St Barts: Another fantastic surprise

To be honest I thought I would not like St. Barts and we ended up loving it! We had planned to stay here for two days and ended up spending almost ten. We did not do the “mainstream” St. Barts. I guess that for the majority of the visitors this island means fancy scene, amazing restaurants, expensive shops, classy yachts and stuff like that.

For us it meant time to rest, update the website and do some really incredible diving!

For Feijão is was time to be close to the rich and famous. I think that, unlike us, he really belongs to this fancy scene. He felt right at home and every multi-millionaire would stop by to cuddle and play with him.

  

Our days here started with the right foot, thanks to our incredible gennaker. We had a great sail from Barbuda to St. Barts. This is probably the most confortable way to cruise: downwind, little wind, little waves, no main sail… only the gennaker out. We left Barbuda at 3:30AM and arrived in St Barts at 2:30PM, the apparent wind was around 10 knots and our average speed was around 5.5 knots. The crossing was super easy a peaceful.

St. Barts was perfect for us because it had all the great French stuff, like a great boulangerie, with really nice people who actually would speak, believe it or not, English. So we could communicate, how awesome is that? In fact there were a lot of people who actually would even speak Portuguese.

St. Barts is also full of Marine Reserves that are great for diving and snorkeling. Not only there is a diverse marine life and amazing visibility, but it is also really easy to reach them, they have buoys where you can tie up your dinghy and just dive from there. Despite all of this, we would never find anyone in the water besides us.

Our favorite diving spots were Ile Fourchue, Ile de La Ponte and Les Gros Ilets. They are all natural reserves with a series of restrictions, which are actually great to preserve the sites.

They have a wide range of beautiful colorful corals; tons of fish, lot’s of lobsters, turtles and big barracudas everywhere. For the first couple of dives Sarah got a bit freaked out having those ugly barracudas swimming so close and checking us out, but then we got used to them.

  

  

  

The only bad thing about St. Barts was that the anchorage close to town is quite uncomfortable and expensive. Yes, you have to pay to be on anchor, believe it or not. Also we had to say goodbye to Marcelo and Carol, another amazing couple who came to visit us and became good friends. I bet that in no time they could also be doing something like we are doing as themselves have been into some really interesting adventures on two wheels across the globe.

 

So after having guests non-stopping since November (apart from the 3 days we hauled out the boat in Santa Lucia), Sarah and I had a few days to ourselves. We rested a couple of days, updated the website and then we dove our lungs out. It was great. Now we will move on to St Martin and will probably spend the next days working on the boat, planning the next stops and cleaning the boat for the next guests.