After a few days in Culebra, we set off south to St Croix, (pronounced by the Americans as San Croy!) - what an uncultured lot they are!  This island, although part of the three island group that is the US Virgin Islands, along with St John and St Thomas, is about 50 miles further south, and well off the beaten track of the charters boats crowding the US and British Virgin Islands.  The tourist clientele is part American and also part Danish, as until 1985 when the US bought the 3 Virgin Islands for the bargain price of $20m, St Croix belonged to the Danes.  

There is a lot of Danish influence particularly in the architecture around the main town of Christiansted, the walls of the big public buildings on the waterfront are built in Danish yellow brick and, whilst most of the buildings retain the heavy duty shutters over the windows as original features  - these days, rather than being secured by a hefty wooden plank across the closed shutters, there are large heavy duty locks! 

Fort Christiansvaern, completed in 1749, was the first public building erected by the Danes following their purchase of the island from the French in 1733.  Also, in the same area there is the Old Customs House, now used as an office block, and the Old Scale House, previously used to weigh barrels of rum and sugar.

Interestingly enough, although the fort is well armed with several canon, none have ever been fired in anger.  Also, all the canon face out to sea and the interior side of the Fort remains unarmed - the reason for this was that the only perceived 'land side' threat in those days was a potential slave uprising.

 The 'Yachtless' Club of Christiansted 

 Fort Christianvaern

Canon

 The Old Customs House

 Scales for weighing rum and suger

Frederiksted is the second 'city' of St Croix.  This is on the South West Coast, and is home to the cruise dock.  Fortunately, there were no cruise boats at the dock at during our stay in St Croix.  The downside of this, however, is that when we went to Frederiksted, the town was very quiet and half closed, some businesses only open on cruise ship days.  

 The Supreme Court of St Croix - not quite so intimidating?

 The Promenade at Frederiksted

Whilst we were here, John decided to look at our engine fuel filter - the glass was looking very dirty and he was concerned that we might have got some dirty fuel, it seemed unlikely as the last place we fuelled up was Puerto Rico, and they have a steady stream of boats using the pumps, but you never know.  Anyway, on Wednesday afternoon he got to work on it, slowly taking it all apart, making sure to get photos so he knew how it all went back together.  I did my usual task in this situation, which is to sit in the bathroom giving moral support, handing over tools and mopping his brow, etc.  It was all going really well until the last stage, putting the lid back on.  It didn't seem to be fitting well, and the upshot of John trying to make it fit well was that one of the the butterfly screws snapped!  I had left my position at this stage and was sought out by a very concerned John telling me that the engine was now completely out of action!  No engine meant that we couldn't leave the anchorage if necessary, the channel is very tight to sail, also we would struggle to get the anchor up anyway without the engine to back up the windlass motor - we were really stuck!  A search of the bosuns screws etc kit turned up nothing, so next morning we arrived at the car hire place at 8am ready to go to the chandlers at the other end of the island to get replacement screws.  This turned out to be the easy bit, taking about a hour in total, what took the time was the trip practically round the whole island to get some diesel in a can to pour through the filter to prime it.  Although there are loads of gas stations, gas (petrol) is all they sell, most don't have a diesel pump.  About 2 hours later we arrived back with the screws and the diesel, put the whole lot back together and we had a working engine again - phew!  Poor John had spent a very sleepless night worrying about everything that could possibly go wrong, but all was OK in the end.