After 5 weeks in Puerto Rico, we have sailed over to the United States Virgin Islands, also known as just “USVI”. The USVI includes 3 larger islands, St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix; and they were a Danish colony until 1916 when the US bought them for 25 million dollars, and in 1917 they officially became a territory of the USA.
Having spent so much time in the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, we have seen a lot of good snorkeling and pleasing small islands. Thus, we have chosen to focus our time here on St. Croix, which has a bit less traffic than the other islands, due to being farther away. We did spend some nights on St. Thomas, first in Charlotte Amelie, the capital city and named after a Danish Queen. There we saw the Carneval parade full of glittering dancers and booming steel drum corps.
After Charlotte Amelie, we moseyed over to Christmas Cove on a small island just southeast of St. Thomas. There we caught up with our Swedish buddy boat Angelina and crew Eva and Mats. We snorkeled and had sundowners and tasted Stromboli on the floating restaurant boat “Pizza Pi”. They introduced us to another Swedish boat, so there were three Swedish flagged boats for a couple of nights in Christmas Cove.
May 7th we woke up and saw that the winds were good for a sail to St. Croix, so we headed down. We hadn’t really checked the rest of the weather, and ended up in a bit of thunderstorms, but fortunately all the strikes were quite far away. Lulu sailed wonderfully, doing over 7 knots at times with a reefed mainsail and full genoa. There is a long reef facing Christiansted harbor, so we anchored inside the reef. At sundown, before it started raining, a floating bar passed our boat with a group of happy revelers.
Our first full day on the island started with sightseeing and grocery shopping. We weren’t able to buy fresh veggies on our way out of Puerto Rico as they hadn’t opened when we walked by the greengrocers, so we needed to stock up. Light noises of thunder evolved into a downpour, and we stopped into a local diner for lunch and to get out of the rain. We really recommend Toast Diner on St. Croix, if you are here for a visit! The food was excellent and the service was super friendly.
Walking back from lunch, we decided to keep looking for grocery stores, and ran into a couple who were just tying up their dinghy alongside us. We started talking, and they invited us to join them in their rental car as they shopped for groceries at a local farmer’s market and also a large grocery store a ways across the island. Now we have lots of fresh fruit and vegetables on board!
It is so wonderful that you can meet people and they invite you to come along and shop with them, the cruising community is a very helpful and friendly community. St. Croix has shown us a very friendly welcome, we are looking forward to our days here. Fair winds from Christiansted on 8 May, 2024.