CruiseNews 37
Date:  29 January, 2001
Port of Call:  Hurricane Hole, St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands
Subject:  Back in the U.S. of A.

When we sailed into Christiansted Harbor on 20 December we felt like we were returning home.  It was wonderful to see the U.S. flag snapping tautly in the breeze over the yellow walls of Fort Christianvaern.  We had been out of U.S. waters for nearly a year, and we had been looking forward to returning to a U.S. territory.  We wanted things that are simply unavailable in the rest of the Caribbean:  telephones where 1-800 numbers actually work; post offices where stamps cost only 33¢; ATMs which dispense dollars; and chains of stores which carry the brands and types of products that we grew up with.
 
Consequently, the first thing we did on our first full day here (after checking in with customs, of course) was to hop on the bus and visit K-Mart!  With only four days left until Christmas, we navigated our shopping cart down the aisles and gawked at what was, to us, an astounding collection of merchandise.
 
Arriving at St. Croix was like returning home in other ways.  On our second day in St. Croix we had lunch with several amateur radio operators we had been talking to on the Caribbean Maritime Mobile Net for the previous year.  Even though it was our first meeting, in some ways it was like a reunion of long separated friends.  We met Lou, John, Jeanette, and Jim-all active hams on St. Croix-and chatted for an hour or two.  We got invited to go to church with Jeanette on Christmas Eve, and to a party at John and Jeanette's on Christmas Day.  We gladly accepted both invitations.
 
The next day we went really wild and went to BOTH K-Marts on St. Croix!  We were looking for lots of little things we hadn't been able to find in over a year and we wanted to make sure we left no stone unturned.  Somehow we also wound up with a new VCR as our Christmas present to each other.
 
 
Christmas Eve aboard Sovereign
On Christmas Eve, Jeanette picked us up at the waterfront and drove us to her church.  It sat up on a hill looking down on grassy knolls, the ruins of windmills, and the expanse of the blue Caribbean.  We sat listening to the choir practice before the service and looked out the huge picture windows at the magnificent view.  During the service, the minister didn't seem to have any trouble competing with the view, and by noon the service had finished.  We had lunch with Jeanette, John, and Lou at a restaurant nearby.

 

Christmas "hams" John, Margo, Clive, Bud, and Gail
On Christmas, after opening our gifts and watching "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" on our new VCR, we took the dinghy in to the waterfront, where Lou met us and drove us to the Christmas Party at John and Jeanette's.  More local hams were there (including a guy who looked suspiciously like Santa Claus and they asked him if he was tired after "last night"!), plus some other boaters including Clive and Margot from "Revid", who we had met last spring on our way south through the islands.  We had a great time with our new-old friends; it was a wonderful Christmas.
 
On Boxing Day, John kindly offered the use of his frequency counter to help align my ham radio, and John and I spent much of the day working on my radio.  I spent the rest of the day admiring what is undoubtedly the finest ham shack I have ever seen.  Cathy stayed behind on the boat, opting to rest and relax.
 
Exploring the powder magazine at Ft. Christiansvaern
The next day we played tourist:  We toured Fort Christiansvaern, walking through the portcullis, climbing up the ramparts, peering into the dungeon, the powder magazine, the officer's quarters, and all the other nooks and crannies of an early 18th century fortress.  We took the obligatory photograph, with one of us standing by the cannons as Sovereign floated in the harbor in the background.  In the afternoon we took a day-trip to Buck Island, a national park near St. Croix, and went snorkeling there.  Now that we have the yardstick of the fabulous reefs of the Tobago Cays, every other place we snorkel seems a bit of a disappointment.  Still, we had fun.  We motored Sovereign back to Christiansted Harbor, arriving just as the sun set.
 
We were sad to leave all our new-found friends, but we were looking forward to picking up some mail we had asked to have sent to St. John.  So on 29 December we left for St. John with hopes that our mail would be waiting for us.  Aside from having to maneuver to avoid a large tanker, the 40-mile trip was an uneventful motorsail in light winds.  When we arrived and checked for our mail, we found that not only was our mail not there, it hadn't even been sent yet!  We resigned ourselves to having to wait a while longer for the mail.
 
 
Relaxing at Water Creek
In the mean time, we tucked Sovereign into a little cove called Water Creek, off of Hurricane Hole in St. John.  Water Creek is one of only a handful of anchorages in the Caribbean that is not plagued by rolling ocean swells, and we have been enjoying the calm.  The land surrounding Water Creek is part of the Virgin Islands National Park, so it is undeveloped.  The harbor is lined with mangroves and the hills are covered with a mixture of cactus and leafy saplings.  The water is much clearer than usual for a mangrove-lined harbor.  Pelicans dive-bomb the mangrove fringes for dinner.  Schools of blue stripers churn up the water around the boat with such fury that it sometimes sounds like an angry mob is beating their fists against the side of the hull trying to get in.
 
We celebrated a very quiet New Year's Eve here, deciding to toast the New Year at midnight Greenwich time, which is 8:00 PM local time. We are sharing the harbor with only a few other boats, because it is such a long way from shore facilities.  Every few days we dinghy in to Coral Bay to check for mail and visit friends.
 
One night we dropped in and had drinks with John and Betty from "Parrothead", who we first met in Los Testigos, Venezuela.  They introduced us to Dave and Robin on "Intrepid", who generously loaned us a stack of movies for our new VCR.  We spent the next day saucer-eyed, watching five movies and draining our batteries in the process.  The next day we watched two more movies, and pretty much got completely over the longings for TV we had been having.
 
We had been checking with the mail service every day or two, and finally on 6 January one of the packages showed up.  Unfortunately two more packages were still missing in action.  Instead of getting upset, we decided to cruise around St. John while waiting for the rest of our mail.  We motored around to the north side of St. John, not because the wind was light, but because our batteries were still low from the TV marathon and running the watermaker.  In the early afternoon we picked up a Park Service mooring in Francis Bay.
 
 
Customs House, Whistle Cay, Francis Bay
Francis Bay is a stereotypical Caribbean anchorage.  It is rimmed by white sandy beaches and has lush green foliage and palm trees growing near the shoreline.  Tourists sunbathe on the beaches and swim in the aqua waters.  A few dozen boats bob in the gentle swell tied to the Park Service moorings.
 
While there we met up with Bob and Mona from "Mutual Fun".  They had left Hampton, Virginia with us in November 1999 bound for the Caribbean.  While we had our rough 7-1/2 day passage to Bermuda, they got stuck between persistent easterly headwinds, Hurricane Lenny to the south, and a strong cold front to the west.  They decided to turn back and wound up taking ten days to travel from Hampton, Virginia to Beaufort, North Carolina, a straight-line distance of around 100 miles.  They tried again this year and finally made it, and we had a nice reunion.

Trunk Bay, St. John, USVI
After two nights in Francis Bay, we motored over to Trunk Bay and picked up a mooring there.  Sixteen years earlier on our honeymoon aboard the cruise ship "Southward", we spent a day snorkeling at Trunk Bay, and we wanted to do it again from our own boat.  We snorkeled to the underwater "trail" and followed along it.  The fan coral was surprisingly healthy considering the heavy traffic the area gets, but the most obvious wildlife were the schools of tourists in their cruise-ship issued dive gear.  We were literally elbow-to-elbow with other snorkelers as we scissor-kicked our way along the "trail".

Waterlemon Bay
Trunk Bay is just a day anchorage, so we motored over to Waterlemon Bay and picked up a mooring there for a few nights.  We spent a few quiet days reading and puttering around the boat, then motored back (again more due to low batteries than lack of wind) to our favorite anchorage in Hurricane Hole.
 
With our two packages still missing and presumed lost, we decided to head over to St. Thomas.  We wanted to re-fit our high-output alternator so we wouldn't have to run our engine so long to make electricity, and we had heard that St. Thomas had the best machine shop in the islands.  So on 15 January we motored (to make more electricity) over to Water Island near St. Thomas.  After a good bit of thought, we finally decided on a design that would allow us to keep two alternators and the refrigeration compressor mounted on the engine simultaneously.  A friend of John and Betty from "Parrothead" offered to drive us to the machine shop and introduce us to the owner.  We gave him a pattern for a new alternator bracket.  After three days and a few trips back and forth so we could align everything precisely, and a few more trips to the auto parts store for new belts, we finally got everything set up like we wanted.
 
We decided on one more trip back to St. John to check on our mail, and so we motored (this time with a strong wind and big seas from dead ahead) just in time to drop the anchor in Hurricane Hole as darkness fell.  The next day we checked on the mail, and by a great miracle the rest of the shipment had finally arrived, only 33 days after we requested it!  We had a second Christmas on 20 January, opening all the wonderful Christmas cards and year-end letters we had been sent.  We smiled gleefully as we pulled two months worth of magazines out of the mail envelope.
 
We have spent the last week officially "waiting for weather".  While waiting we have done a few odd jobs:  we finished bolting on the high output alternator (137 amps, wow!); we changed the engine oil and filters; and we built an automatic anchor light so we can come back to the boat after dark, and the anchor light will be on.

Petroglyphs, St. John, USVI
Last Friday we took a hike with John and Betty from "Parrothead" through a part of Virgin Islands National Park where we hadn't been before.  We started high up on the centerline road in the middle of the island and hiked down the remains of an old oxcart trail.  Thick forest surrounded us on both sides.  Along one side of the trail ran a wall of fieldstones that marked the boundary of an old sugar plantation.  Occasionally we would cross the ruins of old stone houses, or stop to read trail markers explaining the native flora and fauna.  We hiked up a side trail to view the petroglyphs, a sort of ancient graffiti carved into the face of rocks, then went down to the beach and saw the ruins of the last working sugar mill on St. John.  The five-mile hike took us around four hours with all the stops and side trips.  The end of the hike was back up the steep trail, and we were glad to get back to the boat and relax after all the exercise.
 
Every day we listen to the weather forecasts and look at the weather charts we receive on the computer through the ham radio.  At about 430 miles, the passage from the U.S. Virgin Islands to the Turks and Caicos will be our longest in over a year.  We are heading back into an area where weather is more changeable than in the Caribbean, where we once again have to deal with cold fronts and low pressure systems.  Today was almost a "go", but the weather didn't evolve as forecast, so we are back to playing the waiting game.  As always, we will have to wait and see what tomorrow brings.
 
Smooth sailing,
 
Jim and Cathy