I arrived home May 1 from 8 wonderful days on VG. I stayed at the fabulous villa, Villa del Sole. on Mahoe Bay. I have been raving about Joan Soncini’s book Virgin Gorda: An Intimate Portrait since it first came out in ’06, and I thoroughly enjoyed becoming personally acquainted with Joan and Mario Soncini and all of their wonderful friends who were either visiting or live on VG.

As you open the front door of Villa del Sole, you have a fabulous view of the Caribbean Sea and the Dog Islands. This beautiful villa has 4 large comfortable bedrooms with AC and en suite bathrooms. A large great room has a well designed kitchen with modern appliances, a dining room and 2 separate living areas. There is plenty of shade as well as another place to eat on the deck, and the pool water was comfortably warmed by the sun.

The house gets great breezes on a hill about a 3 minute walk above beautiful Mahoe Bay. What sets this house apart from nearly all other homes on VG is a large elevated gazebo with unobstructed views of the Caribbean Sea. What a relaxing place to enjoy breakfast, afternoon cocktails, sunsets, and celebrate birthdays!

We ate scrumptious food all week that we purchased from the well stocked grocery stores on VG, but the highlight was Mario’s 65th birthday party lobster feast, prepared by two of the best caterers on VG Caswell Pondt, a LDB chef, and his associate, Beryl Vanterpool, who also works as a teacher at Bregardo Flax Elementary School. This is the third year I have had the pleasure of eating meals prepared by Caswell and Beryl and every meal has been outstanding.

Villa del Sole was carefully constructed around several large 200 year old trees that provide a majestic beauty as well as lots of shade to the setting, and significantly enhance the splendor of the lush landscaped gardens that I could not stop photographing!

I am going to describe the excellent snorkeling at Mahoe, but let me first mention the great time diving I had with Dive BVI. 11 members of my extended family did our certification dives with Dive BVI 6 years ago, and, after diving numerous other places in the Caribbean, Dive BVI continues to be the top valet dive shop in the Caribbean in our opinion. Jeff and Casey McNutt supervise a staff of 14 at dive shops in Spanish Town and Leverick Bay, as well as a shop in Little Dix Bay, where Paul Gondek teaches Discover Scuba courses for people interested in diving who are not yet certified.

Ruby “Finey” Daniel Clerk in the Spanish Town Dive BVI Shop, has a wealth of knowledge about VG and was a great help to me in my efforts to tour all of the major accommodations on the island, as well as to dine at more of the local restaurants. (I am happy to say I ate pig tail with red bean soup at The New Dixies and I am doing fine!) I cannot emphasize enough how impressed I am with the amount and variety of merchandise that both shops carry, and the 8 photos after Finey are all taken at the Spanish Town shop. Leverick Bay also carries a full line of products. In addition to a wide range of aquatic merchandise, both stores carry a large range of products from quality clothing to hats, shoes, sandals, dresses, t shirts, towels, batteries, books, watches, maps, posters, prints, photographs, post cards, cameras and sunglasses. Everyone visiting Virgin Gorda, diver as well as non-diver, will find something of interest to them. I toured every shop in the Virgin Gorda Yacht Harbour and Spanish Town and the Dive BVI shop is the best stocked store and is the one store that has something for everyone.

The first part of this photo album contains unedited photos of 10 of the 12 dives I did, and the second part contains unedited snorkeling photos at Mahoe Bay. I always edit my uw shots for clarity, light, and color, and I will edit my uw photos from this trip over the next few weeks, but I will leave the photos in this album unedited so that people can get an accurate idea of the water. Visibility during the last week of April was in the 20 to 30’ range and had a pea green tint instead of the gin crystal clear water with 60 to 80’ visibility. As is well known by now, the Orinoco River in Venezuela has deposited a huge algae plume that is in the water surrounding the Virgin Islands right now. Please do not let this affect your plans to go to the BVI! The algal flow is feeding the coral and fish and it looks like one gigantic party under the water right now! There are lots of fish in the water, and, due to the darkened water, many night critters are out during the day and the Dive BVI staff have even seen eels free swimming in the water. At some sites, coral cups are open, and you can still see plenty of color for which BVI diving is so well known. You can still see the light at the end the “Chimney” off Great Dog, and the BVI has a lot of good sites such as “The Aquarium” that are not very deep and are fairly well lit from the ambient light of the sun. I was glad to see patches of elkhorn coral appearing to do well after the threat from coral bleaching a few years ago.
I am also happy to say that everyone made it back to the boat on every dive!

Most of all, it was largely due to the extremely competent staff of Dive BVI that the diving on Virgin Gorda was so enjoyable. Every day, all of the divers are given a thorough briefing of all of the safety features on the boat and what to do in the unlikely event of an emergency. At every dive site, a Dive Master/Instructor gave a thorough briefing of what to expect on that particular dive.

The current varied last week, and Dive BVI would check the current when we arrived at a site. If they felt the current was too strong, we moved until they found a dive site they felt was mild enough to dive. In the course of a week, we dove several sites twice because they were the safest places to dive that day. In addition to attaching to the mooring ball, Dive BVI swam to the bottom and attached a 2nd line from the boat at every dive site. There was also a a line in the water for those who wanted to use it for descent, 15’ safety stop, and ascent.

There were 2 Dive Masters/Instructors on every dive and every one of them carried a slate on which they described various sea life. All of Dive BVI’s boats are custom built dive boats, with large platforms to stand or sit in order to enter the water, and large safe ladders to get back into the boat after diving. Divers always remove their fins and any other gear they want before climbing the ladder. Plenty of snacks and fresh drinking water are available on the boat and all of the boats have heads.There were divers with a wide range of diving experiences, including first time divers doing their certification dives, honeymooners, persons diving for the first time in several years, as well as experienced divers. Everyone had a great time diving.

It was a great joy for me to dive again with Cori Gondek, who first taught us how to dive in 2003. Cori and Paul have been on vacation during our Fall trips to the BVI, and we had dinner with them last year, but this was my first time diving with Cori in 6 years. She is an outstanding Dive Instructor, very safety conscious, and cares deeply for our aquatic environment. I have been diving on several trips with Rudy Woodley and there is no one in the Caribbean who does a better job of finding eels than Rudy! On my last dive (no photos), Rudy found 8 eels, including 5 different species.

This was my first time diving with Johan and Belinda Kloppers, and they are a great dive team. They each gave a thorough dive briefing before each dive on the two sections of the Rhone, using an extremely helpful, detailed new chart of the Wreck of the Rhone dive site I had a peculiar thing happen to me on my Rhone dives. I don’t know if Johan aroused the ghost of Captain Wooley, or if I wrote something Captain Wooley did not like 2 years ago in this essay on the 140th anniversary of the Wreck of the Rhone but my uw camera began acting up while I was inside the bow, trying to take photos. First, no matter how hard I pressed, I could not press the button hard enough for the camera to take a photo. I finally managed to take a photo by turning the camera off and then on again, but I could not take a sequence of shots; I needed to turn the camera off and then on again in order to take each photo inside the Rhone. On the second dive at the shallower stern, the camera worked fine the entire dive and I got a lot of good shots, sequentially, of all of the interesting things you see on that dive. After diving the Rhone, I still had plenty of memory card and plenty of battery left for a night snorkel that evening with Joan and Mario at Mahoe Bay. I carried my equipment down to Mahoe, turned on the camera, check, turned on the strobe, nothing. I wondered if I had forgotten to turn off the strobe after diving, which would have drained the batteries all afternoon. I hurried back to the villa, opened the battery compartment, and it was full of water….kaput, corroded, ruined. Hopefully, my dive insurance will cover it. Joan took a great video of our night snorkel, including a huge lobster that I am guessing was at least a 12 pounder in 6 feet of water.

The snorkeling at Mahoe Bay reef was outstanding, and the visibility was very good. Mahoe has a double reef, and I am assuming that the outer reef where you see the waves hit must have stopped the algal flow from reaching the inner reef, because I saw no evidence of the algal plume at Mahoe.

We saw one or more turtles on nearly every snorkel, squid, lots of fish, and I had a glorious final snorkel the morning of my last full day on VG, when the bright morning sun pierced through the water and caused the reef to glow.

Mahoe is such a wonderful reef, with something for everyone, from newbies to experienced snorkelers. My family stayed in a villa on Mahoe and snorkelled the reef every day in 03, the week after we learned how to dive, and it was truly a blessing to snorkel the reef again every day last week as I became a part of the extended family of Joan and Mario Soncini and their lovely friends. Also, it is always a joy to dive with the terrific staff of Dive BVI. What truly makes Virgin Gorda such a unique place is the beauty of the island, the water, and especially the people, and it holds a very special place in our hearts every day.

All the best, honeymoon2 http://honeymoon2.smugmug.com/