Checked Out

We awoke to a beautiful sunrise over Sandy Spit, recognizing this as the day we will check out from the BVI and back into the USVI.

Customs & Immigration are available at Great Harbour on Jost Van Dyke, open at 8:30 so we mozied over and picked up a ball in the bay. Once we'd paid our $1 for the paperwork (only if u have the exact change so I scrounged up dimes and pennies to make it - otherwise $5 at that time of the morning when they have no change), we filled our tanks with water at the dock and pulled down the BVI flag from our mast. Next stop Cruz Bay to check back in with U.S. Homeland Security. Since it had now marched on to lunch-time, we started with an appetizer slice of pizza at Ronnie's (up the hill) and then found Woodies where Henry had a delectable fish sandwish and I enjoyed a basket of beer-battered shrimp. We definitely have to do some hiking on St. John to work off this lunch!

Ferries and launches ply to and fro at Cruz Bay

Although Cruz Bay is a small little town, it is home to the ferry dock bringing over visitors from St. Thomas and as such it is a hive of activity. We aren't quite ready to reintegrate into this pace of life yet, so we headed for one of our favourite haunts on the south shore of St. John - Lameshur Bay.

The only building in sight is the ranger station - can you find it?

Peace and calm returned as we tacked back and forth towards our destination with the wind right on the nose. Many times we've beaten along this coast into large swells and fighting the current, but on this trip the ocean has been relatively flat with waves only in the 3' range and althought we had to tack back and forth a number of times to make our destination, the afternoon's sail was over all too quickly.

In Lameshur Bay we whiled away the remainder of the afternoon as we watched at least four turtles feeding on the seagrass in the bay, listened to the birds rauchously calling from shore and watched the play of lengthening shadows across the unoccupied hillsides in front of us.