On Wednesday, December 14 we departed Cayo de Luis Pena in the Spanish Virgins (use Google Earth to find 18 17'56.3"N 065 19'58.7"W – copy and paste these coordinates directly into "Fly to") at 1000 hrs bound for Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. The wind was unusually light at 5-10 kts and from an infrequent direction - from the NNE—which proved perfect for a very nice close reach straight line to the West Gregorie Channel west of Water Island. Losing the wind there in the lee of the hills we motored through Crown Bay into the main Charlotte Amalie harbor and dropped our hook in the east end of the anchorage near the Yacht Haven Grande Marina, arriving around 1500 (18 20'04.7"N 064 55'36.6"W).

This would be safe harbor for the expected arrival of a cold front that evening bringing squally, gusty winds from the NE, and allow us easy access ashore where we could locate an internet connection, buy a few groceries and do laundry, all of which we accomplished . This would be a brief stop for us—as soon as weather would permit we would head for the British Virgin Islands.

While in St. Thomas, Dave contacted Budget Marine in St Maarten to arrange the necessary deposit on a new dinghy we wanted to be available during our visit to that island in late February. Our current dinghy is over ten years old and well past its prime. Though still usable, it cannot be considered reliable any longer for traveling as we do to so many remote areas. We hope to sell it to someone who will use it for a more localized purpose (and who can routinely re-inflate the one chamber that has a very slow leak). We were not immediately successful in making the connection with Budget Marine. More on this later….

The cold front arrived as predicted and we hunkered down the following several days waiting out the weather and taking advantage of this time to produce the eight Travel Pod entries preceding this one (it always amounts to days of work, but we know you enjoy reading them!). Eventually the weather improved and we departed St. Thomas the morning of December 18 for the British Virgin Islands.