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The Seattle Times, The Canadian Press, The Nashua Telegraph and other Associated Press fed newspapers featured the Virgin Islands in their weekend travel sections in an article by Roger Petterson:

“Don’t just sit there. Pick a destination and plan a vacation, maybe to someplace a little exotic, where national parks come with tropical beaches, and boats rather than big RVs are a common mode of transportation…”

In the section about St. John, they chose our website, SeeStJohn.com as the go to website for St. John information:

“…he smallest of the three major islands is St. John - http://seestjohn.com/ - where the snorkeling guide takes you to spots such as Hawksnest Bay, a convenient and popular beach where a reef waits for you just a few yards off the shore, or Cinnamon Bay, a popular windsurfing beach where snorkelers can explore an old airplane wreck. Some of the same spots are covered in their beach guide. And don’t miss their photo and video galleries.

And as the “snorkeling guide,” they refer to, judging from their mention of the light airplane wreck,  it’s got to be the St. John Beach Guide.

Thank you Roger Petterson!!!

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Blackbeard

Like other Caribbean Islands, the Virgin Islands, has a considerable pirate history, which has left it’s legacy, at least in terms of the names of some of its islands and cays.

For example, think of the four islands containing the name Thatch, Thatch Cay, Great Thatch and Little Thatch. These islands are thought to be named after the notorious pirate, Edward Teach, or better known as Blackbeard and on St. Thomas we have Blackbeard’s Castle.

Bellamy Cay, he small island in Trellis Bay on the east end of Tortola in The British Virgin Islands is named after the pirate Black Sam Bellamy.

Although Sir Francis Drake was viewed  as a heroic privateer to the English ,he was considered a vicious loathsome pirate by the Spanish. On St. Thomas there is a concrete seat overlooking a beautiful panorama of islands and cays, which is a popular tourist stop called  Drake’s Seat. Here supposedly (but doubtfully) Sir Francis Drake would sit while looking for ships to plunder.

On the south side of the channel between Tortola and several smaller islands, named fter the aforementioned, Sir Francis Drake, lies a small rocky and scrubby  island named Dead Chest. This island was once used by Blackbeard to punish disobedient pirates, who he would leave marooned on this desolate cay with only a bottle of rum in the way of provisions and little chance of survival.

It was Dead Chest Island that Robert Louis Stevenson in his book  “Treasure Island, when he wrote the well known ditty :

“Fifteen Men on the dead man’s Chest,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.”

Furthermore, the inspiration for “Treasure Island” itself was the Island just to the west of Dead Chest called Norman Island , which was named after the pirate, Norman, whose pirate lair was on the island of Anegada.

Today modern day pirates still inhabit the the Virgin Islands, but in the words of Bob Dylan, instead of a sword, they “rob you with a fountain pen.”

It is interesting to note that a United States citizen living in any part of the world, be it on the remote banks of the Amazon, in the mountains of Tibet, the North Pole or, I would imagine, in a submarine hundreds of fathoms below the surface of the ocean or circling the Earth in a space station, all can cast their ballot to decide who will be the next president of the United States.

Except, that is, if that citizen happens to reside in the United States Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico or in another United States territory or possession. United States citizens living in these territories, commonwealths or possessions do, however, retain the right to be drafted into the US military.

by Gerald Singer
www.SeeStJohn.com

You had to hand it to WAPA. During the night when Cat 3 Omar slipped through the Anegada Passage instead of whacking us on St. John, where we live in Chocolate Hole, we lost a little more than one minute of electricity as evidenced by our electric range-top clock that had to be bumped ahead by one short minute the next morning.

Notwithstanding WAPA’s exemplary performance Wednesday night, Virgin Islanders have been subject to an increasing amount of power outages in the last several years. Perhaps this is due to the increased demand presented by the building boom, which has not only given us many more houses, but also larger ones with more systems requiring more electricity than ever before.

The problem of not being able to supply enough electricity to meet demand is a common one throughout the Caribbean. In Santo Domingo, where outages an almost everyday affair, anyone who can afford it has a backup system, a generator or an inverter which stores electricity in car batteries and dispenses it when the power goes out. In Santo Domingo they say that the power no se va, se viene (doesn’t go out, it comes on every once and a while).

Power or Current
What do we say when the electricity stops. Interestingly, the word we use differs culturally.

Continentals will usually use the word, power, as in: “we lost power” or “the power went out.

West Indians, on the other hand will usually use the word, current, as in: “we lost current” or “did the current come back?”

Webster’s Dictionary defines power as relating to electricity as “a source or means of supplying energy,” and current as “a flow of electrical charge.”

Although I am accustomed to the word power, thinking about it, I believe I prefer the term current better.

So on Wednesday night, we had current just about all night

Electricity Rates in the Virgin Islands
Our September WAPA bill showed a rate of about 40 cents per kilowatt hour, which consisted of a Consumer Charge of seven cents/KWH and a LEAC charge of 32 cents/KWH plus other charges such as a Customer Charge, a PILOT SUR, and a WHB SURCHG, whatever these are. (The LEAC is the charge WAPA’s customers face each month to pay for the cost of fuel.)

Comparing our Virgin Islands territorial electricity costs to electricity rates in the United States we find that our .40/KWH is quite high, especially considering our proximity to the Hess refinery on St. Croix.

Within the contiguous 48 states, June 2008 prices ranged from about a little less than eight cents/KWH in Idaho to a high of 19 cents/KWH in Connecticut. Alaskans paid 16 cents/KWH and in Hawaii the rate was 32 cents/KWH.

In short, we on St. John and in the rest of the USVI pay a lot more than other Americans for electricity and for just about everything else, for that matter.

by Gerald Singer www.SeeStJohn.com

Arriving from St. John at the Charlotte Amalie waterfront on the downtown ferry yesterday, I had an attack of nostalgia, remembering the town as it was when I first arrived.

Charlotte Amalie had real soul back then. Trader Dan’s, billed as the only saloon in the Caribbean, was the focal point and meeting place for American expats, local hustlers, pirates and serious drinkers. The New York Times had referred to St. Thomas “a sunny place for shady people,” and nowhere was that more obvious than in Trader Dans.

Around the corner was Up Chucks, guest house, frequented by artists and hippies and dropouts and rock stars like Janice Joplin and the Mommas and the Poppas. Up Chucks’ owner, Chuck, was one of a group of Miami boys who made St. Thomas their home away from home and rumored to have connections with the infamous “Murph the Surf.”

The Crazy Cow served food all day and all night and you could dance until dawn at Le Club down the strand.

Along the waterfront, colorful native sloops lay tied to the town bulkhead, bringing and sending cargo to the Leeward Islands to the east and Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo to the west. Other boats brought fish and fruit and ground provisions.

Kiosks were set up all along the sidewalk, selling coconuts, fresh fruits and vegetables and locally caught seafood. Domino games and West Indian Checkers were played in the shade of the kiosks. People bargained and talked and argued in a polyglot of languages, different varieties of West Indian English, Creole, Patois, Spanish and Popumento and the fragrances of perfumes, oils, fruits, fish changed constantly with the breeze coming in from the sea.

Back Street and Main Street were rife with local restaurants and popular night clubs with live music ranging from jazz to calypso, to rock and roll.

The town beach was Morningstar Beach, which had a gay area, a hippie area and a tourist area. On Sundays skydivers with brilliantly-colored parachutes decorated the skies and drifted down to land on the beach (sometimes).

Outside of town was “country.” That was it, “country.” No K Mart, no Cost’s U Less, no Pricemart or Tutu or Four Winds, just country. St. Thomas Dairy had real cows back, which you could see wandering through the grassy valleys.

The East End was dedicated to fishing centered around the Johnny Harms Marina,a sport fisherman’s Mecca.

In short, St. Thomas was a very cool place to be. Don’t get me wrong. It still has charm, but I preferred the island in “the good ol’ days.”

by Gerald Singer www.SeeStJohn.com

Many tourists take advantage of the significant savings on alcoholic beverages purchased in the Virgin Islands. But now this perk to St. Thomas travel is being undermined by the airlines and here’s how:

If you are flying back to the United States from the US Virgin Islands, you are allowed to bring 5 bottles (one liter) of liquor duty free or six bottles, if one of them is produced locally in The Virgin islands. It’s quite a saving as tax amounts for a great portion of the price of liquor bought in the United States.

But, consider this: Wines and liquors are liquids and, under new homeland security guidelines, cannot by carried onboard - they must be checked in.

Checked in items, however, now incur a fee, which means that if you had no checked in luggage at all, your package of liquor would be charged $15.

If you do have a bag already checked in, that box of duty free beverages will be charged $25 as your second bag.

If you already have two bags to be checked in, you might want to consider flushing the booze down the toilet or passing it out free to whoever wants it, because as your third bag, it will be charged $100.

And if by some chance you already have five bags checked, there will be $200 charge for you reduced-priced liquor.

High Prices and Cut Backs

In case you haven’t noticed, the price of airline tickets is on the rise. Cheap tickets and special deals are almost a thing of the past. And travel isn’t as much fun as it used to be, to say the least. You need to get to the airport two hours before the flight, be humiliated at security checkpoints, squeeze into smaller seats and pay extra for everything from sandwiches to water.

The high-priced airline seats will also be getting harder to find at all. For example, American Airlines is cutting back Virgin Islands flights.

The twice daily direct flights between Miami and St. Thomas has been cutback to once a day.

The daily direct flight between St. Thomas and JFK in New York is now once a week

American Eagle flights between St. Thomas and San Juan have been cut back from eight a day to three a day and between St. Croix and San Juan the 576 available seats will decrease to only 216.