CHAPTER 17: JOST TIME

In addition to cruisers, Great Harbour attracts a daily turnover of charterers —sailors on rented boats, here for a week’s respite from the cold. We’ve done this ourselves many times. Given our passage from Bermuda, we see new reasons to think it a sensible way to spend time in the islands. What we never realized as charterers, though, was that cruisers regarded us as dangerous, irresponsible greenhorns, not fellow sailors.

On a typical day, our cruisers’ anchor watch in Great Harbour begins at 3:30 P.M. Charter boats are pouring in from Tortola and Red Hook and Charlotte Amalie. The charterers have arrived at Great Harbour, Jost Van Dyke, where they are required by the iron laws of Virgin Islands charter-boat culture to spend at least one night at Foxy’s. If you didn’t do Foxy’s, you weren’t there.

Meanwhile, we cruisers are eyeing the approaching charter fleet with deep suspicion—perhaps “fear and loathing” would be more apt. Every owner finds something to do on deck between 3:30 and 5:30 P.M. We look busy with our boats, but that’s not why we’re there. We’re there to tell the charterers to keep clear, to put out enough scope on the anchor chain, and not to leave their crappy pieces of lookalike bathtub plastic until they know the anchor is set.

The charter companies’ brochures do not feature the steely glares of illtempered cruisers. Making peace with them is not covered in the chart briefing. Nor should it be. To the cruising community, a charterer is an inferior being. Strike up a conversation with a cruiser at Foxy’s and you will learn the meaning of disrespect. In fact, the charterers will never talk about them to each other any more than they will confess their deepest anxieties and feelings of inadequacy. Because that is the role of cruisers in every harbor—to make the charterers feel like neophytes.

From the charterers’ perspective, this is ridiculously unfair. Back home, the friends and family think you’re an adventurer. You didn’t go to the Club Med and take orders from the recreation director. You’re not on a cruise ship where your most meaningful act of the day is to choose what to eat at dinner. You’re piloting a boat in strange waters, taking responsibility for your own fate, exploring on your own. That’s what we felt like when we were chartering.

Yet in every anchorage, the charterer encounters these incredibly equipped cruising boats. They are almost invisible behind the gear that makes the true cruiser—wind generators, solar panels, jerry jugs, wind vanes, fold-up bicycles, awnings, RIBs. Most of all, it’s the jerry jugs—yellow for diesel, red for gasoline, blue for water. Every cruising boat has an emergency store of these precious liquids because they actually go places where you can’t get the stuff.

As you look at these cruising vessels—sloops, yawls, cutters, ketches, schooners, even junks—wood, steel, aluminum, fiberglass, and ferrocement— there is one obvious commonality in their design. They look nothing like each other or the charter-boat fleet. They tell you what you already know but would rather suppress. This gleaming toy you are on was built for the charter trade. Its role is to pack as many pallid vacationers as possible into its confined spaces and move them maybe 15 miles on a long day, from one night’s anchorage to the next. No real cruiser would consider buying one of these things. Every last person on a cruising boat believes that in five years, this gleaming steed you’re sailing will be junk. They think less of you because you flew down and chartered it, rather than beating your brains out on the Bermuda-to-BVI run like they did. They will not speak to you in Foxy’s.

We find it impossible not to participate in this ritual of charterer dissing. It justifies our preparation and anxiety and discomfort. We’ve sailed 1,600 miles of ocean to get here. What could we have in common with these jerks who laugh too much and need three people on the bow to put out too little anchor line? So what if we were in their shoes last year. We’re cruisers now.

Charterers can now be told the truth. If cruisers haven’t perfected these vile habits elsewhere, they learn to be obnoxious to charter boats in Great Harbour, Jost Van Dyke, BVI, where the anchorage is always crowded, the holding is poor, and one night at Foxy’s is mandatory.

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