4 Weeks - 8 Countries - Smooth Sailing

Updated: Jun 13, 2023

We chose to head back to the British Virgin Islands for hurricane season, and it was a big decision with lots of moving parts. If you’ve been following us since the beginning, we had planned on doing this adventure for one year and we are getting ready to wrap up our second season. We have seen so much of the Caribbean, so putting the boat on the market to sell took a lot of discussion, and the timing was right.

Our broker suggested that we would have an easier time selling it if it were in the British Virgin Islands versus Grenada. We had storage and insurance all set up for Grenada so it took a few weeks to get the same put in place for BVI. There were many phone calls and a lot of luck as storage on “the hard” (land) is usually booked at the beginning of the year. Once that was in place, we began our trek back north.

On April 17, we left Rodney Bay, St. Lucia and sailed back to Martinique to visit some places we’d missed in March. I can’t tell you how many turtles we saw in some of the Anses (French for cove.) And we never got used to them…ever.

Then, on one of our last days, we were in our dinghy going to the dock and we slowly motored past a dive boat with lots of clothed guys on it and huge cameras. Then we saw a woman running on the dock and jumping off in her clothes after a power boat that was speeding away from the dock. We somehow had gotten ourselves in the middle of a French action movie being filmed in Grande Anse D’Arlet. C’est la vie!

After two weeks on Martinique we sailed to Dominica for a quick overnight with our yellow flag up (no clearing in or out of customs.) The next morning, we had a perfect ninety-degree beam reach with 15 knot winds to Iles des Saintes, Guadeloupe where we’ve been a few times, so we got to revisit some favorite haunts over five days.

One island that we did miss visiting last year was Antigua. It’s tricky to get to from the north because you have to go into the wind. (ie. Big waves, no sailing, yuck.) But coming from Guadeloupe, we had 12-15 kt winds right off our beam and it may have been our best sail ever.

As we approached the island, we saw all of these sailboats bunched together and I said, “Wow – that looks like a regatta,” as though that could not be possible. In fact, we were sailing right into the middle of Antigua Sailing Week, one of the premier sailing regattas in the world that has attracted sailors from all over the world since 1968. Captain Joe maneuvered our catamaran right around the racers as though we were one of them and docked perfectly at Falmouth Marina.

Even though we don’t consider ourselves real sailors, we joined in the festivities that evening at the Yacht Club while prizes were given out. They had a band and dancing and even though we were party crashers, no one really noticed us. Here’s the YouTube video on the regatta. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk3XMnxM4hs

The next day we hiked up to Fort Cutler on the island and watched the last day of the regatta. We toured Nelson’s Dock Yard, a World Heritage Site and marina in English Harbor. Most of the buildings are still standing and have been refurbished over the years.

After enjoying a bit of sailors’ life, we motored north to Jolly Harbor along a reef through beautiful blue Caribbean water to meet our friends, John and Jill who we met in 2016 on a Tradewinds trip in Belize. We we met them in 2016, they had just purchased their first catamaran that was subsequently totaled on St. Martin during Hurricane Irma. After that, they purchased a new 2020 Fountaine Pajot Lucia. We stayed in touch with them over the years and they were instrumental in guiding us to a website in the summer of 2021, where we ended up purchasing the same exact catamaran, only one year younger.

We knew they were headed south to Grenada for hurricane season so contacted them and they met us in Jolly Harbor. We hadn’t seen each other since 2016 so we spent the day geeking out over our boats and savoring life in the Caribbean. They’ve done it much longer than we have, so they’ve shared a lot of their knowledge. Here's their blog talking about how we ran into each other.

After four days on Antigua, we got up at 1:00am and got off our anchor at 1:45am to head northwest to St. Barths. We were just three days waning from a full moon so it was a beautiful night. We had the wind to our back so we did a lot of jibing. We pulled into Columbier, St. Barths at 4:00pm, a lovely cove with great mooring balls. We didn’t clear in as we were headed to St. Martin the next day.

We had spent 2 ½ months on St. Martin last year so pulling into Marigot Bay was like old home week for us. We visited our favorite restaurants for crepes and croissants, hiked Fort Louie and visited the staff at Port de Plaisance Marina, which is our favorite marina in the Caribbean.

On our last day, we got to reconnect with one of our favorite Tradewinds crew members, Lucy, who cooked us the most amazing Thanksgiving dinner for our family on Thanksgiving Day in 2009. What’s incredible about this story is that she is from South Africa and had to Google Thanksgiving meals in America and everything was delicious She is now starting her own catering business on St. Martin.

On the afternoon of May 11th, we grabbed a pizza to-go from Dock 46 and set off at 430pm for our overnight sail to the British Virgin Islands, heading back to where we started in November of 2021.