Okay, if I’m being honest, we’ve spent the majority, scratch that, 100 freaking percent of our time straight up motoring (not even motor-sailing, just motoring) in order to travel east along the southern coast of Puerto Rico. Yes, conditions sucked, we sucked at trying to do more, but whatever, motoring was done out of total necessity (okay fine, and a teensy bit of laziness) in order to forge our way east and make the necessary miles while conditions allowed us to do so.
That being said, we were insanely pumped to see some amazing sailing conditions forecasted as we prepared to leave Culebrita in the Spanish Virgins to make the easy 20 or so mile trip over to St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands.
And better yet, the forecast turned out to be spot on as we sailed away from Puerto Rico! It was hands down, one of, if not “THE” best sailing passages to date!!!!!! Which is probably why I even went the extra mile and made a little video. :)))
Thankfully, we even actually remembered how to hoist the main and let out the head sail and quickly did so to take advantage of the killer sailing conditions. After a few months of non-sailing passages, I would’ve expected our skills to be tad bit more rusty. But they weren’t! Surprise, surprise, it’s like riding a bike!
After trimming everything until it felt comfortable, we turned off our trusty perkins and legitimately sailed the entire way to St. Thomas.
And let me just tell ya, it was a perfect day of sailing! Amazing weather, perfect wind from the perfect direction, no real waves to speak of…I mean downright perfect. Did I say perfect? Because I meant it. ;)) So much so that even though we could’ve and, really, should’ve turned on the engine just to charge our batteries, we didn’t. We sat back and soaked in every second of that trip!
We were bursting with excitement to “officially” leave Puerto Rico and make our way to the US Virgin Islands! We’ve been waiting for this day for what seems like forever.
We rolled into pretty little Christmas Cove (just off the coast of the main island) and, luckily, found ourselves another free mooring ball. Lol. We’re getting pretty freaking good at scooping out those moorings. ;))
After one hilarious attempt at gracefully popping a bottle of chilled champagne to celebrate, but instead blowing the cork nearly through our bimini, we lowered our puerto rican courtesy flag and hoisted our new USVI flag, and sat back and enjoyed one of the prettiest sunsets around.
It feels absolutely amazing to be in the USVI on our own little sailboat!
We made it ya’ll!!!
^^make sure to watch the video until the very end because we snuck in some outtakes of our hilarious champagne uncorking episode!^^
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Can’t open video 🙁
Congrats!!!!
It should work now Jan. 🙂
It’s nice when every so often you get reminded why you are doing this on a sailboat and not a trawler. Glad to see we aren’t the only ones who clip beach towels around the cockpit for extra shade 😉