Thu, 3/4: We awake at sunrise in Great Harbour, JVD, for an early departure to North Sound. Time to pay our dues and fight back upwind, the price for having bailed out downwind two days ago, when we were faced with 25 kt winds and 6-8 ft seas. The gamble has paid off, a little bit: the winds are now “only” 20ish, and the seas 2-4 ft. And we had a great sail to JVD and a good day there yesterday (Diamond and Sandy Cays, Foxy, Corsairs, and Reuben Chinnery – let’s forget about putting the dink on its ear landing at Sandy Cay). Now it’s another beautiful day and, since we’re sailors, we tack our way upwind, helm nicely balanced, just the right amount of sail out, we think, since the rail buries only occasionally – except that the boat makes leeway, big time, and although the knotmeter shows 4-5 kts, the GPS says we’re only making 1 knot toward Mosquito Rock. After a few hours of fun but little progress, we roll up the sails. It’s time to get serious about making North Sound today, so the motor goes on – and we’re averaging less than 3 kts at full speed (both GPS and knotmeter)! (No tach on our boat, so no way to know what “cruising speed” is – I think it’s set so that the motor doesn’t over rev with the throttle full on – our lack of speed certainly feels like it’s not revving enough, although one opinion is that our speedo may have had some growth on it and wasn’t showing our actual speed through the water, which may have been a knot or so higher, with the wind and current reducing our VMG to what our GPS showed.)
This is a big and unpleasant surprise. I’ve never been on a cruising boat that wouldn’t make 5 kts under power in conditions like this, but what we have is what we get. When we round the north tip of Great Camanoe and our projected ETA at Mosquito Rock is wobbling around 8pm (better than the 1am we had under sail, but still no good), we abandon North Sound as today’s destination. Sails out, we head for Cam Bay.
Sails furled, we motor in with good light, finding the entrance and skirting the reef. The water inside is a bit thin, around 7-8 ft, and I’m not sure whether all those dark patches are grass or coral heads (they’re grass), so Dan and Lisa are forward as lookouts. From the helm, with polarized sunglasses on, I can’t clearly see the depth readout on the cabin bulkhead, so Gerry is relaying the readings to me. (I’m glad I dropped a lead line previously and confirmed that the depth gauge is showing water under the keel, not from the waterline as we were told at our Sunsail checkout – this is not the time to start wondering about that.) Everyone is concentrating on our maneuvering, but when the engine stops and its alarm sounds, I realize that no one was thinking about the dinghy, which now has its painter wrapped around the prop. My responsibility, and it should have been an automatic reaction to have someone pull the dink in as soon as we started motoring into the bay, but “should have been” doesn’t restart the engine. I switch off the engine, grab my mask, and go under. After a few trips, I’ve unwound all but the last turn of the painter, which won’t budge. I tie on my rigger’s knife and reluctantly cut the line free from the prop and shaft. My only consolations are that I have watched sailors far more experienced than I wrap lines around props, and that the BVI water is in the high 70° range, rather than the 50s-60s of my home waters. BUT I WASN’T GOING TO DO THAT!
After our fun with the painter, it’s almost anticlimactic to anchor the boat in sand just shy of the reef. The wind is still blowing, but the reef does its job, and the water inside is calm. We spend a peaceful night alone except for a daysailer on a mooring.
Friday, 3/5: Away with no incidents in the morning, we motor into boisterous seas to North Sound via Colquhoun Channel. We pick up a buoy at Leverick Bay by lunchtime, then dinghy in to make arrangements for a taxi tour of Virgin Gorda, including the Baths, for the next day. No one is at the taxi stand, but the dock attendant sets us up for 10am tomorrow with Elton (el-ton’).
With their feet on land, Lisa decides she and Dan must go to the post office to mail something from the BVI to her father, a postage collector. Best information is that the post office is “far” and “high”. They set out on foot, but fortunately are persuaded to take taxis and actually return by the time I finish savoring a pk at the beach bar (good, but not the best – used packaged ground nutmeg, not fresh ground). While at the post office, they spot an offer for “local cooking” food to go. Back at Leverick Bay, we agree the offer sounds interesting, call Leticia Lennard (L L Gourmet Catering Services) and order 4 “lunches”, 3 turtle and 1 conch, for delivery Saturday 6pm at the taxi stand.
Back to the boat, we leave the mooring, motor to Mosquito Island, and anchor in Drakes Anchorage. Gerry and I take the “easy” trail to Honeymoon Beach – we don’t think it’s easy, but the views are good. Poor snorkeling at Honeymoon. Spooky walking through the old resort. The trail markers are still in place, most buildings are secured; it looks like it could easily reopen with a few weeks notice. The dock is falling apart, however.
Peaceful night for the boat, behind the protection of the reef, but Lisa and Dan find a flood in the forward end of their berth. We can’t think of any good reason for it to flood from today’s bashing into the seas and not from yesterday’s, but there it is. We bail out the berth, but the end of the mattress is too wet for sleeping. Dan and Lisa plan to sleep on the two salon settees, because we can’t figure out how to turn the starboard settee into the promised usable double berth (I think it’s a bad joke – four lumpy cushions on the slide-out shelf are supposed to somehow make the single into a double). Lisa settles in to starboard, Dan lies down on the lumpy cushions “just for a little while”, stays the night, sleeps poorly.
Saturday, 3/6: I start the day, as usual, by turning on the engine to run our refrigerator. (It’s battery powered, not engine driven, so in theory it should cycle as needed to keep the box cool, but in practice the compressor demands full battery voltage and stops running within 20 minutes of the engine being shut off. The fridge has only a thin cooling plate in it, not a thick gel-filled cooling tank, so when the compressor’s off, there’s no cooling.) The engine wakes up anyone who was still sleeping; today this is the sleep-deprived Dan.
Our plan for this morning is, after breakfast, to motor to the Leverick Bay dock, pay for a mooring for overnight tonight, buy some fuel, and fill up with the free water (and ice) that comes with an overnight mooring there. (We’re already into our 10-gallon water reserve tank again.) While Dan and I handle the fill ups, Gerry and Lisa will use the onshore showers, then we’ll put the boat on a mooring and dinghy in for our 10am taxi tour. This all actually works as planned – no hurrying, and we’re neither too early nor too late.
Off with Elton, we admire the spectacular scenery, with stops here and there. I’d hoped to do all our sightseeing in the morning, arriving late at the Baths as the crowds were thinning, but Elton has another commitment and needs to drop us at the Baths at 11:30am. The parking lot is jammed, with crowds pouring out of their buses and taxis. We arrange for a 3pm pickup.
Lisa and Dan say they will just walk down to the Baths to look over the scene, then come right back up. They don’t reappear, but I’m not surprised; the trail is long and steep. Gerry and I inspect Mad Dogs, but decide instead to have an early and leisurely lunch with a view at Top O’ the Baths. We don’t have to tell our waiter to slow down; leisurely seems to be part of the deal there. At a nearby table, we notice three well-dressed young women also enjoying lunch. By the time we start down the trail, mobs are streaming up, a good sign. At the bottom, there’s a snack and drinks bar. Lisa and Dan have taken care of their food needs there, and Dan is asleep in the shade on the beach, catching up on the sleep he missed last night. Gerry and I head into the Baths. It’s not a solitary experience, but it’s not crowded, either. Unfortunately, our neighbors from the Top are sitting in one of the pools, screaming happily and continuously at each other – I assume that they drank at least some of their lunch – and the sound echoes throughout the area. Gerry and I work our way through to Devils Bay. On the return trip, it’s about the time I had planned for us to start at the Baths, supposedly when all cruise visitors would have left – and we are blocked by a seemingly endless stream of tourists from a Road Town cruise ship just beginning their visit! I literally have to demand that that they stop and wait while the two of us descend the ladder they’re climbing up. And if I hadn’t pushed our way onto the top of the ladder, I don’t think they would have stopped even then. I now think that solitude at the Baths requires a visit at sunrise or sunset, and I don’t know how to do that on a boat-based trip.
On the return trip to Leverick we stop at Copper Mine Point, VG Yacht Harbour, and Savannah Bay. Interesting and beautiful scenery. Gerry and I head back to the boat for a little rest before our dinner delivery; Lisa and Dan stay on shore. By the time we return for the food, Dan, upset over poor sleeping last night and the morning wakeup, has booked a room at Leverick and they won’t come back to the boat to eat; they’ll have their “lunches” ashore. Dan turns down my offer of dinghy service, says he will swim out later to pick up the dinghy to bring their overnight stuff in to the inn. Gerry and I eat on the boat. She enjoys her conch, I find my turtle “interesting” – legs a bit dry and bony but tasty – other (breast?) meat soft and strange – a taste I decide not to acquire – and I don’t want to think about the morality/legality of eating turtle. There’s plenty to eat, though, a great bed of flavorful rice and beans, plantains, sweet potato, forgettable mixed vegetables from a can, and tasty coleslaw. There’s also a gorgeous full moon. Even with the moonlight, I’m glad that Dan doesn’t, in fact, swim out to the boat that night – it’s not a lot of light, and the wind is still strong.
Sunday, 3/7: Dan appears, takes dinghy in to pick up Lisa, then we’re off. Beautiful sail on a beautiful day to George Dog. As we sail between Great and George, the water seems too rough for our intended snorkeling, but suddenly, there’s the cove at the south west corner of George Dog, flat water and the single NPT buoy waiting for us (looks like brand new pendant and line from the ball to the anchor). Lush live coral, a turtle and lots of colorful fish out to the trenches at the west end – we go no further, because that’s where the seas and wind return. Another boat has anchored in the cove, but there’s no one waiting for our buoy, so we hang there for lunch in the isolation and beauty.
More speedy downwind sailing to Beef Island bluff, then just sailing around until it’s time to go “home” to Maya Cove. Next trip I’ll try to figure out how to return at 8am the final morning and be packed and off the boat by 11am, but this time we stay overnight at Sunsail. Dan and Lisa visit Road Town for dinner, Gerry and I go only as far as Calamaya at the marina. Others have complained, but we find the food, service, and value good. That night we see our biggest fish of the trip, five foot long tarpon swimming back and forth under the light at the end of the dock, rolling on their sides to give us the proverbial fishy stare and displaying their characteristic silver bellies.
Monday, 3/8: Sunny and hot, finally some typical Caribbean weather, conjured up for our departure. While checking in and waiting around for our flight at the Beef Island airport, we notice that there is a post office in the passenger terminal building. The flight to San Juan is only a little bit late, but San Juan baggage handling is so slow that we miss connecting afternoon flight home. At the AA counter for reticketing on the evening flight, I ask for lunch vouchers. Clerk is startled, checks with supervisor, then happily produces vouchers for all of us. Eventually off on uneventful evening flight to Boston. Dan has his car stashed where he works in downtown Boston. We taxi there and he drives us home in only light snow.
End of saga. Experienced BVI hands won’t learn much from this, but I hope others get some idea of what a newcomer can get into and out of and still have a wonderful time. Many of the trip reports here on TTOL have chronicled what a wonderful place the BVI is for restaurants, beach bars, and evening music and dancing. That doesn’t happen to be our style, and I want other folks to know that you can still have a quiet trip and find secluded places in the BVI.
As have many others, I also give my thanks to the Hills for hosting this forum, and to the TTOLers who gave so much advice and information here and on their own websites. My cruising manual was ¾” thick, and I wrote almost none of it myself.
Now I’m spending too much time trying to figure out how to bareboat again in paradise. Got to stop that for now and get ready for our little six-month New England sailing season.
David
