TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums British Virgin Islands April 2022 cruise of Lio Kai

With this site's indulgence, I am going to log this - our fifth cruise in the covid era. Reading optional!!

We left Seattle late last night and are now on board after a long (as always) trip from the west coast.
Our flight out of Seatac was delayed, and our connecting flight MIA-STT was also more than an hour late taking off; late enough that we were not able to make our 2:30 ferry.
Fearing full ferries, we had a reservation, but though we called from the airport we were told that the ferry had already departed (which turned out not to be true).

In any case, we had to book the 5pm RTFF ferry. After initial reluctance, Smiths ended up refunding (most?) of our "no show" ticket, which was nice.

We arrived at the base and were pleased to see that our boat was ready for us and not cocooned in yellow hazard tape. All my queries about the state of our boat were ignored, so we had to take it on faith that our boat would actually be there for us.

We are going to have some family guests on this cruise, so provisioned rather more that when it is just the two of us. Caribbean Cellars had pre-delivered our booze since we were arriving over the Easter weekend. Extra water toys from Island were also on board.

Family guest should arrive tomorrow, we will stay at the dock until they arrive. We are so looking forward to this... we had this group trip planned before Irma and covid.

enjoy my friend...fair winds and following seas

I had the same issue with the ferry except it was native son. They would not refund anything. I did get a credit for future use.

I got no traction initially, but someone more persuasive got their refund and told me so I went back. I would have been fine with a credit too.

How is the boat doing after the repairs from grounding?

Knock on wood, the boat and repairs look ok. I had a chance to see the repairs in November and had my own surveyor check it out.
We are docked right next to "Aloha", the boat that was grounded in Eustacia sound. Thanks for asking!

I took a walk around the docks today to see how many boats are still "seized" (hate that term).
I've been looking around my boat to see what essential safety equipment I now have.
There must be 20 or more lifejackets aboard now, a horseshow throwable on the stern that is helpfully zip-tied to the pushpit.
There are a few more tools and spares that before. A hacksaw which is not a terrible idea.

Probably most importantly, the "Commercial Recreational Vessel License" issued by the minister of finance. The document carries an issue date of March 24, more than three weeks before our cruise started. I would have saved me some worry had someone taken the time to let me know.

I only saw about 3 boats that still had yellow taped signage, and they were all older boats that didn't look ready for charter.

Our family guests are en route and should be here later today once they have negotiated the ferry and remaining protocols.

**** zip-tied to the pushpit.***** horseshow throwable?
Not easy to deploy in emergency situation?

Agreed! By the time you get that off it would likely be too late.

My boat originally came with 8 inflatable PFDs... these probably did not meet someone's rules, though I think that is short-sighted because they are so much more likely to be worn.

We just dropped our guests off at the base. The week went extremely well, but I didn't feel I even had time for regular updates on my thread. Our itinerary basically ended up being Norman, Cooper, Saba, BEYC, Leverick, JVD.

There were some motion sickness issues, so we did not include Anegada this time, which is also a bit of a push for a week in my opinion. We hope to go again with this group and visit some of the spots we left out this time.

I was prepared for things to be far busier. We did avail ourselves of the BB option a number of times just to keep things as stress free as possible. Getting up at 7AM is not a hardship to me, I'm typically awake for several hours by then.

One thing I have not seen mentioned is the confusing system of reserving moorings at Norman Island on Dockwa.com. There is no premium, so my wife tried this out for curiosity and reserved a ball close to Pirates. Of course when we got there, we found another boat already on the ball. It was an older 53' Beneteau. Although there were lots of balls available, we politely asked them to move and they did. I don't know how they could have known that the ball was reserved online. It kind of looks like this is an attempt to save labor in collecting mooring fees by dinghy, but I totally do not understand how this system is supposed to work. If someone knows I would be happy to be enlightened.

Coincidentally, we found the same boat on our reserved BB at CIBC the next day. There were some language barrier issues, but this time they did not vacate our ball, citing "engine problems", which came out as "vagina problems" in a heavy Italian accent. That became a bit of a running joke.

Though skeptical of their excuse, I did not want to start a confrontation and CIBC saved the day by letting us use one of their private balls. I later saw the boat exhausting water and it left early the next morning. We joked that the boat should have been named Pinocchio. More later.