Day 4

Another early start to the day, and another early paddle board with my younger son. We paddled out to Cistern Point and back where I fortified myself with MORE COFFEE. I like a lot of coffee in the morning regardless of vacation or not. It is what it is. On a side note, I had a business trip to Europe just before this vacation. I picked up some Nescafe Gold instant coffee while I was there. This is, IMHO, some of the best instant coffee anywhere. It was perfect for this trip since I could make coffee with boiled water on the propane stove or from the coffee maker if the generator was running. No need for the french press, filters, measuring, or any of that. Just hot water and, et voila, coffee! I digress...

This day's destination was The Bitter End. We pulled out of Cooper with expectations of a nice long sail along Virgin Gorda to the North Sound. We were not disappointed with the sailing. However, here is where the weather made a turning point for the week. The day was overcast, not raining, but overcast and gray. Now I will grant you than an overcast day in the BVI's on a 44 foot catamaran en route to the Bitter End is better than any sunny day at work. However, it was still overcast and gray. I know you all know what I mean.

We made our way along Virgin Gorda and into the channel for North Sound (Gorda Sound?) and then headed towards the Bitter End. In this day and age of the internet, The Bitter End was just like the pictures but not quite like the picture in my mind. Not necessarily in a bad way, just different. As I like to say though, you don't really know until you go.

We grabbed a mooring and settled in for the afternoon/evening. We went ashore for lunch at the pub and paid for the mooring. Then back to the boat for a quiet afternoon.

At The Bitter End, we started to really notice that some boats were on a similar circuit. For example, there were two identical MarineMax boats that took adjacent moorings and rafted up at multiple anchorages. There were some Voyage catamarans, while not at BEYC that night, that we still ran into at other points during the week. There was also the big Moorings cat that had the floating swim area, denoted by noodles, laid out at each anchorage.

That afternoon, one of the boats on a mooring near us, started cranking out Pink Floyd. I can honestly tell you that, in all my dreams and imaginations about what a Caribbean vacation should be, Pink Floyd has factored in exactly none of them. Pink Floyd is what children of the 70's and 80's listened to in the dark places where they went to hide from their parents and feel pity for themselves. Pink Floyd is what you listen to now on your way to work in a shoulder season on a cold and rainy day where wherever you live looks like a gulag. Pink Floyd is not Caribbean vacation music...until you pull into The Bitter End on a gray and overcast day. The gents next to us took me by surprise with the Pink Floyd selection but the tunes they were pumping out just seemed to work given the weather. It was a very sublime moment.

That evening we went ashore for a cocktail followed by dinner. My plan was to have DH buy me a cocktail at the bar over on the beach and then we would have dinner back at the pub. We went to the bar only to discover that we had crashed the weekly welcome reception for resort guests! No worries though, as we had our drinks and adirondack chairs with a front row to the Caribbean sea. Dinner that night at the pub was good, particularly the pizza.

You know what happens next...dinghy back to the boat for a nightcap and an end to another successful vacation day.