2010 Love City Triathlon

Each year in early September a group of individuals somehow have the energy to swim a 1/2 mile, bike 14 miles and run 4 miles around this island, all in one day. The individual awards are made of hand-blown glass made right here at Maho Bay Camps. Love City Triathlon website

Beach Cleaning

7 of us started the day off right today, by picking up trash at Big Maho beach! The massive rains earlier in the month, along with the random usual trash gave us more than enough work for the hour or so we spent meandering down the beach. Most interesting find: a Lionfish marker, which means that someone tagged the Lionfish at Big Maho and before the National Park could come get the little bugger the current or waves washed the marker ashore and onto the beach. This also means I know what I'll be doing after work this afternoon........snorkeling Big Maho and finding that Lionfish! Most annoying find: lots of rusty old scrap metal. Once again I thank the 7 volunteers that helped walk the beach and collect those 4 bags of trash this morning!

Goodbye's and Hello's

This season we will be saying goodbye to some old things, and hello to some new things around camp. In our restaurant you will notice that we have a new selection of juice from the Nantucket Nectar http://www.nantucketnectars.com/ line that comes in glass bottles that we can recycle here on property through our Glass Blowing Studio. We are replacing the previous line we carried which was in plastic bottles. Along the same lines, we have removed 20oz Coke & other soda bottles from our store. Last season alone we sold 9,360 bottles of 20oz sodas! If we can get most of those converted to aluminum & glass we can recycle and reuse whatever we bring to Maho, since St. John does not have any recycling available on the island. However, we are able to recycle the aluminum soda cans on St. Thomas when we make trips to Home Depot and for other supplies, and as mentioned previously we crush and reuse clear glass for our Glass Studio (more details in a later post!). For the past few years we haven’t carried a 16-20oz bottled waters in our store for the same reason we are removing 20oz sodas, but we have found a new company that uses a bottle made completely from plants and is not petroleum based, http://renewal-water.com/ . They also use spring water instead of filtered city water like some companies. We hope to be able to have it in stock in just a few weeks.

We are working on providing more natural and organic products in our store, which proves a bit difficult at times on the island. If there is not already a distributorship set up with a wholesaler then it is very difficult to get items we would like to carry such as Tom’s of Maine and Dr. Brommer’s soaps. We hope you enjoy some of our new selections this year, but more on that later.

St. John Historical Society

On Tuesday, November 9th the St. John Historical Society will kick off the first meeting of the season at the Bethany Moravian Church Hall at 7 PM with a presentation by Magda Smith entitled "When I am Dust Upon The Wind" - more information about meeting, activities and special events like their event celebrating the legacy of Project Tektite on Nov. 6th at http://www.stjohnhistoricalsociety.org

pictured - Beehive Cove-Great Lameshur Bay, site of Tektite

skylights

The views from the previous post about F-Pavilion are perfect, just as long as you don't look up!



As many of you probably know, St. John was introduced to a Hurricane named Earl this past September. While generally speaking the damage to St. John and Maho Bay was as good as we could hope for, there was still plenty of small annoying damage done to the Camps. A good example of this was our roof on F-Pavilion and our main dining area pavilion. While the dining area pavilion is closed the good news is that new roof has been ordered and shipped for both pavilions, and will be ready for business as usual this season. Even better news is that we only needed to purchase portions of new roof for each pavilion, not entirely new roofs. If you look really carefully at the pictures you can see a support wire running from the roof to the floor - used during high winds to secure the roof so that the roof and whole structure doesn't end up at Little Maho Beach! If you look even closer you'll also notice something on the tables, our Art Center has been busy making lots and lots of paper in this beautiful sunny weather, and the tables under the damaged roof bring plenty of sun to dry each piece of paper!

We're all looking forward to enjoying those beautiful sunsets in our main dining pavilion again.

DOT Instant Credit

A note from the Resort Manager:

This week I was looking into flights for my Dad to come down and visit me. I tried a search on Travelocity to get a base line for us to see if it would even be feasible. Flying from Nashville with 1 stop came up at $578, not bad I thought. Then on the left hand side of the screen, I noticed a link that read “Flight and hotel starting at $578!”. Surely not. How is that possible? I’m a sucker for a deal and for pushing buttons that say “push me”, so I clicked only to be amazed at what I saw. For $578, the cost of the original ticket, my dad could get the same flight and 5 nights accommodations at Maho Bay Camps.

Its too good to be true. How could this happen? A little digging and I realize its part of the Department of Tourism’s new Sizzlin' Sampler package. The nuts and bolts of it are that reservations (minimum of 2 guests five night stay) are eligible for a $350 instant credit from the Department of Tourism that is immediately applied! These packages must be booked through a travel wholesaler like Travelocity or Expedia, but thanks to the Department of Tourism, our guests can now travel to us before Dec 15th and basically have the equivalent of a 5 night stay at Maho paid for in the instant credit (booking deadline is Oct 31^st so act fast!).

Looks like Dad will be coming to visit, and hopefully you will too!

Scott

Management Training

Today we used F-Pavilion as our staging for management training in the late morning and early afternoon. F-Pavilion is where we typically have yoga classes in the morning and group events or activities by day during the season. There are many great viewpoints from Maho, but the view from F-Pavilion is one of my favorites, covering views of Francis, Whistling Cay, Cinnamon Bay, Trunk Bay, all the way down to "turtle rock" off of Hawksview/Gibney beach, and then across to Lovango/Mingo/Congo & Carvel rock. Even though I've been on the island many years now the view is still breathtaking.

I couldn't decide if the view helped our concentration or hurt it - where else in the world is management training done in such a beautiful location?!

Matt

Maho Bay Camps Gets Six-Month Lease Extension

The biggest news we have had recently is of course our lease extension! We now have an extension that brings us to July 31st, 2012. There's a good article that covers all the details in our local paper: The St. John Source

Welcome.........Back!

Welcome back to the new "old" blog of Maho Bay Camps here on the beautiful island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It's been a long time since updating and we never really got this blog off the ground the first time, but we hope things are different this time around!

Our intention with this endeavor is to provide an informal setting for information on Maho happenings - we'll have updates from each department here on camp, like special projects going on in Maintenance or maybe a few entree's being served in our restaurant, the latest glass blowing projects, perhaps the latest dive report from watersports.........the idea is to give you stories and information that we live everyday and you miss or look forward to hearing about.

Of course we'll still keep up with some island happenings, eco happenings, and any other happenings we can come up with. We hope you find this informative, entertaining, intriguing, inspiring, and any other adjective you can think of. Please bear with us as we build and develop this blog to its full potential. As a welcome back gift, enjoy a recent Maho sunset.....on us.