Caribbean Cruise 2006: St. Thomas

November 10, 2006

St. Thomas

Yet another sailing excursion. You gotta love it. This time we are with Ondeck Ocean Racing. We thought we would be on Farr 65's but they had not arrived from Europe yet. So we were on Beneteau Distinction 40.7. This is much closer to what we were used to. As luck would have it there were only 5 from our ship to crew. Parker and Beth are also members of Kissy's group but we had not seen them so far during the cruise.
Once at the boat we were introduced to the captain and mate, Ocean and Billy. Which Suzette quickly dubbed Billy Ocean. Ocean was born on a yacht and has circumnavigated twice. Billy is a Flordia boy who bought a 1 way ticket because Flordia was not warm enough.
This was another match race and we just basically took positions. Suzette and Parker had the starbord jib sheet, Toby and I had the port jib sheet, Beth had the queen seat aft of the helm. Ocean did tactics and tended the main.
Once Billy found out that 3 of us had sailing experience he just knew we were going to win. And win we did.
This was a really fun boat to sail however the helm is quite sensitive.
At the victory party after the race the rum punch flowed and there were lots of things to purchase.
We decided not to do any shoping in St. Thomas since we had quite an exciting day. So back to the ship for some pool time and relaxation.