The Rest of The Season-Part I

It's not easy keeping up with writing blogs, especially when you're 1800 miles and 3 months away from the subject.

In St. Barts we decided to continue south instead of east to Barbuda.  We figured we'd visit Antigua and Barbuda on the way back up north, later in the spring.  So St. Kitts was next:

Sailing past the Brimstone Hill Fortress

Basseterre

We anchored a few nites in the busy and historic city of Basseterre.  The efficient local "bus" system makes it easy to get places, so we hopped on one to take us to the Brimstone Hill Fortress.  Unfortunately the bus takes you to the entrance to the Fortress grounds which is well below it.  Fortunately the first tourists in a passing rental car saw our plight and gave us a ride up and later back down the hill.

"I have to walk up there?"

The views and the grounds are spectacular:

The bloggers, with St. Eustatius and Saba in the background

We heard about the Green Velvet Monkeys that were brought by the British, and now are reported to  outnumber people on St. Kitts, and we were happy to be greeted by a few while leaving the fort.

We walked along the main road down to Old Road Town, then up the hill to Romney Manor.

Along the road to Romney Manor

The manor was once owned by the great, great, great grandfather of Thomas Jefferson, and Lord Romney in 1834 was one of the early slave emancipators:

350 year old saman tree at Romney Manor

Grounds of Romney Manor

Another oasis in the otherwise bustling city of Basseterre was the Palms Court Gardens.  The property consists of a single guest house, but the highlight is a beautiful, large infinity pool and surrounding gardens.  A great place to relax, swim, and have lunch

View of Basseterre from the Palms Court pool

Guest House

The next night we moved south to White House Bay, near the Great Salt Pond.  We noticed activity at the beach bar, so took the dinghy ashore to enjoy it.  A well dressed host in all whites greeted us at the dock, only to inform us that they'd love to have us "any other night" because on this night they were hosting a private party for guests of the newly opened super yacht marina around the corner in the Great Salt Pond.  Oh well. . . . We did explore the marina, called Christopher Harbour Marina, and lo and behold it was indeed a super yacht facility--a few of the St. Barts Bucket Regatta boats were there!  Then we pushed our tails back between our legs and returned to our little mother ship for a quiet nite to ourselves.

Before we got to our next island, we passed by Nevis and then Montserrat.  One of my former work partners weathered a hurricane while vacationing there a number of years back, and I was curious about the status of the resort after impact by such a huge force of nature.  No signs of any ill effects when we passed by. The same could not be said of Montserrat.  The island was devastated by a series of recent volcanic eruptions, and the lava fields were enormous:

Next stop, Guadeloupe!

St. Barths

From St. Martin we set off for an easy upwind motorsail to St. Barths.  We arrived in Gustavia mid afternoon on March 18. 

We heard the island was "upscale," and before long we saw some of the neighboring boats at anchor and realized it was true.

"Uh, ok. This one has its own waterslide"

"But this one has a nice garage"

However, this weekend, "upscale" became an understatement because the annual "Bucket Regatta" was being held there.  So it was no surprise to see 35 mega-mega yachts gathering, for 3 days of "friendly" racing around the island. 

Nice boats, guys.

The colorful history of this kind of racing dates back to the mid-1980's in Nantucket, where a small group of well known and very rich owners decided to settle a debate about their yachts out on the water.  The event soon moved to Newport and in the mid 1990's spilled over to St. Barths as well.  Needless to say, there was a lot of gawking going on along the docks!


OK, this one I could call home!

Here you can see we really tried to get away from the scene at the docks.  That's Susan at the beach, but, alas, in the background were, yup, more mega-yachts. 



These boats are so big here, there's no room to swim!

We decided to stay for the first day of racing on Friday.  Spectacular scene!  To really appreciate just how big these yachts are, try to pick out crew.

Downwind leg with Spinnakers out

Day 1 winner Rosehearty races toward the line

St. Martin, Part II

We flew back to CT on Feb 10, and Friday, March 6  we closed on the sale of our house. We also made the decision to rent an apartment in Providence RI starting in the late spring when we get back to New England.  Meanwhile, our mailing address a PO Box in Avon!  We jumped in the car to drive to Providence, plunked down the deposit, visited our friends Josh and Tiff, then drove to NJ, visited my mom, drove to LI and visited Susan's parents, dropped off the last car into storage, and on Monday March 9 jumped on a plane with Rachel, who is on spring break, to head back "home" to Simpson Bay Marina and Pratique. 

Its been a week since then and our heads are still spinning.  Just not as fast. We decompressed by visiting Marigot, Grand Case, Orient Beach, Philipsburg, Kimsha Beach, Pelican Bay Beach, and Cupecoy. 

Marigot from Fort St. Louis
 

Susan and Rachel atop the Fort

Canon protecting McDonald's and the Mall

Rachel is served fresh macaroons at Orient Beach

Rachel had to go back to Boston via JFK on Sunday, and as luck would have it the connection was canceled due to, you guessed it, more snow in Boston. In fact, this snowfall pushed Boston over the top for most snow one season!

Now, having been sitting in the Lagoon for a month, we need to get the bottom cleaned.  Then sometime this week we will jump to St. Barth and then Barbuda.

Back in the Caribbean!

Got back to Tortola on January 20, and found Pratique at home in her slip, and right next to her sister, Hippocampus:

Nice to see she had company while we were two-timing her at home, getting our house ready for sale.

We provisioned the boat, shot up to the North Sound  and the next day set off for St. Martin. Mostly upwind motoring and bumpy enough that the night was sleepless.  But we got there just before dawn and sat outside Marigot until the first bridge opening at 0900, and anchored safe and sound in the lagoon, next to our friends Skip and Maddie on Saralane.  Skip sent me soundings and waypoints for the channel from the bridge to the anchorage, but I still managed to get the keel into the sandy bottom once before we got to the deeper water.  No big deal, though! 

Then we went to Marigot to check into France.  The office was supposed to be open in the afternoon, but after waiting an hour, nobody showed up.  So we did it the next day.  They use self-serve computers to do that, which sounds easy enough but the keyboards have a number of letters swapped into different places (like a is where q is), making the process slower than expected! 

Got to visit with Skip and Maddie and meet their friends Daryl and Adri (pronounced "aaah-dree" like, "open your mouth wide and say "aaah.")  They live on Leila, and we spent some very nice time with them over the next week.  Skip and Maddie skipped town the next day though, on their way to Antigua & Barbuda, but not before they downloaded their wealth of local knowledge to us--a huge help and time-saver for us!

We spent most of our nights in St. Martin anchored in the lagoon, on the French side, but it's easy to dinghy back and forth between St. Martin (French) and St. Maartin (Dutch) depending upon the order of the day.  It was good to see that the state of economics on the Dutch side is as we had envisioned:

 Megayacht neighbors taking up space. Hey, there's Venus again!

 It wasn't long before we found a sat TV at a local bakery showing us what we were missing back home--snow, and lots of it!

 

One of the tourist highlights that I really wanted to experience was going to Maho Beach to see the jumbo jets fly directly over you as they land on the runway just behind.  They even provide the schedule!

Duck, here comes KLM!

While we did also have a chance to sail to some of the local spots like Grand-Case and Ile Tintamarre, we received word early on that our house had a buyer.  That was a surprise, to say the least--kind of like throwing a fishing line over the stern and getting a strike before the line has fully paid out.  So instead of being cruisers, we found ourself on line for email and phone calls. We made reservations to fly back home to finalize the sale, which is where we are now.

OK, what happened here?

 

More next month!

2014 SDR

We had much more time preparing for the rally this year compared to last.  Also, this year Pratique and Wynot were joined by 4 other Outbound 46's:  Pneumatic, Hedonism, Hippocampus and FuhGedAboutIt.  Another familiar boat was Legato, a beautiful Tayana 48 owned by Larry Terhaar.  Larry sold us our previous boat, Breezin,' when he had Legato built, and later I helped him sail his boat from CT to Florida. 

This year Hank was able to do the rally, and we were joined by Ed Cotter who has done lots of cruising on his own Valiant 42, as well as newcomer Bob Herbert from OPO.



Ed

Hank



Bob



 

 

This year we decided not to leave a day early since the sea state was still a bit bouncy on Sunday. So instead we got going around 0830 on Monday Nov 3.  We set the pole for the Solent sail and went down the coast wing-and-wing.  Then turned east to cross the Gulf Stream at the location provided by Chris Parker.  We spent the next few days sailing and motor sailing the rhumb line toward Virgin Gorda.  However, more and more during the passage the wind was on the nose.  After two days of relative slow going mostly into the wind, I felt that we had enough fuel to continue motoring east toward 64° 30' W, then tack to the south for the last two days in the developing trade winds.  That strategy was confirmed by Chris, and we made it to the BEYC in 9 days, arriving early morning on Wednesday, Nov 12!  Along the way we caught two Mahi, but only one was a good size to eat, and it was delicious!!  Thanks to Hank's usual culinary expertise we ate quite well along the way.

At the Bitter End we were greeted by the crew of Wynot (although Tom was exchanged for Talya by the time we got there!) Then when Pneumatic, Hedonism and Hippocampus arrived, the Outbound celebration started! 



Tina, Geof, Talya



Bob from Hedonism

Kurt

 



Skip

Ed

 

Kurt gets braided!



Time for the Drone!

Lee Corwin, Hippocampus

Our charter neighbors at the end of the dock provided live music all afternoon!

Making Phil Lambert proud:   Hedonism, Hippocampus, Pratique, Pneumatic, and Wynot!
(FuhGedAboutIt went to St. Martin)

 Just like last year, reluctantly I had to move the boat from the Bitter End to Roadtown, Pratique's new home away from home.  Lee came with me to scope out marinas in Tortola:

Village Cay

 Another boat clean-up, then a walk to the ferry. Time for a last lunch before traveling home:

Spicy yellowtail roll.