Brewers Bay

Returning from the SVI last week, we wanted to find a quieter anchorage than Honeymoon (Druif) Bay on Water Island. In recent years Honeymoon seems to have been taken over by live-aboards and is incredibly crammed full of boats, even in low season.

Our best alternatives seemed to be Brewers or Lindbergh.

When approaching from the west, you get to Brewers first, so we stuck our nose in to check it out. There was only one boat!

On the right side of the bay, as you are entering, there are a number of small moorings that seem to belong to the University, as well as a small dock. The bay itself is about 400 yards wide, has a nice calm sandy beach, and protected to the south by the runway for Cyril E King airport (STT). We had east winds, typical, and the bay was VERY calm. We were in a cat, but there was a single monohull anchored here that looked like a long-range cruiser.

The bottom is predominantly sea-grass (from the looks of it) but there are spits and patches of sand. Farther in towards shore the bottom becomes mostly sand, but this appears to be in water less than 10 feet deep. Not knowing the bay very well we opted to stay farther out.

We grabbed a spot of sand in 19 feet of water that was about 150 feet North of a small white mooring ball that probably belonged to the University. Later, a dive-boat grabbed this ball and put us in danger of swinging into them, so we moved about 100 yards farther north in around 20 feet of water, put out 125 feet of scope (50 was chain) and settled in for the night. Eddie dove in and watched Captain Woody back down on the Fortress which promptly buried itself securely in the sand. We anchored 6 times with the Fortress and it always stuck like glue. CYOA was kind enough to mark scope in 25 foot increments, taking the guesswork out of figuring out how much scope you have out.

You might think that this anchorage would be very noisy from aircraft traffic, but actually the sound from the jets was pretty mild... much milder in fact that the noise you hear at the Best Western Emerald Beach in Lindbergh Bay.

This bay looks as though it would hold perhaps 4-6 boats at anchor before crying uncle.

The next morning it took us about 30 minutes to motor to Crown Bay to top off the fuel and perhaps another 10 minutes to get back to CYOA. Crown-Bay is easy-peasy for taking on fuel. Call them on VHF 16 when you arrive and when you pop into the entrance the fuel dock is immediately on the right. Rig fenders to starboard.

here's a little chartlet from the iPhone showing our anchoring spots. We had 4 different chartplotting GPS's with us (Raytheon, two Garmins, and my iPhone), and this is a screen snap from the iPhone. It appeared to be every bit as accurate as the Garmin GPSMap 76CSX and the on-board Raytheon chartplotter.

I wish I could show you a picture of the anchorage during the Texas Society Chili Cook-Off (Sunday, August 18th this year!)-they get tons of boats in there.

Was something wrong with your primary anchor, which is all chain, or your windlass that caused you to deploy your secondary, which is rope and chain?

Primary was fine. I had a bit of operator error on my part, forgetting that you have to rev up the starboard engine before the charging circuit kicked in, which powered the windlass. We had just had the boat two years ago, and so we blew off the boat briefing... where they actually demo raising and lowering the anchor. Had I not blown off the briefing I would have refreshed my memory about the power circuit. Thinking our windlass was not working we just used the fortress instead. Settled weather, eight strong adults aboard to handle the fortress, easy enough. We dove it every time it was set and backed down on it every time. No harm no fowl.

Brewers is one of my favorite beaches on STT. During the day there is very little traffic. It's a little rocky but on cruise ship days it's where we go for peace and quiet.

The traffic pattern for the airport keeps the planes to the south of the runway (if they're not directly lined up with it). That's why it is quieter in Brewers Bay than in Lindbergh Bay.