including the transmission, dinghy, autopilot and refrigerator; discovered and hung out in our newest favorite St. John anchorage,P0001894 Hurricane Hole; got visits from friends Randy and Lonie, Mike and Cynthia, and my brother Gary and sister-in-law Vanessa, read lots of books and learned a lot more about the world of amateur radio.

And, yes, the computer was out of commission for awhile when the keyboard finally succumbed to corrosion from the marine environment. But after disabling the notebook’s keyboard and adding an external one, it’s working ALMOST normal again (I just have to choose whether I want to use the mouse or the keyboard). Anyway, this will be an attempt to bring you up-to-date with our goings-on.

P0001921The first thing you should know is that we left the Virgin Islands this past Friday when we sailed over to Isla de Culebra, one of Puerto Rico’s eastern islands. We hope to be here just long enough for a weather window to open up for us to make the 640 nautical mile passage up to San Salvador in the Bahamas. However, there is a very nasty low pressure system and gale centered just north of that location and it’s taking it’s sweet time moving on out. I’m downloading weather faxes and reports frequently looking for a break; hopefully we’ll get to leave here Wednesday morning and are looking forward to the 4 – 5 day passage out into the Atlantic.

Way, way back on the 3rd of March, Randy and Lonie came sailing in P0001867to St. Thomas on a cruise ship. We picked them up and went for a short sail before dropping anchor in Honeymoon Bay on Water Island where we managed to grab a table in the shade on the loveliest beach around just before the day-charter barge KON TIKI showed up, dropping off their 100 or so guests. After a late lunch back onboard Ma’alahi and the strange disappearance of a great number of bottles of beer, we managed to race back to Long Bay and deposit R & L on the cruise ship dock just in time for them to make the gangway before it was stowed.

P0001890A couple of weeks later Mike and Cynthia flew in for a week’s visit. We didn’t waste any time taking them to our newly discovered Hurricane Hole near Coral Bay, St. John. We swam and snorkeled and spotted many birds. Then we thought it would be good to take them to a favorite little funky bar-restaurant, Skinny Legs, for a quiet Sunday late-afternoon cheeseburger. WRONG DAY! We dinghyed over to the sounds of a BIG party going on. There was a live band and people jammed in every corner, both inside and out. I will not EVEN attempt to describe all the bizarre events of that evening but we think we remember that the cheeseburgers were excellent! We made a run to Virgin Gorda, via Peter Island where we enjoyed another exciting episode of “The Charterboat Anchoring Show” which consists of getting to a BVI anchorage that has no moorings early in the afternoon, getting something cold to drink and then watching the show as late-arriving bareboat charterers come in and go through hilarious gyrations in their attempts to set the hook! The next day we sailed on to The Baths at Virgin Gorda. We spent the afternoon with Mike and Cynthia, climbing the giant boulders and making our way to the fabulous Devil’s Bay Beach. Upon returning to the mother ship, we were shocked to discover that in our absence about 30 or more French bareboat charter boats had anchored closely around the frightened Ma’alahi. We quickly made our escape to the overnight anchorage at Spanish Town and next morning fled the BVI. It was a week that went by too fast.

However, two weeks later we swung right back into vacation-mode when Gary and Vanessa arrived for their visit. Things got off to a fast start as we sailed offshore from Water Island heading toward St. John and Gary caught the last two fish in the Virgin Islands. The first was a barracuda who got tossed back after we carefully removed the hooks without losing any fingers. The next one, though, was a definite keeper; a very nice-sized, two-dinners-for-four Wahoo! Actually, there must have been at least a couple more fish in the ocean because Gary almost caught them, too. Problem was, I had just replaced the rusty hooks on a couple of good lures but they turned out to be too puny and these sea monsters bent the hooks straight and slid off! Well, one morning we had an experience that would top any fish story. We were just coming out of the cut in the reef from Cane Garden Bay when Claudia let out a shriek, “Oh my humpback5gosh, it’s a wh-wh-whale!!!” Holy cow! Sure enough, there was a mama humpback and her calf swimming by very close to us and the shore. We turned the boat around and got even closer. Gary was at the bow snapping pictures like crazy and we were all treated to the sight of the adolescent humpback breaching and splashing several times only 150 ft. away! Don’t think we’ll ever top that! I think we came real close to talking G and V into staying with us and helping us sail back to the Bahamas and Florida, but in the end they flew home anyway (sigh).

Claudia has had a good time learning to play the piano. We bought an electronic piano keyboard back in January and she’s teaching herself how with the books we bought with it. It was slow going for awhile but she’s reading music now and readily picking out (guitar term) new songs. I play a little, too, but only by ear. It’s another reason why this email has been so long in coming. Since getting the HAM license I’ve also spent more time with the radio, both on the marine and ham frequencies. It still amazes me that with this little black box and wire antenna and a little power from our batteries that I can talk to so many people in so many far-away places from our little boat in the remotest of anchorages. I talked to a guy in Copenhagen, Denmark one evening, talked with Mary and Rick on TRANQUILITY while they were on passage from Panama to the Galapagos Islands, frequently talk to Andy and Diane on SPIRIT BORNE in Panama’s San Blas Islands, Rosie and Neil on DREAMCATCHER in Columbia and even had a good conversation with Liz on RUMPLETEASER the other night in New York City! I’ve talked to my dad in Texas from his friend’s HAM station a couple of times and have had a couple of really good, long conversations with my friend Elkin, up near Pittsburgh. So, HEY, get a radio and let’s talk!

When the wind and sea conditions finally improve we’ll take off from here and make way to San Salvador. We’ll spend two or three weeks visiting some of the islands in that area before heading over to George Town where our daughter Christina and her family will meet us for a visit before we head on to Florida. We’ll be in touch and start sending position reports along the way via email.

Regards,

David and Claudia
aboard MA’ALAHI

Dolphins, St. Croix, St. John, St. Thomas, Virgin Islands

Caribbean Update From Ma’alahi

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Hello everyone out there in email land!

David and Claudia are finally back online with a new email address: KD5MXA@winlink.org. This email address is a permanent replacement for the old SAILMAIL address. Like the old email account, this one is via the HAM radio and it makes use of the identical technology and software. So, it’s the same SLOW send and receive for us on this end, although we do have more stations and frequencies available to log on to. There is a real neat feature of this new setup. On the web, go to http://wl2k.org/arps.htm and enter KD5MXA in the call sign prompt and click “display”. This will take you to a series of maps that show our last reported position which gets updated each time we logon to email.

We really love it here in the Virgin Islands. Even though we’ll be heading to Florida in the coming months to setup a new home base, visit family and friends and go to W*RK for awhile, we think this would make an excellent home base, too, someday. We already know that when hurricane season arrives, we can be south to Venezuela’s out islands in 3 days and that is a perfect place to cruise during that time of year, and then return here at whatever pace that suits us. We sailed down to St. Croix around the middle of January (35 miles south of St. Thomas) in order to take the HAM tests, the passing of which has given us these new email privileges. On this trip we finally made it over to Buck Island, a small island-national park less than 5 miles from Christiansted harbor. What a great discovery this was! The west end of the island has a beautiful white sand beach lined with palm trees and the anchorage is in deep sand in about 10 feet of water just off this beach. There are fabulous coral reefs around the island that made for excellent snorkeling. When we go back we hope to lure some of those big lobsters outside of the park boundary and have them over for dinner. On the sail back to St. Thomas we had yet another encounter with a group of dolphins playing at the bow of our boat. It was especially fun to watch the m in the incredibly blue and clear water competing for position directly in front of the bow.

We’ve made extensive use of 1-800 numbers and the U.S. mail in St. Thomas; ordering new parts, returning broken ones for repair and getting them back in a reasonable period of time. We’ve been without the use of either of our depth sounders since the first day of October when our backup unit decided to take early retirement. Although we got real good at judging depth from the color of the water, it is very good indeed to have both of them repaired and back onboard again. The forward seal on our transmission took to leaking awhile back and we’re going to have that fixed next week. Since the parts are on order for that and will take a week or so to arrive, we sailed over to St. John to spend some good NO-SHOPPING time at some of our favorite anchorages. We’ll head back to St. Thomas early next week to make the transmission repair.

Well, that’s the news from the Virgin Islands. It’s good to be back online and will be even better when we hear from you!

David and Claudia
aboard Ma’alahi
Leinster Bay, St. John, USVI
February 10, 2001

St. Croix, St. Thomas, Virgin Islands

Back in the Virgins

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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 LaunchDay_Nikki_Cyndi_Keith_Alyssawe 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. WeFort_Christiansvaern_1 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
Salt_River_Bay_1Okay, 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