March 2nd
The Benefit of Hindsight!
Here we are still in the USVI, but a bit of an eventful 10 days since the last blog. Two of the most notable disasters were: Becky managed to leave a rope dangling over the port stern side; it promptly took hold of the port propeller and tore it off! Oh dear I soon discovered that at less than 2 knots cats tend to go around in circles with only one prop. We were in about 25 to 30 ft of water so snorkelling to recover the prop was not on. However we managed to entice a diver who was on the next cat into doing a bit for us, he found the prop, and then another bit of the prop and then the end cap. In this state the prop was clearly not usable anymore. So we high tailed it back into the BVI and Sopers hole where we found the guys there very helpful.  They found us a second hand prop and fitted that complete with new end cap. So now we could manoeuvre and go in straight lines again. Disaster number two was the dinghy, while we were all milling about after the fearful bang that the detaching prop made, the dinghy decided to go under the boat and took off the accelerator control mechanism. This turned out to be as big a financial blow as the prop getting lost; even though it was only the arm that was broken we have had to buy a complete unit. This led to more expletives and me muttering that the b..... Dinghy was far too big and flashy for our boat... a familiar tune, as everyone pointed out to me.

In St Thomas we met up with Bees Knees who we haven't seen since Morocco. We spent a couple of nights with them, the kids were royally entertained by Pepe and her husband, a retired GP, was good fun too. The kids came away with a 'thousand' DVDs which we will return when we see them in Antigua.

We left St Thomas as the weather didn't suit the anchorage and we sailed the long way around to St John, doing about 15 to 20 miles in all. On the way there it was strike after strike for Jordan: of course there was the one that got away!, But also two Barracudas and three Kingfish, a kind of Mackerel. Of course we threw the Barracuda back as they are renowned for Ciguatera, a toxic disease that the fish acquires through eating reef fish. However the BVI book we had said Kingfish were edible. That night we dined royally on fresh fish only to all come down with deli belly and various other symptoms, Becky was the worst affected. This led to internet consultations where we discovered that actually Kingfish are responsible for 65% of ciguatera poisonings and the neural toxin can be debilitating for months! To cheer her debilitated self up Becky grabbed her hair dryer and not thinking that we already running three of the four air con units (to keep her cool I might add!) she started to blast away with her 25 amp 2000 watt special. She brought the generator to its knees and it refused to start again, obviously offended by that sort of treatment. After a good deal of huffing and puffing fiddling and faffing on my part we got it to go again, having treated it to new filters and restoration of the circuit breakers.

So they say things come in threes, we seem to have had a four running here. Well it is not all bad we are in our favourite USVI bay and it is a beautiful day and we are all on the mend or mended. So it is back to education of the teenage delinquents and swimming and snorkelling.

Oh one final word, we have been adopted by a 4ft 6ins Barracuda, he or she lives under our boat and is a hazard to swimmers but provides complete relief if egg bound. When we first arrived I jumped off the bow to check the buoy we had attached too, only to come face to face with ‘Barry’ from that moment on we have been inseparable.

February 21st

So how time flies it is now February the 21^st, we have been to Anguilla, St Barts and St Martin before sailing back to St John in the USVI. Over the last month we have slipped into cruiser mode and as you can see we have spent time in some places we have been before and one or two new ones.

At the beginning of the month we spent a week with Sophisticate: Richard and Ange with their friends Peter and Charlie. In the week all of our livers were tested thoroughly as we sailed around Anguilla visiting the beauty spots of Sandy Island, Seal Island, Dog Island and the not so well named Scrub Island. The first three were delightful, picture postcard places, little islands of sand with palm trees. Unfortunately on the days we visited there was a bit of a swell, which meant the water was a bit sand murky and restricted the snorkelling visibility. However Ange more than made up the entertainment with her screaming instructions as we beached the dinghy through the waves onto the beach in front of the bar. The entertainment was also richly enjoyed by those at the bar, they certainly knew we were arriving! The bar on Sandy Island was delightful, a shack on an oasis in the middle of the sea.

We set off for St Barts on a beautiful day, unfortunately it was windless, so we are going South just right for a reach and nothing to put the sails up for. Richard had attempted to adjust our autohelm the day before as we toured the islands around Anguilla, so with engines running I turned it on, with confidence, to take a break. The boat spun around 90^o and we were heading for the not too distant shore! Well we tried a few times but to no avail, so out came the manuals and Becky to the rescue on the electronics. It turned out we had to swing the compass to allow it to recalibrate. To do this you have to take the boat around in slow circles to allow the electronic compass to acquire positional data. We were somewhere between Anguilla and St Barts, so with nothing else to do on a bright sunny day we started to go round. The manual said at least two turns, but if you go too quick an error message comes up flashing ‘Too fast’’. Well we went round twice, then three times then four, then then then. Every time we got a ‘Too Fast!’, at a certain point in the circle with no engines on we were taken by the current on round......after an hour and a half and not one completed circle without the dreaded ‘Too Fast!’ we gave up. However we seemed to have accumulated enough data for the autohelm to work.

St Barts we know quite well now, we go into Ainse de Colombier and pick up a buoy or anchor. This is a turtle sanctuary, at times the boat is surrounded by turtles servicing and diving. We then dinghy into Gustavia to check in. For others do remember if you do this then there is no fee in Gustavia, the fee they will attempt to charge you is for the crowded harbour anchorage, however the buoys in Ainse de Colombier are free. Gusdtavia is lovely, very French , pretty cafes good food, but expensive. People watching is a delight, it is a bit pof a play ground of the rich and perhaps famous. I think there must also be a local and very busy plastic surgeon on the island --- there are plenty of stretched foreheads and rather high eyebrows around!

Charlie and Peter are bon viveurs and very generous with it. We are now on a limited budget and have to be a little careful so it was great to be treated to a lunch that started at 1:00pm and finished at 4:16pm! The wine was excellent and only surpassed by the food! We retired to Seas the Moment where the festivities continued while Becky and I scurried around getting Jordan’s work ready to go with Charlie and Peter in envelopes back to England. The evening was finished with loud rather raucous music that ascended to or should I say deteriorated to Peter doing his ‘Full Monty’ party trick to ‘You Sexy Thing’ fortunately some modesty was preserved. Just in time really because I do believe Indy’s eyes would have really popped out of her head. There is something about medics and taking their clothes off! Great day and great night.

Ange and Richard with Charlie and Peter left the next day for St Kitts and Nevis, we decided to stay in St Barts for a day or two more and then go up to St Martin to provision and buy a few things for the boat and dinghy. The sail up was great, in fact so much so that we went about 10 miles out of our way just to sail a bit more. Simpson Bay Lagoon in St Martin was familiar to us but there was a small frisson as we squeezed out 26fott beam cat through the opening road bridge. It looks quite narrow until you get in it and then suddenly there is plenty of width. We did go in the Dutch side though the French bridge would have left us with only 1 foot to spare each side!

We planned to stay just under a week, as it happened we arrived on Sunday and left on Friday night. It was an action packed few days! There is a cruisers net in the Lagoon, at 7:30 each morning on Channel 14 you can advertise your wares or indeed your wants. We took the opportunity to advertise the excess scuba gear we have: we had been told be dive shops that there was little call for second hand goods. So not expecting much of a response I left shortly after the advert went out to get the dinghy steering fixed ....the new steering arm had mysteriously bent....later diagnosed by the mechanic at Budget marine as heavy feet standing on arm!! But I digress, little did I know that as soon as I left Becky in skimpy nightdress and Jordan, not the fasting thing on two legs first thing in the morning, had been inundated with fourteen dinghies around the back of the boat all bidding for dive gear. Bt the time I got back we were $1400 dollars richer and the boat was a mess of dive gear that we hanging onto and other stuff that had been thrown out of lockers!

Flushed with success next day we advertised the wind surfer, which also came with the boat. This time the response was not so overwhelming but we did sell it for a princely $800, so the Werrett float was boosted over the two days. However we did think that the deal had gone down when the guy who bought it found we had no skeg for it. However Jordan and the purchaser, Rich, went off the next day to comb St Martin for wind surfer shops with the board in tow. They found a skeg and all was well.

We left St Martin at 3:00am on the Saturday 20th set sail for St John’s USVI. The promised wind didn’t appear until mid morning but we really got going then and we were outside the channel into the Virgin Islands by 3:00pm. From our vantage point we could see squall after squall heading down the channel. We held back for an hour or two before we went in to find our friends Don and John in Water Melon bay.

Jan 20^th

Well I survived 10 days alone with my children... but only just, I have to confess to several melt downs, alot of shouting, 2litres of vodka and 2lbs of almonds (my only treat when on Atkins!) Dave came back on Jan 16^th and I expected him to resume schooling duties with immediate effect but the new job he is involved in required significantly more of his time than I had allowed for. He has been up until 2am working on document rewrites etc, so it hardly seems fair to expect him to get up at 7 and spend 8 hrs trying to remain patient in the face of extreme adversity!

So enough of the kids and homeschooling, anyone would think we did nothing else with our time! We are still in Soper’s Hole but we can now see light at the end of the tunnel and we hope to once again cast off our dock lines and start sailing again tomorrow.  The last time we enjoyed such freedom was last April, since then we have had hurricanes to avoid, families to visit and boats to buy and sell. Now we have no real place to be, not until May anyway when we go back to the UK to sit GCSE’s but don’t get me started on that again! Our main exciting news is that we have two lots of visitors coming out to see us at last; John & Zig of Windancer fame are coming out on March 7^th and my mum and niece are coming out on April 4^th so we are all really excited about both visits. It seems such a long time since we shared what we have with anyone. When we first set sail, we expected to be inundated with visitors but sadly very few friends & family have taken us up on the offer, I’d like to believe the recession is to blame rather than the fact that a week in a moving confined space with the Werrett’s is more than most people can contemplate!

Despite our dearth of visitors, our social life continues to prosper out here and in the last week, we have had another feast with Lincoln and his family, met up with John & Donelda who have just returned to the BVI having gone home to spend xmas with family in Canada, and last night we took Robin & Jo, owners of the Voyage base here in Soper’s, out for dinner at my favourite BVI restaurant, The Dove. We had a great night, they are both South African’s and have plenty of stories to tell, equally it’s always nice to meet someone who hasn’t heard your stories before and doesn’t begin to glaze over after an hours scintillating conversation!  So if all goes to plan we hope to try and meet up with John & Don over the weekend, they have guests with them (someone else who hasn’t heard our stories.....) so that will be fun, not sure where we’re headed but if I have my way – Virgin Gorda will be our next port of call...!

Jan 12^th

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Well I’m once again home alone in the sunny Caribbean; Dave is back in the UK again, cursing Virgin for cancelling his flight home and then trying to charge him $3600 to rebook his return flight on Saturday... and being frozen to death, whilst I am being driven to distraction by our darling children. The pressure is now on as the Jordan’s GCSE’s are fast approaching and January is the month when all coursework is done and submitted. We are making progress but it is like extracting teeth...  I do worry sometimes that one of the main reasons we decided to make this journey at this time, i.e. to spend quality time with our children before it was too late, will actually become our undoing in that far from becoming closer as a family, they hate me because I’m a bitch of a teacher and I hate them because they are such bad students!  The close Mother/Son relationship that exists at weekends, especially whilst Dave is away when we watch DVD’s and go shopping together, completely disappears when after the eighth episode of the day where I find him flicking his sister round the head with a rubber band and hitting her with a broom when I step off the boat for 5 mins, I finally snap, and as I excel at being a supportive caring Mother, I call him a retard and confine him to the boat for 24 hours! At which point he opens the door and walks off the boat in an indignant huff... Not the ideal recipe for happy families but true life on board this happy ship nevertheless. Add to that it is only 4pm, and I am on Atkins diet, so too early for vodka, especially when today was the day I was going to go without booze!

I know you all think we have an idyllic life and I know compared to most we do, but I honestly never thought homeschooling would be this hard and have such an impact on our relationship with our children. I would encourage anyone who was thinking of doing it to think again, I have no idea whether we have done enough to prepare Jordan for his exams, certainly the time it currently takes for him to do anything will certainly not be acceptable under exam conditions. Up until last week I lost sleep most nights worrying about where he was going to take his exams because every centre I contacted near to where we live in the UK refused to take him. I finally found one last week in Oxford, so we will have to drive him down everyday, Dave assures me it is not a problem and I shouldn’t worry but I’m a mother/teacher – wouldn’t you?

Anyway, peace of a sorts has returned, Indy has gone to bed with a chocolate cake I made her earlier, well what else do you do if confined to the boat, Jordan has returned and although he is not speaking to me, he seems to be working and typing away at his laptop with a ferocity previously unseen. Ah well Sundowner time is approaching... and I have a good book, I do look forward to this time of day, normally the kids will go off roaming, maybe fishing or just ‘hanging with other dudes’, and I will normally enjoy having the boat to myself for an hour or two, either that or I go to the bar to pick up wifi, that is when I really appreciate the lifestyle we have here,  watching the sun go down over the bay, enjoying the warmth of the day and people watching as life goes by on the dock, a few years ago, I would be rushing home from work, stressed, stuck in traffic, cooking dinner etc  compared to that there is no comparison, just a shame I confined the kids to the boat tonight....!

xx