DON'T SAIL HERE they said | Boatlife of the rich and famous | Sailing Florence - Ep.154

Sailing from Antigua and Barbuda to the British Virgin Islands, we were past the expensive luxury island of St Barts. Despite its reputation for an uncomfortable anchorage and high prices, we decided to pause for a night and check out the lifestyle of the rich and famous. From low-flying planes and luxury super yachts, to crystal clear waters and uninhabited island anchorages, St Barts has something for everyone and it certainly surprised us. So given that this island is famous for being expensive and exclusive, the question is, is it possible to sail here and enjoy yourself on a budget? We are Amy and Matt. We've spent the last six and a half years sailing our 37-foot sailboat Florence around the world. In that time, we have crossed four oceans and over 46,000 miles have passed under our keel. Now we have made it back to the Caribbean, we will explore these famous islands before we recross the North Atlantic Ocean to return to where we began this voyage. We're sailing from Barbuda to the British Virgin Islands and after the last few passages we've had in the Caribbean which have been either upwind or close reaching in bouncy condition with squalls, today has been an absolutely beautiful day with some beautiful downwind sailing for a change, which has really reinvigorated me for ocean sailing. But the beauty about sailing distances in the Caribbean is there's lots of islands that you can stop off on. So although it's 170 miles from Barbuda to the British Virgin Islands, we've actually got some islands on the way. So we're about to stop in the island of St Bart's. It's been a 65-mile sail today, so just about what we can do in daylight hours and then we should be able to stop, have a rest, have a look around the island and then make our way on to the British Virgin Islands. Okay, just bear up, then we'll ease asheave and... Arriving at the island of St Bart's, we dropped the spinnaker and sailed around the southern point into the anchorage. To find space in this crowded anchorage, we had to thread our way through the supions. It had taken us all day to sail the 65 miles from Barbuda, meaning that the harbour office was shut by the time we arrived. It was nice to be able to relax at anchor instead of sailing on through the night to the British Virgin Islands. Right, time to go ashore and pretend to be rich and famous. So St Bart's is known as the playground of the rich and famous and we thought when we were in Antigua there were a lot of super yachts, but here there are so many massive super yachts. Clearly this is where everybody comes to. Most of these boats have got more than one tender, they've got a massive rib and then more next to them they've got another tender, which is... the tenders are bigger than Florence's. Yeah, the average size of yacht here is indicated by the form when you check in because there is a tick box to indicate whether or not you have a helicopter on board. We've never actually seen this many super yachts in one place from anywhere that we've been around the world. Even in places like Tahiti where there were huge super yachts, there were definitely not this many. We've just come up the hill and from here you can see all the super yachts in the harbour, but that isn't all the super yachts that are here. There's actually a whole load more bigger ones out at anchor behind where Florence is. What do you do when you've docked your super yacht? Ah yes, shopping. Most visitors come to the island to shop as it's duty free, but the brand names and items offered for sale are definitely at the super yacht end of the scale rather than the Florence end. A quick scout around the shops soon told us that we would have to find different ways to entertain ourselves here. Once you've shopped you can relax on the beach and order fancy cocktails from the bar, but without a few designer shopping bags propped against our sun lounger, we didn't fit in here either, so we drifted away to find sanctuary in a quieter part of the capital. We found loads of these red footed tortoises all over the Caribbean islands, a bit different in size to the massive tortoise Jonathan which we met in St Helena. It's the baby one and it turns out they absolutely love banana skins. Venturing away from the capital of Gustavier, we went looking for one of the main attractions on any tourist itinerary when visiting St Barthes, an attraction that would make us wish that we too had a shell to duck and hide in. We've come up to the famous roundabout where the aeroplanes come in over the hill and then they have to land just down the other side, but they go right over your head! Constantly planes coming in over this roundabout, but the very first one I stood just underneath where they land and I actually chickened out. I had to run out of the way because I thought I was going to get hit by one of the wheels. It was quite low and it was very close. Whoa, this is not looking good, it's really low! I think I'm going to have to duck out of the way. We eventually worked out why the pilots were coming in so low and seemingly only wanting to use the first half of the runway to land. After landing, most of them would have to do a u-turn and taxi back up the runway to the terminal, but if they nailed the approach low enough and touched down right at the start of the runway, sometimes they could stop in time to simply turn right into the terminal instead of having to taxi back up the runway first. This was clearly the goal and the reason for nearly ripping their wheels off on passing traffic and tourists at the top of the hill. Before we came here, we looked at the reviews of the Anchorage and they were terrible. They said that it's really rolly, not protected at all, and you've got lots of superyacht tenders buzzing back and forth, creating loads of wake, so you'll be bouncing around all over the place, and also that it was really expensive, but we've actually not found it to be too bad for the couple of nights we've been here. We've managed, we've been lucky, we found a gap within the mooring field that's a bit closer into the shore, so we've got a little bit more protection. The boats are out the back of the Anchorage have been rolling around all over the place, but here it's not been too bad, and also it's not actually that expensive. We've paid €36.80 for what will be three nights before we go, which, although that's a lot of money to just be at anchor with no facilities, it's a lot cheaper than we thought it was going to be, given that it's such a high cost island. Although we have to pay to anchor here, checking in and checking out is free, and often in other islands you have to pay a fee for checking in and checking out, so it kind of all works out. But St Barts is not all about superyachts and shopping. There are some quieter bays further north that are not accessible by road, so we took Florence around to have a look. We've moved just four miles up the coast from the main port in Gustavia round here to Columbia Bay, and the slow sail that we had to get here had us winding through all of the superyachts, which made it for quite an interesting sail. It's an absolutely gorgeous bay here, and you can actually only get here by boat or by a 30-minute walk from the nearest road to get in here, so it's much quieter than it is around the corner. There's still quite a number of boats here, but plenty of space for us to drop the anchor. I've actually been really surprised at how much I've enjoyed our time in St Barts. We were told that it's really expensive, it's busy and uncomfortable, but I guess for us, most of the places that we go in the Caribbean, it's too expensive for us to eat ashore anyway, so it hasn't really actually been that different, and there's been loads of interest in the time that we've been here, so I think if it wasn't for the fact that we were having to pay to anchor, then we'd probably stay here a little bit longer. The anchorages aren't very comfortable here, but it is really easy to get ashore, and there's lots to see, despite the fact that it's just a small island, so I would definitely recommend a short stop here, even if you are on a budget like us. So we're moving on again today, but I can actually see our next destination. It's this island behind me, which is less than three miles away, and it's this horseshoe-shaped island, which is a nature reserve, and then there's supposed to be a really nice bay in the middle of it, so looking forward to going in and seeing what it's like there. So we've come just a few miles away from the main island of St Barth, to this beautiful anchorage, this little horseshoe anchorage, on an uninhabited island, and we're surrounded by this amazing scenery, just like craggy peaks and beautiful turquoise water. There's turtles popping up around us, it's crystal clear, we can see the bottom, but it's really tempting to try and get to the top of one of these peaks around us, so we're not sure if there's any paths ashore that are labelling us to get to the top, but we're going to head ashore, and we're going to try and climb to the top of this one. Turns out there is a path of sorts, apparently you can do all the peaks, which is quite tempting. Wow, some beautiful views from up here, you can see St Barth in the background. It's actually easier to get up here than we thought, there are actually a few tracks, just got to do a bit of scrambling to get up to the peaks, and I think we'll go and try some of the other peaks as well. Absolutely beautiful weather this afternoon as well, forecast is to drop off and go really light winds, so we're going to wait here for a little while until the wind picks up, and then it'll be good for us to sail onto the BVI's hopefully. Sitting up on the cliff here and watching the tropic birds flying below us, and all of the waves crashing into the rocks, is reminding me of St Helena Island that was in the middle of the South Atlantic. Spectacularly beautiful, but very rocky and barren like St Helena was on the outside. It's so dry here that it's actually just struck me that Guadeloupe, which was a few islands ago, is probably the last island that we're going to see that's got rainforest on it. All of the islands further north are dry like this, and it's kind of sad because it's us heading our way out of the tropics. It's been a beautiful pit stop here in St Bath, so beautiful we've actually stayed a couple of days longer than we planned to, but time has come we need to start making tracks across towards the BVI. It's beautiful weather at the moment which has been brilliant for exploring here, but unfortunately means it's going to be pretty slow sailing across the BVI. We're only forecast to have about 11 or 12 knots of wind, and it's 97 miles, so that's not something that we can do during daylight hours on Florence, so for the first time in quite a while we're going to be sailing overnight to get there. Sailing downwind in light winds means using Florence's biggest sail, the spinnaker. Our spinnaker is an asymmetric sail which is normally flown with the tack attached to the bow, but here we need to sail a lower angle to the wind to get to the British Virgin Islands, so we're going to transfer the tack to the spinnaker pole, which enables us to sail with the wind further out. The spinnaker allows us to sail in these light wind conditions, without it we'd have to resort to the engine to make any reasonable progress. We've got a beautiful sunrise coming up behind Florence, and in front of us we can see the Virgin Gorda just behind the spinnaker, which is where we're going to go and check into the British Virgin Islands. Beautifully calm this morning, it's been a beautiful calm sail all the way to be honest, almost a little bit too light through the night, got a little bit drifty at times but so different to what we had bashing up when we were going sailing, almost sailing to windward up from the southern Caribbean up the chain, but now we're bearing off across the top and going more west with much easier sailing. At the moment we've still got enough breeze to get there. Forecast is for this wind to stop around midday, and I'm just hoping we'll just about manage to get there before that happens, and we can sail all the way. Consistent light winds from the same direction mean that there is little to do on board Florence, other than keep a lookout and enjoy the ride. Calm flat waters like this are a joy to sail on, but they're also ideal for spotting whales. Wow that's so cool, it was just looking ahead to trim the spinnaker, and just saw on the horizon dead in front of us the water spouts from whales blowing, and it's a group of at least four humpback whales, and one of them rolled over and slapped a fin, there were plenty of tails coming out, that was awesome to see. We haven't seen anywhere near as many whales as we expected to see sailing around the world, we know we've seen a few but it's actually a rare sight, and it's so special to see such big mammals in the ocean like that, that was really cool. A lot of the time we've passed through areas which are known for seeing lots of whales, like the humpbacks in Tonga and up the coast of Australia, but we've been there just at the wrong time of year to see the whales, because we've been following the seasons for the winds and to avoid cyclones. We're just sailing past the famous baths, or as Matt would say the baths, we have a bit of a northern-southern divide on Florence as to the proper name of this place, but it is one of the most famous places in the BVI, but we are just going to have to pass through in order to check in in Simonstown. Spanish Town. Oh sorry, Spanish Town, we have a bit of a dispute about that name too. We've got no idea where we're going. Checking in at Spanish Town was quick and easy at the main ferry dock. It cost us US$42 to check both us and Florence into the British Virgin Islands, and we were given permission to stay for one month with a further $13.75 to pay when we leave as a departure tax. We had a quick wander around the town to stretch our legs, and then carried on a couple of miles further up the island to find somewhere calm and quiet to catch up on our sleep after the overnight sail. Next time, we have a change of pace. With patrons visiting us for a week of cruising in company, we set out to explore the British Virgin Islands at charter holiday speed. We had been warned that the BVI would be expensive and so crowded that we would struggle to find space to anchor. Subscribe to catch the next episode where we find out if that is true. If you'd like to find out more about behind the scenes on Florence, track our progress across the oceans in real time, find out where we are right now, or ask us pretty much anything, then please head over to our Patreon site and join the crew. We would like to thank everyone who supports us to make these videos possible, and a special thank you to our star patrons.