David’s Voyage Blog

Publish Date: Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Location: Ensenada Dakity, Culebra, Puerto Rico
Coordinates: 18° 17.439′ N  65° 16.854′ W

The crew of Three@Sea has been remiss in posting blog updates about our adventures in and around Puerto Rico. We have no excuse except that life gets busy, but that’s a lame excuse at best.

To get things moving again I thought I would give an overview the cruising we’ve been doing, and then Kathryn and Ayla will blog about a couple noteworthy adventures. But first I should probably describe the logistics of our current situation.

We are spending the winter (probably through April) at Sunbay Marina in Fajardo, on the northeast coast of Puerto Rico. We chose this location because it is relatively close to San Juan Airport, and it also puts some nice cruising destinations within reach on the weekends. I am working full time, and I fly somewhere about three weeks out of every month (I’m not usually gone the whole week). We do not have a car here in Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rico has almost no public transportation, so we rent a car whenever I need to get to or from the airport (about a 1-hour drive). Kathryn and Ayla then use the rented car to visit interesting destinations around Puerto Rico while I’m out of town. When I’m in town on the weekends (and occasionally for a week at a time) we try to cruise somewhere.

Culebra

We’ve spent the most time on Culebra, which is one of the Spanish Virgin Islands. Formally Culebra and Vieques are part of Puerto Rico, but they’re known in the cruising community as the SVIs. Culebra is only about 3-1/2 hours from our home base in Fajardo, so it’s very easy for us to get to on the weekends. It also has the best anchorage / mooring-field of anywhere we’ve been because of a well-placed reef that blocks the constant swell from the ocean. The small town ashore, Dewey, is small and sleepy compared to the mainland — we like Culebra a lot.

Vieques

We recently spent a long weekend anchored near Esperanza on the south side of Vieques. This other Spanish Virgin Island is much larger and more populated than Culebra, and we had several adventures while on Vieques. The most interesting activity was a visit to the bioluminescent bay, which Ayla will report on soon. One of the “top ten beach bars in the Caribbean” is also in Esperanza, so we made a pilgrimage to Bananas to sample the local mixology.

Our anchorage in Vieques was a little rolly because the ocean swell curved around the end of the island and entered the relatively open anchorage. We deployed our flopper-stopper to help with the roll, but it still got a little tiring after several days. We enjoyed Vieques very much, but we were ready to move on at the end of the weekend.

St. John

The U.S. Virgin Islands consist of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John. St. John is the least populated of the USVI’s, and it has no airport so you can only visit by boat. More than half of the island is set aside for Virgin Islands National Park, so much of the island is forested and undeveloped. We picked up a mooring ball in Fancis Bay on the north side of the island, and we spent five days exploring the area. We had an excellent snorkeling adventure to the reef near Watermelon Cay. Kathryn and Ayla hiked to the ruins of a sugar plantation from the 1600s.

One of the things we love about the Bahamas and the Caribbean is the beautiful blue water. The different colors of blue and green are amazing when the sun hits them. The water here in the northern Caribbean is about 80 degrees, so it’s both swimmable and refreshing. The water around St. John is the prettiest we’ve seen yet, with it’s deep blue morphing into clear green as you approach the beach. There’s something about this water that is both soothing and exhilarating.

So that’s a short summary of our cruising adventures since we arrived in Puerto Rico. We’ll post more detailed blogs about a couple specific adventures soon. We love PR and the Virgin Islands, and we’re really glad we made the trip down here!

As far as additional cruising, we would still like to get to the British Virgin Islands before we move on, but I’ll probably need to take some vacation time to do that trip. We’ll be heading out of here in late April or early May, but our next destination is still unclear.