Let's go shopping!

- Look, mom, there's mangoes! Oh, and kiwis...
- Mom, there's strawberries!
- How much are they?
- It's $5 per pack. Can we buy them?

There's something to be said when adults and kids get over excited at the size of a supermarket and the stuff you can buy at relatively good prices. After spending so much time in the Bahamas, where food availability is often an issue and finding good prices is even more rare, finding a good grocery store is a real treasure, for both adults and kids,

The first time this happened to us was when we got to Puerto Rico. At first we were just glad to find a good-sized store, comparable to the ones we see in the USA and Canada. Then, we got really excited when we noticed the prices were even cheaper than what we are used to paying in the USA. I literally felt like a kid in a Toys-R-Us store! The first time we went shopping, we filled a whole cart with veggies and fruits. The cashier had one look at everything and said "Wow, you guys eat healthy!". Our response was simply that we were coming from the Bahamas and the availability there is not quite the same.

Of course, living on a boat, the other issue is how much you can actually buy. I usually go to the store with a cart and a backpack. I've gotten quite proficient at packing everything neatly to accommodate as much food as possible in both items. I put the heavy items on the cart first and everything light on top of it or on the backpack. Of course, at times, I underestimate how much I'm buying until I start putting everything away and realize, too late, that I bought too much. So, often, I walk back to the boat with the cart, the backpack and a few extra shopping bags. If the kids are with me, I got two extra pairs of hands to help me out too! Of course, being the caring and considerate mother that I am, they take the light stuff and I take the rest of it. If Ernesto is shopping with us, being the polite and caring husband that he is, he takes the backpack.

When we got to St. Martin, one of the first tasks to do, was to provision. Coming from the BVIs, where things are not cheap (I paid 10$ for 5 kiwis once), our fridge was quite empty. The SuperU on the French side of St. Martin was a great surprise. It's big, cheap and French! That means lots of great cheese and great $4 wine bottles. And, quite conveniently, next to the store there's a boulangerie (bakery) where you can buy a french baguette for $0.70.

Then, of course, comes the task of getting the full-to-the-rim cart into the dinghy, drive to the boat in sometimes-not-so-calm waters and get the still full-to-the-rim cart off the dinghy and to the boat without dropping anything to the water. We have, indeed, lost a whole gallon of milk and a can of mushrooms to the mighty seas.

Once everything is aboard, is time to organize the newly bought items. Any packaging that can be disposed of, is removed and, if necessary, contents are labeled. The reason being is that, apparently, cockroaches like to lay eggs on the cardboard and we don't want any such creatures on our boat. Another reason is simply garbage. We want to eliminate the amount of trash we generate when we can't get rid of it.

And then the moment comes when you have to ask the most basic of questions:  "Where in hell do I put all this? Did I buy too much?". Every space on the boat is used to the best of its capabilities and maximized. I have food stocked away pretty much in every single part of the boat. It has paid off very well when we are in places where there's no groceries stores or the food is just ridiculously expensive.

At the superU in St. Martin with the mighty cart and backpack

Electronic price displays at the store. So cool. This is the first place I've seen this.

Helping hands, enjoying a treat

A Kind of Summer Holiday

Dear reader: throughout March we took over 600 photos, all of which are great shots. I selected a few highlights to post here, but I encourage you to go see the ones I've put on my Facebook account. And yes, I'm quite modest about the quality of my photography.

The month of March has been chock-full of fun activities that made it easy to ignore the crummy weather of the first couple of weeks. There was socializing for kids and grown-ups, plenty of snorkelling, hiking, SCUBA diving, tough pounding to weather, and easy sailing. The Virgins have lived up to their famed beauty. The 15-mile long Sir Francis Drake Channel, the heart of the Virgins, houses some of the most beautiful and easily accessed coral reefs.

Our young free diver in The Caves, Norman Island

 From beautiful Francis Bay, Saint John, we crossed to Jost Van Dyke, Brittish Virgin Islands and met up with Skylark. We hadn't seen them since George Town and both crews were eager to compare notes on the different routes we took to get from the Bahamas to the Virgin Islands. By crews I mean the adult members of the crews; as far as the two boats' kids are concerned, the passage, however rough, was already an event that had taken place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

Coolest shot of yours truly to date, at The Indians. I'm happy under water

Newsflash for cruisers: White Bay in Jost Van Dyke can get annoyingly rolly. Newsflash for Taia's captain: when people on ActiveCaptain say that an anchorage is rolly, it's because they've been there and have found it rolly. I fail to see how a discerning captain would completely and utterly ignore other captains' experience. And yet we spent 2 nights there. Although after the first sleepless night we moved to a flatter area of the bay before the place got crowded for the afternoon spectacle.

Sunset from the top of the hill at The Bight

White Bay is a bit of a happening place, or, in the words of Taia's captain: a zoo. Have you ever been to the zoo on a beautiful spring Sunday afternoon? Do you remember how impossibly crowded it was? Well, that's what White Bay felt like when we got there. Add a few 20-year-old girls showing off their pseudo-sexual dance skills on a power boat blasting music for the whole beach and a few 40- to 50-year-old men acting the same age as those girls, and you get the picture we found in White Bay. Rather entertaining.

That's when our time in the Virgins started to feel like a summer holiday. The folks on Skylark are a lot of fun to hang out with, and so we did. The kids had sleepovers almost every night; one of the Skylark kids would sleep on Taia and one of the Taia kids would sleep on Skylark. We even did school together as we moved from anchorage to anchorage. We snorkelled, hiked, sailed, biked, and generally enjoyed everything the cruising lifestyle has to offer.

Skylark under sail. Natalia was crewing for Stewart that day and Louise crewed on Taia

Then our water maker kicked the bucket. I'd been nursing it for a year and knew the moment would come when it would spit out its last drop of fresh water. After 2 or 3 days of researching alternatives to solve our fresh water production problem, we decided to buy a new one and the enjoyment of life resumed. We placed the order for the new one almost 2 weeks ago and it should be on its way to Saint Martin, where we're going next. The installation shouldn't be too complex, as the plumbing is mostly already there. But, like any other boat project, this one will most assuredly suffer from Paul's Pi Rule: every boat project takes Pi times the amount of time initially allocated to it.

I rigged up the spinnaker pole with a rope swing at The Bight. The kids love it

We visited almost every island in the BVI, the touristy ones and the more secluded ones as well. It truly is a marvellous place. Initially I thought that the Bahamas was better, but after a few weeks here, I conclude that they're just different. Both have a special place in my heart. While the Bahamas has a broader abundance of fish in general, the BVI has all its beauty within a 7 mile radius.

Michael Beans's Happy Arr! show at Jumbies, North Sound, is excellent

After hanging out with Skylark for a couple of weeks, we ran into another kid boat we had met in the Bahamas: Almost There. The kids were ecstatic to share play time with yet another kid. It's great to make friends in one place and run into them in a totally different country. There's something I find inherently cool about that. And we also spent time with Distant Shores, whom we hadn't seen in about a year.

Almost There on a broad reach. While they easily sailed at 8 knots, we were happy to get to 5

Almost There have plenty of SCUBA gear on board, including a compressor to fill their tanks. Robert invited me to dive the RMS Rhone with him. I borrowed tank, BCD, and regulator. The dive was excellent and short. Although I'm PADI certified, I have very little experience (only 5 dives!), so I haven't mastered the art of consuming little oxygen, which shortens the length of my dives. I guess I'm going to have to get my own gear and dive more to remedy this situation.

Robert, from Almost There, my patient dive master at the RMS Rhone wreck

And here we are in North Sound, Virgin Gorda, the north-eastern end of the BVI, ready to move on to our next destination: Saint Martin. Tomorrow we'll do our first overnight sail since we sailed the south shore of Puerto Rico in early February. It's only 80 miles to Saint Martin and we expect to get there in a bit less than 20 hours.

Oh, and I forgot to mention: I turned 42 some time during our stay in the BVI.

It's Happy Arrr!

Following Camila's steps, Matias also wanted to write a blog post. So, without further ado,  here it is...

On Monday we went to the Happy Arrr Show! We met a pirate named Captain Beanes who drunk Koolaid instead of rum. I found 2 doubloons, one gold one silver. Cami found 1 doubloon. We heard him sing. He wrote a love song for us and friends came. I had a sprite and the other kids had smoothies..We had a conch shell blowing test and I won for the kids because I got 8 seconds and I won a beer opener which is weird. He sang us a song like this:

"Yo ho watch em go,

rolling down,

the Sopers Hole"

Matias

Showing Captain Beanes the doubloons I found

All the kids singing with Captain Beanes

The kids from Skylark, Almost There and Taia on stage

Blowing the conch horn

Because I won, I was made a knight of the Pirates of the Caribbean!

We had the biggest table close to the stage!