Good day all,

Sorry for posting here, but the trips board seems to not be working. Admin please take note when you post there it disappears. When you click on pages the pages are all blank.

So for all you cold folks up north I thought I would post a side trip from my trip with Rob to Jost VanDyke, BVI. I will let Rob post that trip first. This is a trip Amy and I did from Jost to Tortola for Valentine's dinner, and returning at night. You have to love a girl that can get out of a kayak, throw on a little black dress, and look amazing.

Amy is the most awesome person you would ever want to meet. I am truly blessed to have met her here in St. Thomas. She was a travel nurse and was originally here for a short term to work at the hospital, but I convinced her to stay! Amy is a very strong swimmer and surfer, and she is also a great kayaker. Amy's idea of fun is to swim five miles or to paddle her surfboard out to a reef 1/4 mile out. Her idea of a vacation is hiking the Camino de Santiago 800km across Spain. I was okay with bringing her into open water, and what's even more awesome is she thought it was cool to kayak to Valentine's dinner. I just want to say I saw her first! Sorry guys, but you have to find your own.

Amy had to work on the days Rob and I kayaked to Jost, so she took the ferry Sunday and met us there. Ivan's Stress-free resort is my favorite place in all the Caribbean. I have travelled literally to almost every island- certainly every major one, and Ivan's is my pick for best place to get away from it all. The plan was that Amy and I would kayak from Ivan's to Cane Garden Bay in Tortola, BVI. I am guessing about eight miles without looking it up on the map, all open water with a nasty headwind and current on the way there. We would kayak back at night using deck lighting that I rigged up. It is USCG legal, and we had flares, horns, communication, and all required safety gear.

We started out in the afternoon around 2:30 to beat the sun's heat. 10AM to 2PM are the worst times to be in the sun. As mentioned before in another post, Rob and I had the thrill of 9-11 foot long rolling swells, but that had all subsided and the water was flat. It was perfect except all that swell had caused quite a current. As soon as we headed out I realized this was not going to be as easy as I had thought. I was still sore from the 5 hours of non-stop paddling with Rob the day before and Amy was getting used to the boat we rented from a friend at West Indies Windsurfing. It was a brand new Wilderness Systems Cape Horn 17 footer. Maybe 17.5- I can't remember. I was paddling my Shearwater Atlantic 19 foot strip-built with a Greenland Paddle. The GP did great in the headwind and honestly I didn't consider that Amy was having to fight the wind much more than me. Not only was she using a Euro Paddle, but I think the plastic boat she was in wanted to weathercock more and she had to fight that. My kayak has a very low deck and long waterline with less rocker and tracks very well. I kept having to slow down. As I paddle I often get in a rhythm and would look back and I was leaving Amy. This doesn't go well on Valentine's Day!!!

I looked at Amy's paddle as we rounded the first buoy out of Jost and said "Dear, take a look at the name on that paddle." She said, "Yeah, what about it?" I said "What direction should it be, up or down?" She laughed- the paddle was upside down! That did help a bit on speed once corrected. The wind was pretty strong and head-on, and the current to my best judgement was around 3 knots. Amy was paddling about 4 knots! I soon realized this wasn't going to be the cute Valentine's paddle I thought it would. I had thought about 2 hours. Long story short, it took about 3.5 hours. We arrived at Cane Garden Bay at almost sunset.

On the way in about a mile off Tortola's NW coast, we started to get some long rolling swells in the 8-foot range, but such long intervals it really didn't feel like that much. You just slowly roooooose up and then back down. If you watched the horizon you could see the massive swells rolling towards you, but as you paddled you didn't really feel it as much. I would watch them roll towards shore and count down... 10, 9, 8, 7.... 3, 2, 1... Crash! They would crash into the shore in threes. Luckily Cane Garden Bay is protected enough that it wasn't getting too much of the bad stuff, but beaching required timing the swells and making a run for it. Apple Bay, around the bend from Cane Garden, is a world-class surfing spot, and they hold surf competitions there. It was now closing out, but the two days before it was totally on. I almost wished we had taken a board with us, but I was happy paddling the kayak in open water.

My buddy and "brother from another mother," Mark, had made reservations for us at a beautiful beach-side restaurant, Quito's. I had eaten there before and knew it would be romantic and charming. We arrived to find a DJ playing booty-shakin' music at about 20 decibles. I asked him, "Hey buddy are you going to play this loud stuff tonight? It's Valentine's Day you know!" He started to jive and dance and said in a used car salesman kind of voice "Hey man, I'm the DJ man, whatever you want bro, because I'm the DJ man, you want me to rock it I can rock it bro because I'm the DJ man...." Oh great. I canceled our reservation. Mark and some friends met us on the beach and they suggested another place that would be more appropriate.

The kayak was the talk of the beach. Everyone wanted to know why I use "that skinny little stick" to paddle with. I explained how a GP works and they still said "I think you could go a lot faster with a kayak paddle." I laughed. One older gentleman was just fascinated with the boat, and stopped to talk for a while. I love listening to people reminisce about their younger days. He told about when he worked on a merchant ship and the captain gave him the wheel as he went down below. He said he'd never steered a big boat before. He turned the wheel and nothing happened. He turned again, and still nothing happened. (Those of you that know are laughing, but I will tell you- big ships take a while to respond to steerage) He said all of a sudden the boat made a big sweeping turn and he finally got it turned back around and on course. He said the captain came up and said "How's it going?" He said "Oh just fine, no problems." I'm sure the captain knew what went on. It was a funny story, and he was a very nice man, but Amy was hungry and when Amy gets hungry you'd better find food quick! I bid him farewell and we went to search for food.

What I love about Amy is she can paddle a kayak, beach it, pull a little black dress out of a dry bag, slip it on, and she's still the prettiest girl at the prom! I changed in the bathroom into some linen pants and shirt- appropriate dinner attire that we call "Island formal." We walked down the beach to the place Mark had recommended. Some guy was singing very loudly "I've Got Friends in Low Places". I apologized and asked Amy if she wanted to go somewhere else. She gave me the "I need food NOW" look, and so we were seated. I told the waitress to bring something- anything- bread or something right away before Amy started eating the other patrons.

She got us some wonderful fresh-made bread and we ordered wine and started to relax a bit. However, the singing went on. It was bad... I mean really bad... bad enough that Amy said "Is it karaoke night?" The waitress looked embarassed- "um, no... he's actually paid to do that." She informed us that it was happy hour tonight and they had singing all night. Wait a minute... happy hour all night? Only in the islands folks! So it was bad enough that this guy sucked, but also he sang songs about breaking up, songs about crying in your beer... nothing remotely to do with Valentines!!! Amy said "I'm just waiting for him to start singing "She f'n hates me". We laughed. I said "I didn't do too good this Valentine's did I?" She said, "Well, look at it this way- you want it to be memorable, and this is certainly memorable..." We laughed! The food was actually amazing, and once we were fed and watered we felt more relaxed and enjoyed it despite the horrible singing.

Well darkness had fallen and we knew we had to get on the water ASAP. A crowd gathered around the kayak as I readied the lights. I used a clamp-on light that I clamped to a board which I slid under the deck rigging. We had backup ligting of the same type, plus head lamps as a tertiary backup. We had flares, cells, radios, and even glow sticks as a final resort backup just in case, but honestly I think they're pretty worthless. Anyway, the point is we were prepared. This would be about 6 to 8 miles of open water paddling at night. The water was flat as could be- almost motionless. Perfect for night paddling. We headed out into the stars and it was absolutely amazing. Complete silence. Once we got out of the lights of Tortola we rafted up the kayaks and briefly we shut off the lights so we could enjoy the stars. It was amazing. The milky way flowed across the sky like a river. A fish would jump now and then but other than that and the water sloshing on the hull it was completely silent. Amy said "Okay, this was a good idea- you've been redeemed!" The paddle back was absolutely beautiful. There was no boat traffic except one dinghy that passed a mile or so ahead of us and never came near. We paddled from Tortola over to the shore of Sandy Spit, which looks like the island in cartoons that the little guy is always stranded on... just a few palm trees and some sand. There is a little bit of shrubbery on the south side, and the treefrogs that live in the brush were singing to us as we paddled by. We got to Jost and paddled the shoreline for probably an hour all the way back around to White Bay where we were staying. As we passed Great Harbor we could hear the music from legendary Foxy's Bar in the distance, but the tree frogs sang a much more appealing song as we paddled the shoreline at night. Now and then a lone taxi would go along the winding road from Great Harbor to White Bay. Jost VanDyke got electricity in the mid 1990's, and has only had cars for about as long. There are only a handfull of cars on Jost, most of which are safari taxis that run the single road that circles the island. The point is- it's very very quiet on Jost at night. The treefrogs chirp like birds and the water lapped a drumbeat against the shore as they sang. It was quite beautiful.

All the way I kept seeing bioluminescense as I paddled but I wasn't sure if it was that or a reflection of my deck light. We rafted up again and I shut of the lights to check it out, and it was bioluminescense. This kind was what I call "little sparklies" that come off the paddle like sparks. There is another type of bioluminescense that just glows green like a light. That happens in backwater. The sparklies happen in open water. They are caused by tiny single-celled organisms that glow when disturbed. It looks like your paddle is a magic wand as it goes through the water making little greenish sparks. It just added to the ambience of the night paddle.

We arrived back at White Bay very late in the evening. There were a few people at Ivan's playing guitar and singing. We beached the kayaks and looked at the stars for a bit before turning in. What a great way to spend Valentine's Day! Amy rocks! Once it was all said and done she really enjoyed the kayak idea. I think the night paddle went much better than the loooong day paddle there, and I think I would have scored more points if the music hadn't been so loud, but that wasn't my fault, right?

Hope you enjoyed. Look for a trip report soon for the trip from St. Thomas to Jost and back. It was beautiful. I don't think I will ever find a place I love more than the VI.