St Croix was full of fun things. A spotted eagle ray did a swim by right after we dropped anchor. We had a snorkel at Fredericksted pier followed by lunch at Polly’s, then a tour of the Cruzan Rum distillery, and pizza for dinner with blueberry cream cake for dessert. During our snorkel of the pier we saw a spotted scorpionfish , flame box crab, white fireworm, goatfish, Sandiver, barracuda, a huge trumpetfish and another trumpetfish that liked showing us his belly, smooth trunkfish, of course loads of Sargent majors, a turtle, trunkfish, bluegrass wrasse, and a flounder (Kathleen missed this one).
Before leaving St Croix, we treated ourselves to a day as ‘regular tourists’ with a Big Beard trip – a 6 hour group charter day to visit Buck Island and have a reef snorkel. If you get the chance to visit Buck Island, we recommend taking it! We then walked a good ways to get to a grocery store and were gifted a ride home from Allie, who lives on her boat and has been in St Croix for many months – long enough to have bought a car! Our reward for the hike to the grocery was homemade strawberry caramel crepes for dinner.
We pulled up anchor to head back to St John, and the wind was perfect for a day of sailing. We caught the smallest mahi yet, and then grabbed a mooring ball on the north side of the island in Maho bay, part of the national park, meeting up with old friends. How we love St. John! All the turtles, the clear water, fish under the boat, and the rays jumping in the mooring field, not to mention the pretty beaches!
Ready for more adventure, we moved over to Hawksnest beach for a hike and then lunch with a view. The hike was a blast even if it was a bit more adventure than we had anticipated – the trail was overgrown and thankfully one of the other dads had brought a knife to bushwack with!
We had planned to move over to Charlotte Amelie, St Thomas to spend the night, but after our hike (it was a good climb and we have been living at sea level for 9 months) we were so tired we decided to stay the night on the mooring ball and head out in the morning. The mooring balls in this bay cannot be tied in such a way to prevent banging into the hulls if there isn’t enough wind or current to keep you off of them. Bummer. We much prefer mooring balls where we can secure the ball between our hulls. Only blaring heavy metal would have kept us from hearing the BANG! all night long. But then we still would have been awake
We had a nice easy morning with coffee for the adults then threw off the mooring lines and headed for Charlotte Amalie for a grocery run for fresh food for our passage back to the Bahamas.
