The Adventures of Little Rosie

Viequies  (posted from Coral Bay, St. John, USVI)

On Monday, March 15, we left Puerto Patillas, Puerto Rico and motored east to Viequies, one of the Spanish Virgin Islands.  Viequies is a long, narrow island with a fairly small population.  Much of the island was owned and used by the US military for various purposes.  These areas were closed to the public.  Most (all?) of these areas have opened again.

The trip over was uneventful – a lot of motoring.  Mark and Michelle were out ahead of us on Reach and spotted a mother whale and her baby.  We were too far back to get more than a glimpse.

We planned to work our way along the south side of the island to Sun Bay and stay there for the night. We reached Sun Bay and it didn’t look very protected from the swell.  Not wanting to rock all night at anchor we continued on to Ensenada Honda.  The bay goes back in and around behind some reefs, so we figured it would be still all night.  We find being rocked to sleep is over rated.

Just as we turned into the bay and looking for the reefs we got a hit on the fishing line.  Luckily there was room to slow the boat, reel in the fish, and then negotiate the channel back into the anchorage.

Dewey, Culebra

Mark and Michelle planned to stay a day or two to snorkle and fish.  Jackie and I decided to continue on to Culebra.  We were hoping to catch up with our friends Roland and Kathleen on M’Lady Kathleen.  We met them when they passed through the Chesapeake on the beginning of their cruise. Now, about five years later they are on their way home.  We had been staying in contact by email when we had a connection and last we heard they were in Dewey, Culebra, but we had no idea how long they planned to stay.

The trip up to Culebra was easy and as we motored into the harbor, there was M’Lady Kathleen.  We anchored and tracked Roland and Kathleen down at the Dinghy Dock restaurant.  It’s lucky we arrived when we did because they planned to leave the next day for Sun Bay, Viequies – they would have passed us going the opposite way!  They decided to stay a few more days and we had a lot of fun visiting with them.

Beautiful Flamenco Beach, Culebra

Tanks for the memories, Flamenco Beach

Culebra is also a small island, but it has a nice little town, ferry service to Fajardo, Puerto Rico, and an airport.  It also has some very nice beaches and good coral for diving. We spent an afternoon at Flamenco Beach, perhaps the nicest beach on the island.  Oddly, there are no flamingos on Flamenco Beach, but there are a lot of Pelicans and we had a lot of fun watching them fish.  Culebra was also used by the military and at the far end of the beach are the rusty remains of a tank.  The salt has corroded it away quite a bit, but occassionally people paint it in various gay colors to spruce it up a bit.

Reach arrived after few days.  They had been exploring a cove on the east side of the island and the small neighboring island of Culibrita.  We accompanyied them to an anchorage on the west side of Culebra and dove on a nice coral bed.  Lots of great fish, but being in a preserve we could only look, not catch, clean and eat.

We move back into Dewey were we waited for a package to arrive.  While waiting we decided to take the ferry to Fajardo, PR, and do some shopping.  The ferry is a great service and only costs a couple dollars each way. The only downsides are that it leaves at 6:30AM and they don’t serve coffee on board. One of the pastimes on the trip is sleeping.

Sleeping on the ferry is no special feat

In Fajardo we found a plaza with a Walmart, a West Marine, and a few other stores of interest and had a relatively successful day of shopping.

Next: St Thomas, USVI

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