On Monday, February 13^th, we departed Leinster Bay, St. John at 0830 and motored the short distance to nearby Soper's Hole, Tortola, British Virgin Islands - less than two miles away – as the first step of our passage to St. Maarten. At Soper's Hole we cleared in and out of the BVI at the same time in order to have the required customs and immigration exit papers to present to the St. Maarten officials. Once we finished the customs formalities and discarded some trash, we departed Soper's Hole at 1100 for St. Maarten.  Our departure involved some timing (which they usually do). The existing negligible wind forcing us to motor would affect us early in the passage, but that evening the forecasted increase in wind would change to a favorable direction back to the ENE. By that hour we would be in a position to alter course and hopefully be able to sail on 10+ kts direct to St. Maarten.

To accomplish this, Navigator Donna suggested we motor in a NE direction in the very light east wind during daylight along the south side of the BVIs - right along the drop-off shelf to deep water where we could at least be fishing - and take advantage of the engine running to use the bread maker and run the water maker, filling the water tanks for our eventual guests. By the time we would run out of daylight for fishing we should be NE of Virgin Gorda with enough wind angle to turn to starboard and make St. Maarten on one port tack overnight. With good luck we might also be stocking the freezer with enough fish to share with our guests! Because of a significant north swell forecast for the next several days, we planned to arrive on the south side of the island (the Dutch side St. Maarten) and would anchor in Simpson Bay. We had initially planned a French side arrival in north-facing Marigot Bay but this would not be prudent given the north swell.

Except for the "stocking the freezer" part (we caught no fish) our plan worked perfectly and 108nm from Soper's Hole, BVI and 20 hours 45 minutes later, we arrived safely in Simpson Bay, St. Maarten at 0745 February 14th. We motored and motor sailed the first 8 hours as described in very light winds. Then we spent much of the rest of the time trying to keep the boat from going too fast in winds higher than the forecast 10 kts so we wouldn’t arrive before daylight. In retrospect, Simpson Bay is very large and easy to enter in darkness; in the future we may not bother to slow the boat, favoring an earlier arrival!

Soon after arriving in St. Maarten and clearing customs/immigration, we had several tasks to accomplish which included switching the freezer and fridge, checking on the status of our new dinghy ordered from Budget Marine, preparing for Bob and Beckie’s arrival, and completing our entry in the Around St. Maarten Multihull Regatta taking place on February 25^th. Unfortunately, we soon added another task – our single sideband (SSB) radio suddenly stopped working, failing to either transmit or receive. As our SSB is our principle mechanism for communicating with friends and family at home via e-mail and serves as our primary tool for receiving weather information, losing it was significant.   After our own troubleshooting efforts and consulting with a local radio geek to check it out, we determined the radio was seriously broken and, worse, no resources existed on St. Martin to have it locally repaired. Our only repair option was to ship the radio back to the US for service. Because we would be close to “civilization” and could continue to get internet connections ashore in St. Martin, we decided to defer shipping the radio for repair until we returned to the USVI in late March where we could monitor its repair if necessary by telephone.

The good news was that our new dinghy, not expected to be available until mid March, was already here but we delayed taking delivery of it so that we would have more time to attempt to sell our current dinghy and not have the new one interfere with the regattas. We knew we could advertise our dinghy for sale on the local cruiser’s VHF radio net held daily at 0730. Ideally, we wanted to take delivery of the new dinghy simultaneously with finding a buyer for the old one.

The freezer/fridge swap went without a hitch. Pas de Deux has two refrigeration units – one twice as big as the other – and both can be set to be either a refrigerator or freezer by simply changing the thermostat settings. When we depart on our winter cruise we have the larger unit set as a freezer so we can store more frozen provisions and the small one set as a refrigerator. As we use up the frozen goods we get to a point around mid-cruise when the remaining volume will fit into the smaller unit. That’s when we do the swap to turn the smaller unit into the freezer with the larger unit becoming the refrigerator, which can significantly decrease our power usage. In conjunction with this switchover, we inventory our remaining frozen goods, defrost the prior freezer, and clean both. Our portable coolers – wrapped with towels for extra insulation – become temporary holding bins while we make the swap, which takes about 90 minutes for the defrosting to occur. Dave claims he can hear the batteries’ sigh of relief when this is all accomplished. Donna knows he’s happy as well that he can now refrigerate more beers….