Our last Charter of the Caribbean Season was for 6 guests, who would be with us 4 nights then four guests would leave, and the two primaries would stay the three final nights. It was a charter filled with antics, laughs and adventures, as usual.
We dropped off the first set of departing guests at Trellis Bay and Dirk walked them right to the airport at Beef Island. The last two charter guests departed April 30th, 3 nights later, from the beautiful Scrub Island resort. We accompanied them on the ferry from Scrub Island to Trellis Bay as we had provisioning to do for the ingredients needed for Season 2 of filming on Cooking with Yacht Chef Sandy.
After dropping the guests and provisioning (thanks for the truck, Davide!) We and decided to take the night off before heading out to St Thomas the following morning. That evening, we met up with our friends Vince and Judy at the hot tub on Scrub Island and headed up to Chef Davide’s place where we collectively made a meal of Mahi Mahi Picatta, pasta and a green that I can not recall at the moment.
It was a fun night and the next morning, we headed back to St Thomas, finished provisioning for the show, the film crew landed and we did some preliminary setup. That night we had Tap and Still burgers for dinner and headed to bed.
I woke up the next morning super early to prep, prep, prep! Filming the show is fun but a TON of work and extremely tiring. Especially given the fact that I had JUST dropped charter guests off and was rolling right into relocating to St Thomas, provisioning and filming. We filmed for 4 days, 3 episodes per day. On Season 1, we did 4 episodes per day. I have no idea how I pulled that off.
Filming on location here aboard Le Rêve was easier in some ways and more difficult in others. One slight difficulty was that I needed a countertop that would allow me to face the cameras directly for filming, but my countertops in the galley run the length of the boat. I needed a countertop running across. Dirk and I went to Home Depot and found some shelving that was just perfect and we were able to place it right across the galley on top of the existing counters. The problem was that it completely boxed me in. Then there were two cameras set up right behind the new countertop, so when I needed to get out of the galley for whatever reason, I had to crawl under everything. That was a workout doing that crawl many times each day. But I had a really short commute and all of my ingredients were at my fingertips, and you can’t beat that!
