Red Hook, Eastern St Thomas, USVI

Flying out of Boston, we had to get up at 3am. It was going to be a long day, but the rewards were at the end! Travelling with three children is a challenge, we joke that when you have a 3rd child, you are changing from man to man to zone defense. You are a person short to watch after them. As we drove through the New England snow, we contemplated our Painkillers and sun kissed beaches. After a stop in Miami, we were flying into St Thomas. We have found this the place to get the cheapest flights to. You can fly into Tortola which can be more convenient for charters, but its more expensive.

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BVI/USVI Sailing Itinerary for Children Redux

So last week we had our bareboat charter in the Virgin Islands. I had posted A Kid-Friendly UVSI/BVI Charter Itinerary as I wanted to share one that focused on short sails and children. Something I had not found much online.

Well, after the fact, we ended up changing the route, go figure. Over the next few posts I’ll share what we learned about taking kids to the Virgin Islands and what islands we visited.

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A Kid-Friendly UVSI/BVI Charter Itinerary

This children’s USVI/BVI itinerary is based on a week charter with an extra sleepaboard the first night. With three kids sailing, we plan to have very short sails during the day between anchorages and stay at places that have moorings and ice (we have no fridge on the boat). Another criteria for the chosen stops is that they have restaurants very close to the beach. We plan spend most of our meals eating out rather than eating on the boat and let the kids frolic on the beaches while we finish more leisurely. The idea is to head out from Red Hook where we get the boat and then go St John -> Jost Van Dyke -> Tortola -> St John -> Red Hook.

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Countdown to USVI Bareboat Charter

We’ll be heading off to the Caribbean in about a week for our second bareboat charter. A big goal for this trip is about getting familiar with a bigger monohull. We have sailed on Lake Champlain with 30-32′ monohulls and have chartered a cat, but we don’t have much experience in a bigger monohull on the sea.
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Baby Steps – Chartering Redux

With an eventual goal of living on a boat for six months, we need to get experience. We live near a large inland lake, and sail an O’Day 322. Clearly that would be too small a boat with three active young boys. So, we needed to figure out how to get experience on bigger boats. The obvious answer to this is bareboat chartering.

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