At this moment we are on our boat Island Girl for 25 months. We departed Miami Beach on December 6, 2012 for an expected journey of about 2 years and here we are in St. Maarten ready to have another season in the East Caribbean and no plans yet to head back home. In these two years we sailed the East Caribbean multiple times, visited Guyana and Suriname in South America and sailed to the center of the south Caribbean to Bonaire. We left Bonaire with the intention to sail back to the East Caribbean but that is hard in the winter time with the strong north/east wind and in many cases high Atlantic swells. So we sailed to St. Croix the largest of the USVI and spent our Christmas there.

We rented a car for 2 days and drove around this beautiful island. We like the island so much since it is not as rugged as the other East Caribbean islands, which makes the driving over good roads very easy giving you beautiful views of the hills. Since the largest oil refinery of the western hemisphere is closed the local economy is sliding down and although Christmas time is the beginning of the tourist season it was remarkable quiet on the island.

However, you do not notice this when looking at the new construction of the most beautiful houses and resorts. Some of them are really bizarre like the building on top of the hill that looks like a medieval castle or a mosque. Our favorite place is Sandy Point that is located at the south/west corner of the island. This spectacular beach is part of Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge and is one of the longest in the Caribbean. The beach is one of the favorite nesting sites for the loggerhead, leatherback, hawksbill and green sea turtles and is closed from April to September when these turtles come to the beach to lay their eggs and the little turtles try to get into the water. For the rest of the season the park is only open on Saturday and Sunday. North of Sandy Point is Frederiksted the second largest city in St. Croix and is again a historic site built by the Danish. A large cruise ship pier has been built and in the tourist season cruise ships arrive a couple of times in the week to St. Croix. The east side of St. Croix is the easternmost point of the USA called "Point Udall" and a nice monument is built to commemorate the millennium.

On my birthday we had a nice dinner on the boardwalk and toasted on the year we had and hope for a good year to come. We spent our Christmas days in St. Croix where they have two Christmas days, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. The anchorage was rough with a lot of swell and since we did not want to return to Island Girl in the dark we had a Christmas Lunch on Protestant Island. The food was great we still think that eating on the beach is special.

We enjoyed our stay in St. Croix and were originally planning to stay for some time, but our mooring became so uncomfortable due to the heavy Atlantic Swell and since it was predicted to get worse, we left St. Croix on Saturday afternoon after Christmas and sailed to St. Maarten. After a rough first part of the trip we arrived at 8:00 AM Sunday in St. Maarten and dropped the anchor in Simpson Bay.

When we arrived in Simpson Bay the bay was full with anchored mega yachts, but when we checked the lagoon most of the mega yachts marinas were nearly empty. The following weeks we found out why: during the holidays all the mega yachts were out either on charter or in use by the owners and returned to St. Maarten at this time. Due to the heavy traffic through the bridge the openings times for incoming and outgoing traffic are strictly set, so when a boat arrives in St. Maarten they first anchor in Simpson Bay while making arrangements with the marina pilots to enter the marina and wait for a bridge opening to enter the lagoon. We are anchored next to the channel to the bridge so we see on a daily basis a whole parade of large to very large yachts passing by. We took a few pictures of this parade. Some of the boats are very special like "Limitless" owned by the owner of "Victoria Secret". We were anchored next to this boat 2 years ago in "Anse Du Colombier" and were amazed by all the toys they have on this yacht. However, to me and many other people we met the ugliest yacht we saw is "Venus" built by Feadship in Alsmeer, The Netherlands, designed by Philippe Stark for Steve Jobs the co-founder of Apple. However, Jobs died in October 2011, the yacht was unveiled a year later at a cost of more than €100 million. The yacht was impounded on 21 December 2012 at the Port of Amsterdam following a dispute over payment. The designer claims that Jobs' heirs owe him €3 million of his €9 million fee for the project. The yacht was freed from its Amsterdam dock on 24 December 2012 after Jobs' estate paid off the last of its bills. Looking at the boat I would not have paid the designer a penny.

We could bring our folding bikes on shore and "Buccaneers Beach Bar" allowed us to use their facilities to park the bikes and we made a few trips over the flat part of the island around the lagoon. We drove to the famous Maho Bay with the Sunset Beach at the beginning of the airport runway in St. Maarten. After Dorothy had the KLM 747 pass over her we had lunch in the "Driftwood Boatbar".

I signed up for some diving and took in the meantime 4 dives, all of them to boat wrecks. The oldest wreck is the HMS Proselyte that was a 32-gun Royal Navy fifth-rate frigate. She was the former Dutch 36-gun frigate Jason, built in 1770 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her crew mutinied and turned her over to the British in 1796. She then served the Royal Navy until she wrecked on 4 September 1801. She lies in approximately 50 feet of water, just beyond the mouth of Great Bay at Philipsburg. Numerous cannons, ballast bars, barrel hoops and anchors are scattered around the wreck on the ocean floor, all heavily encrusted with coral. All the other wrecks sank more recently and all have a wide variety of fish and coral. My deepest dive was to the wreck of a tug boat in 90 ft. of water. Around the wreck you see a lot of large stingrays and some of them are partly buried underneath the sand. In the smoke stack of the boat you could see a lot of large lobsters; we saw a shark and a couple of very large barracudas.

The weather in the east Caribbean has a very strong north/easterly trade wind (Christmas Winds) and large north/east swells. We want to visit Saba that we skipped two years ago but we need some settled weather to do so. Saba is very small and even the lee side of the island gives no protection from the north/east Atlantic swell. Based on this we decided to stay in St. Maarten a little while longer, enjoy the nice things of this island, do some repairs on the boat and our computer equipment until we can make the 20 miles crossing to Saba and stay there for a few days.