After snorkeling at the great Diamond Reef, we moved on to Little Jost Van Dyke to stay overnight. It was a pretty trip over to LJVD island.

Here is a sailboat sailing (although still raising the boom sail). Joran explained which directions the wind needed to be blowing to use our sail. Normally, we used power instead of sailing. But when the water got too choppy, he would raise the sail for stability.

We made it – and here is our view once anchored.

There was a pretty little island (more like a bump out of a sandbar) out here that we didn’t anchor next to. The water and sand looked so pretty! In the end, a few boats anchored around it. We were more into the bay.

For dinner, Casey made an interesting stew with grouper on top. It was delicious!

At night, many boats turned on their colorful “water lights”. We sometimes did that, too. Here is what it looks like. It does look neat when you see a lot of different colors out on the water.

The next morning, we had a classic “American” breakfast. Of course, it’s jazzed up with avocado and a fruit. We also had iced mocha coffee drinks for breakfast. It was just too hot to drink hot coffee!

Little Jost Van Dyke was not a great place to snorkel. We didn’t even take very many pictures cuz there was hardly anything worth it. However, we did see this one fish that we hadn’t seen before – it’s a Mutton Snapper. They can grow quite large, up to 37″! But this one was only about 10″.

You can see the background on this picture doesn’t show anything interesting. This is what most of the area looked like.

After our morning snorkel, we moved on to Caneel Bay of St. John. This was our crossover from the British to the US Virgin Islands. So, we had to go to customs here to “enter”. First, we had lunch and then snorkeled.

This location was much more popular. There was a beach that filled up with people from the island and some of the boat folks took dinghies over to the beach. This pic was before it got crowded.

Lunch was a purple rice (who knew it came in that color!) and chicken mix with other yummies mixed in. Such a nice view for lunch!

This shows the stunning color of the water. It’s always such a pretty Caribbean blue! You can also see the mooring ball we are hooked up to here.

Everywhere we look, there is a great view! This is a view across to St. Thomas.

Finally, after lunch, we jumped in the water.

We love when we see these little Trunkfish. They are just so interesting looking.

This area was a bunch of rocks and boulders, like this picture. Not a lot of coral, but some grew here and there.

We found a pair of squid here, too!

This was SO pretty! These are Christmas Tree Worms on this coral. Each worm has two of those pretty cone shaped “trees”. The rest of the worm is embedded into the coral/rock.

This is a school of Yellowtail Parrotfish – also called Redfin Parrotfish. I believe these are juveniles. They don’t have the yellow tail yet.

We see Surgeonfish a lot, but these were some nice pics of two of them…

We’ve never seen these red sea urchins before. They are Rock-Boring Urchins. The good thing about these specific sea urchins is that they do not eat coral like the black ones do. Instead, they eat algae. They do bore holes into the rock/coral, so if there are a lot of them on live coral, they could damage it. But, overall, these aren’t the “bad” sea urchins.

On the other hand, THESE Black Spiny Sea Urchins are definitely bad for coral because they eat it. Unfortunately, the population of these black urchins is exploding and they are causing terrible damage to reefs in many places. Overall, we didn’t see a lot of these black sea urchins during our snorkels in the Virgin Islands. But here in Caneel Bay, there were too many of them.

We don’t see angelfish very often, but here are a couple of good pictures of juvenile Gray Angelfish. They look totally different as adults, when they turn gray and lose the stripes.

Sometimes we see these Squirrelfish hiding under rocks. I wonder why they are called Squirrelfish??

After snorkeling, all four of us took a short dinghy ride around to another bay, where we docked at the US customs office. It was empty, so it was very quick to pass through customs, maybe 5 minutes. Interestingly, when we passed into the British Virgin Islands, Joran (as the Captain) was able to go for all of us. He just needed our passports and that was it.

Tonight, Casey made us gnocchi for dinner! It was really great, with a meaty sauce.

I thought this sailboat looked pretty. But, boy, it’s small and it rocked back and forth a LOT, even though you can see the water was very calm. Catamarans with their two hulls are definitely more stable in the water.

This reminds me of a crazy story! There was a boat moored in front of us, not very far away. I was hanging out reading in the front of our boat when I happened to glance over to that other boat and noticed the man on the boat was wandering around NAKED (!!!!). 😮

What!?! I couldn’t believe it! He was just walking around out in the open on his boat without a care in the world. I told Joran, Casey and Jeff – but they didn’t believe me. Joran and Casey looked over and, of course, saw the naked man. Jeff was lying down reading and didn’t want to bother getting up to see a naked guy – LOL!

You know, if this man had been somewhere without a lot of other boats around – many of which were right near him and had children – then, sure, be naked. But wow, to do that with so many nearby people, especially with kids, yikes, that was not right. He never did put clothes on the entire time we were there.

Anyway, that’s the crazy story. Of course, I didn’t take a picture of that!!

The next morning, we had eggs benedict for breakfast, before heading out to new sites.