That Four-Letter Word: Work

Celeste moored at Henley Cay

When we started cruising, we knew that eventually we’d have to go back to work. You can only stretch a dollar (even a Trinidadian dollar, seven of which are equal to one U.S. dollar) so far. Though we’ve been doing well in budgeting our funds, we decided to spend this winter season working in St. Thomas to fatten up the cruising kitty. It’s the U.S., so we don’t need special permissions or visas, and we have several friends working here. And boy, did we land our dream jobs. Chris and I are now running day charters on the 38’ sailboat Celeste for Caribbean Blue Boat Charters. It’s perfect: Chris is a licensed captain, I’m a marine biologist, and we take people over to St. John to sail and snorkel. How cool is that! We’ve done a number of charters already, and the guests we’ve had have been great. They love the sailing, and I get to teach them about all the critters we see underwater. We do our best to ensure that they have fun, and it can be quite exhausting. But a couple of our groups have opted to go ashore for lunch instead of eating on the boat. On these occasions, after tidying up and making sure everything is ready for their return, we can sit back, eat our own lunches and relax. It doesn’t get much better than this. We even got a five-star Trip Advisor review, which you can read here (the one for December 28^th entitled “Great Day on the Water”).

Guests getting geared up to snorkel

Relaxing while waiting for our guests to come back from lunch