After 25 years running the Catered To villa management company, owner Eileen Duffy has a succession plan in place. Tyler Andersen, who moved to St. John last year from Los Angeles with wife, and new St. John Sun Times publisher Eloise, is the heir apparent to the business, through what they term a buy in plan. (Tyler came on board as general manager last year.) Although neither would say how long the transition will take, both say customers and villa owners won’t notice a difference. And Eileen’s not going anywhere right away anyway. (Not counting plans for a really long vacation.) Read our quick Q&A with Eileen and Tyler here.
Below: Eileen, Chris, Eloise and Tyler in a rare moment of them all having nothing to do for one minute at the exact same time. (You have a better chance of photographing Big Foot than catching the four of them all at once.)
The brand new St. John Waterfront Bistro is now open for lunch. Everybody is raving about how beautiful it is and how nice it is to have a high-end restaurant on the beach, but we haven’t heard much about the food. Admittedly, we haven’t been much closer than this picture since the place opened. We walk by and feel underdressed.
Anyway, lunch is now served every day from 11 am to 2 pm.
We can at least look at the menu in our backwards ball caps. Lunch menu ranges from a $7 French onion soup to an $18 grilled yellowfin tuna salad.
Have you eaten there yet? By all means! Share your review!
This guy looks like he’s had a little too much carrot juice and rum, doesn’t he? Half inflated bunnies are scattered all over Marketplace, we guess they’re Easter decorations. Better than last week, when some of them were hung from trees in the back lot from ropes, looking not drunk but, well, hung. The bunnies can best be described as …disturbing.
We don’t think we’ll write about the old metal boat for awhile. It’s gone legal. Our folk hero, Michael now has a lawyer, and still contends he’s the rightful owner. Another person has the boat and contends it’s his. And that’s where it ended up going on that trailer. (Spy photo of boat at undisclosed location.) Next chapter may be court. Beings possession is nine-tenths of the law, Michael may have an uphill battle in his fight for the boat. It’s all about a piece of paper that says “it’s mine” right now, and both sides say they have one. If we can get Party Two to talk to us, we’ll post an update. There are always two sides to a story. Sometimes more on St. John.
Ackley Communications, which runs the Surf VI Internet service, has sold it to St. Croix’s Broadband VI. Ackley, which also owns Pirate Radio, says the deal will mean faster connections for its customers and redundant backup for service. Gordon Ackley joins Broadband VI as its “chief technical officer.”
Meantime, East End artist Terry McKoy, aka Sloop Jones, has started moonlighting as the St. John distributor of Dish TV and Hughesnet Internet service. “The service is excellent, but pointing the dish is a bit tedious. You have to hit a sweet spot 26,000 miles away, says Terry.
We keep suggesting he should paint the dishes, Sloop Jones-style. (He thinks it would interfere with reception.) Oh! There’s a Webcam at the Sloop Jones studio now. Check it out here.
Fun how fast you can become part of it all on St. John. The folks who moved themselves and a Unimog to the island just a few months ago, helped lead Saturday’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade through Cruz Bay. Big hit. And usvi-on-line.com forumites might recognize a face or two. (Nice Sloop, Rick!)
While Cruz Bay paraded around in shamrocks and Lucky Charms, Coral Bay played host to another Flotilla benefit for the Guy Benjamin School Saturday. Something to put on your to-do list for next year. The event is sponsored by the Coral Bay Yacht Club and sailboats, big and little, take anybody who has sea legs sailing to Miss Vie’s beach for lunch and then back. How much raised this year? Counting the till soon come. Coral Bay time.
Longtime Cruz Bay restaurant Sosa’s is closed. The West Indian restaurant, run for years by a Dominican Republic clan, was well-known for inexpensive and what fans called very tasty dishes like salt fish and goat stew, and for its late night salsa music blaring through Cruz Bay. Nobody can tell us why it closed. (We hear it was the Health Department that shut it down.)
Here’s something we were just told. Sosa’s landlord… is Lindy. Lindy, the Cruz Bay fixture a lot of people think is just a friendly, skinny homeless guy, is a Donald Trump of real estate it turns out. (We’re also told he has a loving family that cares very well for his affairs.) Don’t judge a book by its cover. ESPECIALLY on St. John.
Note: We have been admonished before about writing about some of the Cruz Bay characters, and are reminded that we should always say they are, for the most part, loved, taken care of and left to be who they are. We got no problem with that. (Unless they spit on us.)
We chose this reader submission because it didn’t sound like it would work. How can you bread shrimp, and then grill them? Turns out it turned out! Liamsaunt’s breaded, grilled lemon garlic shrimp, below…
If you’re a parent, you know private school ain’t cheap, but more than half of the students that attend St. John’s only K-through-12 school, the Gifft Hill School, get some kind of financial assistance to go there. And that financial assistance is raised once a year at the Pine Peace Auction. (Long story about the name, which goes back to the merger of the elementary Pine Peace School and the 7-12 Coral Bay School several years ago, and it would be much easier to explain this if supporters just changed the name to the Gifft Hill School Auction but maybe next year.)
This year’s auction is Saturday, but you DO NOT HAVE TO BE ON THE ISLAND to bid on some stuff. There’s a live auction, AND a silent auction. The live auction includes lots of services, dining and travel packages, including resorts and even a few villas on St. John. The silent auction’s heavy on artwork and jewelry, a couple of vacation packages, an Ocean Runner package and even a wedding and a Sony Playstation 3.
Last year’s Pine Peace Auction raised a whopping $155,000, a big sum for a little island. It’ll be fun to see what the big winners are this year (not counting the kids of course.)
(Pictured above, the St. John version of a Rainbow Coalition.)
For a boat that doesn’t run, that old metal boat has sure traveled far in the last 24 hours. At last report, it was spotted on a trailer behind a truck on the road toward Coral Bay. No news on where it ended up. We wouldn’t count Michael out of the picture just yet though.
Plans for the old metal boat hit a snag this morning. DPNR, which let that boat sit there for months without trying to remove it, decided Tuesday was the day it had to go. And Michael, the guy who says the boat is now his, was on St. Thomas buying bottom paint when the dozer showed up.
The good news is we’re told Michael finished patching all the holes in the hull yesterday, so it’s floating. The bad news is it was towed to Cruz Bay Creek, and where DPNR is not likely to just give it up without some kind of fuss.
To complicate things further, we’re told there is at least one other person claming ownership of the boat now. Stay tuned for an update.
Michael Knoepfel (hamming it up here) is the new and proud owner of that old metal boat. And all it took was some patience, and $110 worth of advertising. The 38 year old took advantage of abandoned vessel rules, ran an ad in the newspaper seeking its owner for a month, took proof to DPNR and got the boat signed over to him.
(Virgin Islands Daily News classifieds: “Would the owner of the MK1 motor vessel, VI1332TB washed ashore and abandoned in Cruz Bay please call 777-3100.” )
Now that Michael‘s boat has come in, he has to work on getting it out. “I’ll see if I can get the engines working, but I’m also getting a couple of outboards to mount to the back platform,” he says. “This is going to be my own boat to have fun with.” And that might include snorkel tours or as a fishing boat.
Or something more patriotic.
“If Homeland Security wants to give me a grant to restore it, I’ll gladly give them a set of keys so they can use it in a national emergency.”
This is a paid ad, but the comments below are our own.
One pool not enough for you? How about two. Just looking at all that beautiful water not enough for you? How about water access right from the property. And after you’ve kayaked across Hart Bay and back, dry off and play some billiards in the game room. This is a pretty fabulous villa.
MISTRAL: 5 Bedrooms, Two pools, Waterfront. $7,995,000.
East coast continentals have sprung forward and are once again in sync with the clocks on St. John. Eastern Daylight Saving Time equals Atlantic Standard Time. So for the next six months everybody’s happy hour starts at the same time. Unless you’re in Coral Bay where time is a dirty word.
If this family’s reaction is any indication, Cruz Bay’s new convenience store is a hit. First Stop just opened for business. If you’d find it at 7-Eleven, you’ll probably find it here. Check it out. First Stop is next door to the Fish Trap restaurant.
(Look at that boy! Like Amy Winehouse on her first day out of Skittles rehab!)
