Happy Easter!! Well, better late than never right? Some of our posts were actually written at the time we were visiting but lost them when our other computer crashed! L We were excited to get to the Virgin Islands for several reasons. One there was a good possibility that we were going to get our first visitors on this leg of our journey, we needed to order boat parts and other items to be shipped to us without costing extra $$ for duty/custom fees, and this is where Four Points began sailing in her early days! We have documents showing that the original owners live(d) in St Thomas. We tried to locate them but apparently they had moved off the island. We thought it would have be fun to meet them and show them that Four Points is back in the Caribbean if they were still on St Thomas or any of the nearby islands.
We decided to take the suggestion of our sailing friends on s/v Hunter and anchor in Lindbergh Bay. This is a beautiful bay just off the west side of the main town, Charlotte Amalie (a couple miles by dinghy). It is relatively quite bay (found out later), except on holiday weekends, otherwise just the noise of the airplanes taking off and landing. The water was clear for swimming off the boat and the sea turtles visited us every morning! We arrived just before the Easter weekend. We were excited b/c we pretty much had the bay to ourselves (2 other boats) AND we were able to get Internet on the boat from a Tiki bar onshore! YAY!! As I mentioned it was a quite bay until the w/e came. There was a big celebration with very loud polka music and DJ that did not shut up all night long...really all night long.... I think that there was quite time from 5 or 6 AM until 12 N then it started again. Well, we only lasted for 1 night and part of day of this and decided to pull up our anchor and head over to Charlotte Amalie. That is an advantage of living on a boat, if you do not like your surroundings (could apply to neighbors too...not in this case ha!) you can just pull up anchor and move!

When we sailed around to Charlotte Amalie, it was fun to meet up with some other cruisers (s/v Plane to Sea and s/v Betty Boop Too) that we had met earlier in our trip. We explored the island; caught up on laundry, provisioned, ordered our boat parts and other items. Since it was going to be a week or so before our shipment would arrive we decided to sail over to St John to explore while we waited for delivery.

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After refueling, provisioning, filling our water tanks, and fixing our battery problems, we were more than ready to leave PR. Because of the distance and the winds notoriously being on our nose, we left Salinas in the late afternoon to make the crossing at night. Following the suggestions in the cruising guide The Gentleman's Guide to Passages South we plan to use the island's night lee and be at our destination before the strong trade winds begin the next morning. The picture of Brian climbing the mast was to unwind our main halyard that had twisted around the shroud somehow (??) but since he was up there he thought he might as well see if he can find internet! Ha! That's another whole story about trying to put up mainsail up in the wee morning hours at the beginning of our last passage (all before sunrise...so yes it was very dark) and the sail kept getting hung up and would only go so far....
We had three choices for our next destination, Culebra Island (north), Green Beach, Vieques (west coast of Vieques) or Esperanza, Vieques (south coast) it depended on the wind/swell, once we got "out there" to see which way we could get the best point of sail for Four Points. Since there was a bit of a north swell, and the prevailing wind (east) had more of a northerly blow to it we decided to have the wind push us to Esperanza. The anchorage would also give us protection from the north swell, giving us less roll!
Well, we explored the small quaint town of Esperanza once we were sat on the anchor and the boat was secured in its new neighborhood. Esperanza is mainly a fishing village. The town has one main road (dirt) that runs along the waterfront; laced with restaurants, shops, dive centers and small hotels. We also found internet in a small museum, so I could catch up on my school work but not enough time to post on blog! Our stay in Esperanza was short for we got up early the next morning to head to the US Virgins.

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Where is the internet? It seems strange that it is very hard to find good internet in Puerto Rico. We don't miss TV at all, but we really like having internet from the boat. It seems everywhere we go in PR there is no wireless available. We find this surprising after getting internet most of the way down the Pacific coast. We heard so many good things about Salinas that we were sure we would be able to get internet access. Not even the marina here has internet. The only place is a small dark bar where you can set up and get internet but you must buy food and drink. Enough said about internet, but we needed to keep in touch.
We are still having some problems with our batteries...I have gone through the electrical system over and over and have come up with the only solution is to replace four deep cell batteries. These batteries sat in Florida while we waited out hurricane season. I did charge and cycle them but maybe somehow they were damaged. Even after a full charge and a short time after I couldn't start the engine. At first I suspected that something in the system was drawing power that we didn't know about. But after checking all the wiring at least twice the last resort is to buy new batteries. Puerto Rico turned out to be to be a good place to get new ones... they even delivered to the boat. This solved most of the problem but I decided to add another hard cranking battery (along with the deep cell) for engine starting. This solution solved our engine starting problems but not without spending some money we didn't plan for...
With our power problems solved we decided to motor/sail for the Spanish Virgin Islands. This is a group of island east of Puerto Rico that they own. There are small towns, which mostly catered to tourists, and many people say they are the best part of Puerto Rico. It is a full days motor/sail into the wind from Salinas so we plan to leave in the afternoon and travel through the night. We threaded our way through the reefs to the open ocean. The wind was pretty calm and we were making good time. As the sun rose we rounded the eastern end of Puerto Rico and the wind and current was wrapping around in our favor. We anchored between two huge rocks just offshore the small tourist town of Esperanza on the island of Viegues, Spanish Virgins.

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We read in our cruising that Ponce was a nice place and we need to tuck into there once the trades picked up. Again, the trades would really blow by nine in the morning so we were limited on how far we could make headway into the wind. As it turns out Ponce is a industrial city and the anchorage was right in the heart of a major industrial harbor, not the best place for a cruising yacht. We called a taxi and when into the city for a look around. We did find some stores...included Home Depot, K-Mart...but other than that we wanted to get underway the next morning.

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We read about a place called Gilligan's island named by the locals after the TV show. They say the island reminds them of the island used in the show. We loved the TV show when we were growing up so we decided to anchor there. We had to sail through a cut in a long reef protecting the area and work our way to anchor behind an island that looks exactly like Gilligan's island in the TV show. We anchored in twenty feet of water protected from the prevailing trade winds. After a relaxing day and a good nights sleep the next day brought strong winds, but we were protected. A local windsurfer kept sailing/flying by and stopped to have a chat. His name is Gerd and he is an avid windsurfer and owns a house on the beach. He invited Nancy and I to visit his house and learn how to windsurf. Windsurfing is slowing down as a sport and Gerd wants to promote it and keep it popular. Well, he was an excellent teacher and a fine host. After two full eight hour days we could say we can windsurf.....kinda. Because we were having fun learning windsurfing and the wind and seas along the south coast of Puerto Rico were high we decided to stay here five days. Again we woke up very early on the fifth day and threaded our way out through the reef and continued to head south.

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Ok...Ok..Ok....No excuses...we are very late with our Blog

Please bare with us as we continue to catch up...

We miss everyone and we are well...sailing south to get out of the hurricane area before the season starts on June 1st.

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