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Ocean Sail Issue 20 - Monday, May 29, 2000

Location: Airborne from San Juan Puerto Rico to Los Angles and Santa Barbara Ca.

After 9 months of travel it was good to settle down for a few weeks and relax. Casa Ballard on St Croix USVI was the perfect place. And after three weeks in St. Croix, there is almost more then I can write about. Our round trip to France returned us to St Thomas, where we spent the night with David and Danielle Comeaux, our host for the Rolex cup. The next morning we boarded a float place back to St. Croix and Casa Ballard.

In the two weeks that we had been away from St. Croix, the seaplane base had moved from downtown Christianstead to the edge of town. In a place where change takes years, seeing progress of this sort was amazing. Christianstead is a quaint colonial town that dates from it original French settlement before the 1600’s. The Dutch arrived in the 1600 and made it their home. The US bought it in 1917 to protect the Panama Canal and much of the Dutch character has remained. Two-story plaster covered stone buildings designed in revival colonial styles line the streets. Each one painted in a soft pastel color with white trim. No two adjacent building are the same color. The blending and contrast is pleasing and soothing to the eyes. But as it seems in every part of the Caribbean, life is a slow race against decay. Away from the center of town, ruins of building, roofless, windowless, with crumbling walls sit side by side with restored and proud examples. The centerpiece of the town is the fort. It is a historic national monument under the care of the United States National Park Service. It stands on a prominent point in the harbor with ancient black powder guns mutely pointing towards the sea. Its pale yellow walls are surrounded by bright a green lawn on one side and the turquoise sea on the other.

The Dutch settled the island and large plantations fueled by sugar cane, rum and slave trade built the town and the island. Scattered throughout the island are the remains of this period. Ruins of the great houses built of stone and the windmills with their conical shaped stone bases standing out in the overgrown fields. Quiet and vacant sugar mills and rum distilleries distinguished by tall square chimneys stand like obelisks in silent memorial to the lives that once tended the fields. The slaves gained their freedom in middle 1800’s and all the plantations are idle now. The windmills slowly crumble or have been incorporated into a modern house. There are only a few remaining great houses and original Dutch families still in place.  Industry has replaced king sugar, with reportedly one of the largest oil refineries in North America. This makes for very cheep fuel prices with unleaded gas costing just under $1.20. Just 40 miles to the north on St. Thomas the same gallon of gas will set you back $1.80.

Miles of living coral reefs surround St Croix and just to the north is Buck Island, a National Marine Sanctuary.  These attractions and the fact that the water temperature is in the low 80’s made it a perfect place to get my diving certification. After a few nights of hitting the books and class instruction followed by 4 dives, I had earned my PADI open water certification. All diving was done from a dive boat and Ktoo, and often John and Laura came with us on the certification dives. I dove in a “shorty” wet suit and Ktoo rented a thin full wet suit. Despite the warm water temps, even 84 degrees feels cold after an hour. The water was blue and clear with visibility sometimes approaching 100 feet. There were triggerfish, angelfish, blue tangs, eels, lobsters, crabs, turtles, rays and dozens of different kinds of coral. There were more kinds of fish then I could identify. Sometimes small jellyfish (without the stingers) clouded the water. To round out the whole experience both Ktoo and I got our Advanced Open Water Certification. Which required 3 mandatory skill dives: deep water, navigation, and night, as well as two electives. We chose photography, and wreck, multilevel, drift.  In total, we made of 10 dives. It is a place that we see myself returning to time and time again.

Aside from the beautiful water, there are some cultural beauties as well. Probably the most notable of all are the beer-swilling swine. After a tour of the some remote beaches in John’s Jeep, we stopped in a small bar and bought 4 beers, Budweiser’s for John and myself and 2 Sharps for our friends. The bar maid led us across the small parking lot to a white painted wood fenced in yard with a concert floor. Inside the yard were 4 smaller pens with walls about 3 feet tall lined up side by side. As we approached the pens, a large pig stood on its back feet with its front feet on the heavy wood door to the pen and thrust his tusked snout out to us. The door to his pen was labeled “JJ”. Ktoo tentatively walked forward and offered him a can of beer. The giant pig gently took the can of beer, lifted its heavy head a little higher and rolled the can to the back of his mouth. A chomp of the jaws later and beer was foaming out of corner of his mouth. He tilted his head as far back as he could and in a few moments he spit out an empty and crushed beer can on to the concrete. I swear I could see a smile come across his thin pig lips. Stirred by the commotion JJ’s next door neighbor Oreo came to his feet and we repeat the beer feeding.

In the short time that we were staying on the island we made it our home. Ktoo joined the health club (two week membership). She would work out in the morning while I was researching (shopping) stuff for the boat on the Internet using John’s microwave DSL connection. At noon we would often regroup with John and Laura and have lunch at one of fine restaurants. In the afternoon, we would either go on another stage of our progressive island tour, go diving, or head out to Buck Island with John and Laura on their sport-fishing boat.

One of our favorite places to go for lunch was the “Off the wall” The restaurant was a low-key affair consisting of two semi-permanent building that containing the kitchen and restrooms. The dinning area is a strip of sand 20 feet wide that backs up to the beach. In the middle of this is a bar shaped in a “U”. The bar is made from concert, because it is only a few yards from ocean, and hurricanes make regular appearances here. The center of the U is sunken so the bartender stands eye to eye with the seated guests on the outside of the bar. A wooden roof on four posts shades the bar. There are a few more tables under on far side of bar from the beach. The rum punch is great, burgers also great (but maybe not as great as “Cheeseburgers”), fries, fish tacos, Greek salad. Maybe the food is not all that great, maybe it’s the location. But there is something about having lunch on the beach, just a few yards from the water sipping rum drinks to convince you that, well maybe the is food pretty good.