Sailing the Spanish Virgin Islands in April

Nan and I will be sailing with John Kretschmer again in April. Our trip this time will take us from Charlotte Amalie in St. Thomas to Ponce in Puerto Rico, by way of the Spanish Virgin Islands. It's not a trip that's on John's regular schedule (http://www.yayablues.com/passages.htm), but he needs to get his Kaufman 47 sailboat, Quetzal, from where he ended his last trip, "Trans-Caribbean South to North: Trinidad to St. Thomas, via Grenada, the Grenadines, St. Lucia, Martinique" to where he will start his next trip, "Fountain of Youth: Retracing the route of Ponce de Leon from Ponce, Puerto Rico to St. Augustine, via Grand Turk, San Salvador, Hopetown."

Our involvement is the result of a trade that John and I made at the end of our Odyssey trip last year. He agreed to take Nan and me sailing again in exchange for me redesigning his website. I am an Internet developer by trade, and I don't normally do freelance work, but John's offer sounded like a good one so we shook on it. With his comments and content, the redesign went smoothly and the new website has been in place now for more than six months. It seems to be working well as a marketing tool based on how quickly his trips sell out, so he's happy with his end of the trade.

Now we're looking ahead to our end of the trade, with a departure date of Sunday, April 12. According to John, it will be a casual sail, with none of the overnight passages he normally plans, just daysails between marinas on St. Thomas, Culebra, Vieques and Puerto Rico. John has invited another couple, author Dallas Murphy and his wife, to join us but it will just be the five of us. I am in the process of reading Mr. Murphy's Rounding the Horn: Being a Story of Williwaws and Windjammers, Drake, Darwin, Murdered Missionaries and Naked Natives--a Deck's-Eye View of Cape Horn so I will have some topics for conversation. It should be a fun, relaxing trip. I will post updates and photos to my blog as we travel.