Passage to St Croix - Immigration Management!
Is it more complex with a mixed nationality crew?
We recently sailed Artemis from Tortola to St Croix. There are a few specifics around the process of clearing into and out of the USVI in St Croix and the BVI that were new to me, so worth sharing.
Christiansted is 34nm, bearing 190, from the south west tip of Norman Island - or thereabouts. We had spent the night prior to departure in the Bight at Norman Island having ‘cleared out’ of the BVI that afternoon. Once you have departure clearance you have 24 hours to leave, so positioning for an early start is worth it.
Clearing out of the BVI requires you to complete a vessel and crew profile on sailclear.com, and then file a notice of intended departure. Then you visit the Customs and Immigration office in person; we used the one at the ferry terminal in Road Town. The process was painless; we filed the customs forms, paid a small fee at the cashier, and then presented passports for all crew at Immigration. Only one member of the crew needed to attend the office in person.
The weather for the sail south was decent. 18, gusting 22 knots out of the east giving us a beam reach all the way. We averaged around 8 knots, and arrived at the channel buoys for Christiansted around 130pm that afternoon.
To document our arrival in the USVI we used the CBP ROAM app. Our motley crew of US citizens & Green Card holders, and UK passport holders with either a B2 Visa or ESTAs represented a challenge for the process! The key for the ESTA folks was that they had already arrived in the US mainland a few days earlier - so we weren’t showing up to the US for the first time in St Croix. This would have been more challenging, and may have required a visit to the CBP office at the airport, but, as it was we got an instruction on the app to call the reviewing officer for a discussion about our various statuses. This was quickly handled while still offshore and we received clearance to enter the US before we even dropped the hook.
Departing the USVI a day or so later required a call to immigration - we called the same officer we had spoken to on arrival. If all crew are US Citizens then I understand you just leave without ‘checkout’ but given our previously mentioned mix we had a small process that meant filing a couple of CBP forms by email - and then we were quickly given clearance to leave.
Passage north was uneventful. Slightly lighter winds and seas than on the outbound journey, and all went well and we were ready to clear into the BVI at the Immigration/Customs office in Sopers’ Hole by early afternoon.
As was the case on departure, the BVI process is far from ‘electronic’ like CBP ROAM in the USVI. You use sailclear.com again, this time filing a notice of intended arrival, and then there are several office windows in the Customs shed to visit before the task is complete. They are all in the same building, but separate visits to the Customs window, the Port Captain/Cashier and the Immigration office are all needed before you are cleared in. Again, just one member of the team covers the whole crew.
With all that done, we took the dinghy across the harbor to Pussers’ bar on the dock in West End for a Painkiller… well, several Painkillers. Much needed!
