charter yacht

Such nice comments in the book this week! Nice to see the teenagers write such nice long stories! Thanks guys!! They commented below on liking the omelettes. I made omelettes all the way around every single morning! By this morning, I was really getting sick of eggs and I think I finally had them filled up and beat on omelettes as they left some of them! The guests are on their way back to Florida and Wisconsin, and we are scrub a dub dubbing in anticipation of picking up our "Adventurous Wenches" tomorrow. We will see how adventurous our wenches are this week!

Once again you have made our family enjoy the best week of our lives. Thank you, Thank you. Jill and Don

Awesome time once again! I will remember more now then I am 11 other then 6! I loved all the places we went. I love the BVI's! Sad to go back. Thank you Thank you so much! I had a fun week of snorkeling and banana boating. We saw a ton of awesome beautiful fish. We must have got 10-15 fish and got on hooks about 5 sharks. It was awesome. AFTON

An excellent week as always, I loved that we did this again. Fishing every night was very fun and excellent. I caught two tarpon, 1 really big one, 2 horse eyed jacks, I massive one and a bunch of reef fish. Me and my dad went out with kayaks to ride the surf. I also brought out a boogy board and hit a wave between 6-8 feet. It was an excellent feeling. I learned a lesson "RESPECT THE OCEAN" So much fun hanging with every one, Kerry, Bazza and Simeon. Simeon was a lot of fun to hang out with. Learning how to sail was a blast. I learned a lot from Bazza. SCUBA diving was amazing. We saw so much wild life down there. We treasure hunted and that was so much fun we found bottles and old metal things. The bubbly pool was amazing. It felt like our hot tub. All in all it was amazing. HOpe to come back! CRAE

Thank you for a great trip! It was great to see the kids do so many fun things. I enjoyed snorkeling and the hike was an adventure..alot of fun. It was very relaxing and fun for all! Thank you for all you did to make this a great time. SCOTT AND DEBBIE

The week in paradise was very "righteous". The crew was awesome. Omlets were so good. Kerry really cooked awesome. Bazza and Simeon were awesome at teaching me and Crae to sail. Fishing was a blast, many fish, especially tarpon. The bubbly pool was very fun along with the couple goats along the way. The freaky town on Salt Island, is, well, weird! Perfect weather and very little rain. Simeon is very accomodating and does anything to make the guests happy. Bazza is awesome at sharing and teaching fishing techniques I hadn't known about. SCUBA diving was awesome. The wreck of the Rhone was the best dive we had. Than you! JUSTIN

Visiting the Promenade for the second time after 4 years was nothing but "excellent" It was once again great to see my family and enjoy this wonderful experience with the entire crew of Simeon, Bazza and Kerry. We had a great week of diving in new places along with traveling to new and wonderful places from the last time. The Promenade was running strong with pride and a lot of love. WESTEN


My food order came without more food then with, so it was into town to hit every store this afternoon and still come up without some things. There apparently was not a fresh blueberry or strawberry to be had on island this week, so we will do without! Won't be the first time.

this is a pic from last nights dinner, and although we had lots of bites and jumps, no Tarpon were landed last night.

We sailed down to the Rhone this morning, and I grabbed my camera to jump in and take some pictures.

Coming down the line...

We made it to the bottom...

I swear every single dive boat in the BVI was there this morning, and all on the shallow end. I looked like a clusterfu** down there and I counted 30 divers in my sight at the same time!

This is our groups idea of posing for a group shot...gentle, they are mostly resort divers so understandable!

Nice school of Squirrel Fish...

I had to run into town today to go visit government offices and go to the banks (today the ATM machine told me it could not give me money because of a hardware malfunction! That is a new one! Two very different sized cruise ships sitting on the dock in town today.

Tied up on C dock at Village Cay and glad to see that they are getting security gates on the docks. If this is your boat it is sunk at the dock though!

Back to the boat and we are staying the night at our favorite spot, Salt Island. The sunset tonight was spectacular...

And the gigantic Princess Cruise Ship came by later on in the evening and it looked like a lit up city...

Of course about the time dinner was to go on the table, the fish started jumping on the lines, we had a couple barracuda...

And several Jacks. Notice this jack still has the large bait fish hanging half out of his mouth!

Everyone was watching the fish life so I only had two people at the table for my two bell dinner time!

They eventually showed up though and I am now off to bed!

Happy Day before Thanksgiving! Look at this Tarpon from last night.. I think the fish is as big as the fisherman! Took 57 minutes for him to reel in this baby. Took a picture and let him go again....

After a bit of a walk around West End and some reprovisioning we tacked back and forth to get up to Diamond Cay to the Bubbly Pool. It was a great sail, and then they all hiked to the pool.

I understand it was about a perfect day for the Bubbly pool, not too much, not too little!





I think they spent several hours there and then walked around Little Jost to the old brothel.

We are just anchored tonight off Little Jost and we have all stuffed ourselves on steak and potatoes!

We seemed to have packed a lot of activities into today and managed to make it a total of maybe two miles! We started with a dive and a snorkel on Great Thatch, although some went for the more leisurely activities...

Then we went on to snorkel boarding, predatoring, banana boating, water skiing and who knows what else. The look of concentration determined to get up on one ski!

And he is up!

Finally late this afternoon we went for a llloooonnnngggg sail, from Great Thatch to Sopers Hole, but we tacked back and forth in the pleasant wind now and it gave me an opportunity to take some pictures of the guests and the boat under sail...



I stopped over to see Glory of Christiansted as I have a couple people who are booked on Davids boat this week! They have loved the strong wind for sailing the last couple days. Unfortunately, they, like my guests have not figured out how to keep their shorts on the line either!!

We hit Sopers Hole about sunset and it was straight onto fishing. One more time! But we were very successful before dinner even hit the table. One Tarpon...

And one Horse Eyed Jack! After they caught these I made them come have dinner before they could go back fishing!

Some of you may laugh at this picture. These are mouse and rat traps! Remember I pondered a couple weeks ago on whether we would get creatures again on board now that we were using a dock again? Well we did! Quite quickly apparently. I noticed I had cracker packages gnawed into! Not knowing what we had on board we went for all kinds of traps and poison. Well, we win! He did not last long on board, but it goes to show that we will have to keep this kind of stuff out now that we are using dock again. I am questionning whether using a dock is worth it after all. Yep, this was not my brochure tourism moment either, I am not sure many people would admit that they found one on board!

My guests that are coming in a couple weeks, Swim Vacation, who swims around the British Virgin Islands...Really...!!! emailed me today and asked me if I could turn off the wind before they got here. They have about ten days, so it hopefully will be fine for them! I would dearly love to turn off the wind for a bit though, I get "wind stress" quite easily. I guess I am not a true sailor then!
We were up at the crack of dawn to move the boat so they could snorkel before breakfast, and I thought them jumping in in the middle of the bight in 20 plus knot winds was not the best idea, so we moved to Water Point. The wind was not too bad this AM. We had a snorkel and a dive, and then it was time for Bazza to give a sailing lesson to a few of the guys so they could sail the boat.

Our turn to drink pina coladas on the back deck I guess! I asked our helmsmen Crae where we were going and the shrug says it all I think, however, he did tell me we hit our hull speed sailing at 10.3 knots, so that was impressive.

We sailed down to Great Thatch in short time and watched all the monohulls leaned over like crazy tacking back and forth across the channel. The gap in between great Thatch and Tortola must have been running 6 foot seas today! Very gusty this afternoon.

I felt like Susie Homemaker or Martha Stewart today with all the trays I had lined up to go in the oven! Quite enjoyed it (did not have to do sails!)

We anchored at great thatch so bazza could take most of them on the hike up to the fort to find the geocache of ours. We waved them goodbye, and promptly felt like we were in a wind tunnel. Good thing we are so wide and stable, otherwise, quite frankly, it would have been hell sitting there.

They found the geocache and signed our book and all enjoyed the trip up there immensely. give teenagers anything to do with a machete and they are straight on it I guess.

They found a few treasures up there, and I cannot believe they found another flat iron. I think that is half a dozen that have been found there now. I cannot believe that people pressed clothes so much back then!

We tucked into a nice quite cove nearby for the evening and about the time I put dinner on the table, the tarpon started jumping on the line left and right. 3 strikes and large jumps in a row, our fishermen just have to learn a little patience with the Tarpon though, as unless you let them run and play them in and out and tire them out for 45 minutes, you lose them very quickly! I did a fruit crumble with homemade ice cream tonight and one of the guests pronounced it one of the best desserts he has ever had in his life and I think that is high praise! 9 pm and except for the fishermen, it is bed time on the yacht again...
I would think Richard and Lisa would be getting close to getting across the Atlantic by now and here, they thought early this week they would sail in anyways...

What a gusty day it was today! Overnighting at Great Harbor on Peter Island we took one look at the channel and decided we were NOT turning STARBOARD out there.
I found a couple pictures from when we went out to dinner at the Dove on Friday night. Courtesy of Richard and Lisa who had bought us a gift certificate for Xmas last year and we used before it expired! Been there once before, and truthfully, it is not my cup of tea, I am more a plain meat and potatoes type girl then all these bits of flavor mixed together and prettily arranged. But, the food was good, Bazza had beet and cabbage soup for an appetizer...

I had Brie Cheese and then Ribe Eye steak with asparagus deep fried in mustard something and a lemon potato puree of some kind. It was very good. Definitely a wine bar type hang out for the financial types after work.

And this is what happens in the BVI when you have contact with sea urchins! Simba managed to do that tying a stern line or some such. Looks very painful so stay away from those black sea urchins! The spines go right through your fins as well.

Simba thought that I always put up mean pics of him, so I did get an action shot of him scrubbing the cockpit today...

And these guests were trained early, we already have them bringing their plates down to the galley (maybe it was because they did not want them to blow away!) now we just have to train them to wash them as well!!

We had 4 intrepid divers, that were mostly all resort divers and we really had to search for a calm enough spot to get them in the water. We finally settled on Black tip Reef of the west end of Peter, gusty but doable...

Then it was onto the caves and Bight and I think about every crewed and bareboat charter yacht in the BVI was down in this area due to the weather today. Very gusty along the caves, so we sent the dinghy along with the snorkelers on look out and then headed over to the Bight as out in the middle looked about the calmest place to anchor in the entire area!
We had a late afternoon banana boat ride, with the guests determined to stay on and the driver determined to get them off...



We have had several items blown overboard in the last day with this wind, shorts, more shorts, hats and more hats. We had an impromptu man overboard drill to retrieve this hat!

Willy T's seemed to be hopping so we sent the adults over at cocktail hour while the younger members stayed and fished. We had much better luck then last night!

This was interesting, two hooks with squid on the line and we got two fish on it at the same time.

Some, did become live bait, and we have had three very large hits tonight, that we know had to be very massive sharks, as we had on strong line, and these fish were freight trains and took everything we had. Nothing we could do to stop them.

We watched these people and this dinghy for awhile (Was it you??) as we could not figure out if and why they really wanted the dinghy pulled out there on the rocks! Seemed awfully strange, but I am sure there was a purpose.

We gave up the camera and then pictures were taken of us. I think the lettuce look is glamorous and suits me...

Not as much of a sunset tonight as it was pretty cloudy. We certainly hope the wind does lay down a bit overnight.

Had a delitray made up for me this weekend at Deli France, which is where Clarence Thomas used to be. Very French in there! The bread was great, and the tray was pricey and a bit too "french" for my boat and such, but a good source for those who are into these things here.

It is 9 PM and I think it is just about bed time all the way around on the boat it appears, so off I go too.