Last November, I sailed, along with the help of a great crew from Houston and Miami, our sailboat, Cayuse, from Norfolk, Virginia to Road Town in the British Virgin Islands while participating in the West Marine Caribbean 1500 Rally. It took about 10 days to complete the 1500 mile course. The course takes you from Norfolk at the mouth of the Chesapeake to a waypoint south ofBermuda and then on south to the BVI’s. We had mostly good conditions except for a period of 48 hours when it blew 35 knots or more (peak gust on the boat of 48 knots) and we had 15 to 20 foot waves after a strong frontal passage. After finishing the rally, we left the boat at the Village Cay Marina in Road Town, BVI and returned to Houston.
On January 1, Marsha, the kids, and I returned to the boat in Road Town to begin cruising. We spent about a week at the marina provisioning and getting the boat ready. We then left and anchored at a few of the islands in the BVI’s while waiting for the wind to lay down so we could begin heading south. It blew hard, 25 knots or more, for a week. While waiting, we started home schooling the kids, which takes about 2 1/2 to 3 hours each school day (sometimes longer if the students don’t cooperate) and otherwise getting used to living on the boat, no A/C and very limited amounts of fresh water and electricity. We also did lots snorkeling over the reefs in the area.
After about a week of waiting, we left from the Bitter End Yacht Club on North Sound in Virgin Gorda at about 4:00 p.m. on January 18 along with 3 other boats and sailed across the Anegada Passage to St. Martin arriving off the Dutch side at about 5:00 a.m. A nice sail in 15 knots or so and a 6 to 8 foot Atlantic swell. Travis and Cameron barfed a few times, but they were fine by the time we arrived. The passage is typically made at night so that you can arrive in time to enter the Simpson Bay lagoon at the 9:00 a.m bridge opening. We anchored in the lagoon, which is the largest enclosed lagoon in the Caribbean. We spent about 5 days seeing both the Dutch and French sides of St. Martin. They have great stores for provisioning and the prices are not much higher than the U.S and a good public transportation system.
We sailed across with a boat (a J/44) from Amherst, N.H. that has 2 boys (ages 9 and 11) onboard and have been sailing along with them since then. It has been great for our kids to have someone about their age to hang around with. 
On Sunday, January 23, we cleared out of St. Martin and sailed to St. Bart’s. We got lucky and ended up with a mooring in the inner harbor in the Port of Gustavia. St. Bart’s is part of the French West Indies with only about 7000 permanent residents. We spent about 4 days exploring St. Bart’s. We went to three of the beaches on the island. The week we were there Rod Stewart showed up in his boat and David Letterman was on the island. We ate at Le Select, a place to eat and bar where Jimmy Buffett wrote Cheeseburger in Paradise. Overall, a very nice island, but a bit expensive.
On Friday, January 28, we left Gustavia harbor and sailed around to the south side of St. Bart’s to the bay at Anse de Grand Saline so that we could get an early start to sail to Antigua. We anchored in a beautiful bay in about 15 feet of water over white sand with just a couple of other boats. A great anchorage. The next morning we left the bay at 4:30 a.m. to sail to Antigua after waiting for a good weather window to go east. The passage is about 80 miles. After a great day sailing past Montserrat (it has an active volcano that destroyed much of the island in 1998) on the way to Antigua, we arrived at Falmouth/English Harbor, a nice protected anchorage on the south side of Antigua. The British built a naval yard and fort here in the 1700’s, Nelson’s Dockyard, to support their control of the British West Indies. It also is the harbor that is used as the base for Antigua Race Week, one of the larger racing events each year.
On Tuesday, February 1, after spending a couple of days in Antigua, we left and headed for an anchorage on the north end of the island Guadeloupe, another part of the French West Indies. It took us about 6 hours to make the 41 miles across in 6 foot swells and light winds. We anchored off of Deshaies, a small French town with about 4000 residents. The island of Guadeloupe is one of the larger islands in the eastern Caribbean and the first of the mountainous islands with dense tropical vegetation. We spent an afternoon at the Jardin de Botanique, a nicely landscaped set of tropical gardens and apiary. After a couple of days in Deshaies in a very rolly anchorage, we sailed down the west coast of Guadeloupe to small group of islands between Guadeloupe and Dominica, the Iles de Saintes.
We are currently in anchorage in a very small bay with a couple of other boats off the town of Anse Grande on the east side of the island of Terre-de- Bas. A beautiful anchorage that is typically not used because of the prevailing easterlies. We under a very odd weather pattern. The wind has been blowing out of the northwest for a couple of days with a large north swell which has made many of the anchorages used on the western sides of the islands untenable. So we are tucked away in this little bay for a few days until things return to a more normal weather pattern and then we will continue heading south.
Cayuse 
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