Saturday Night – Stay on boat – eat in Roadtown<br><br>Our trip started Saturday morning at 1:30 AM. Our flight was scheduled to leave out of Newark at 5:15 AM. Get to Newark after a 1.5 hour drive and drop car off at AviStar (great place to park your vehicle while flying out of NYC airports). Take shuttle to airport and arrive at 3:35 AM. Try kiosk check-in with Delta, doesn’t work right but nice person manning the kiosks takes name and checks us in. Proceed to gate and find out it does not open until 4:00 AM. About 4:05 they finally open and go through security with no problems. Flight leaves on time and we make our connection in Atlanta for our flight to STT. Arrive STT at 1:30 PM. Meet other couple and their two children that flew in from Pennsylvania via American. Get bags, hop into cab to ferry dock. What a joke, ferry workers fighting over who is going to take us to West End! We finally decide on Smith’s after they took our bags to their dock!!! Arrive West End at 5:00 PM. Moorings meets us and promptly gets us into their van for the “short” ride to Roadtown. As soon as we pull out of West End we end up behind a political procession. Seems this is how they campaign on Tortola. Drive 15 miles per hour, blast Regee tunes from a huge truck mounted boom box and have kids drive back & forth on motorbikes driving like maniacs!!! Takes over an hour to get to Roadtown, by this time we are tired and hot. Check in with Moorings and do boat briefing. Skip chart briefing as we have done this 4 times before and could pretty much lead the briefing. Around 6:30 PM while we are doing boat briefing, Bobby’s delivers our provisions. Load it on boat and and are really hot and sweaty now! We decide to grab some dinner at the new remodeled Moorings Restaurant. What a difference! Average dinner priced at $25 to $30!!! A mere salad was $8.50! My advise would be to either eat on the boat or go elsewhere. Some quick showers and off to spend the night on the boat. Not much breeze but bearable for one night. <br><br><br>Sunday Night – Norman Island:<br>Sail over to Norman Island. Had a pretty funny incident before leaving dock at the Moorings. A boat load of charters are pulling their 4500 cat away from the dock. We hear the roar of their engines as they put it at full throttle, see a big cloud of exhaust. They wack into the front of another 4500, their dingy is flapping at the front of their boat as Moorings people are yelling at them to slow down!!! We hope we don’t end up next to them during the week.<br><br>We picked up a mooring ball at the Bight. We dinghy from your moorings ball to the Caves, where we tie up to the dinghy balls. The water is very choppy and it is hard to snorkel comfortably. Go into one of the caves but it is kind of scary with the waves pushing you towards the rock walls. We decide to head back to the boat and settle in for the day. At the Bight, Billy Bones has been replaced by a “Pirate” bar. Still being tired from the previous day we have dinner and retire early.<br><br>Monday Night - Manchioneel Bay, Cooper Island, BVI Cooper Island<br>There are mooring balls there. Great snorkeling. Not many mooring balls so show up early to make sure balls are available. If you estimate your arrival after 1530, just forget it, they all will be taken.<br><br>Tuesday Night - Marina Cay, Beef Island<br>Marina Cay is a lovely little island, with plenty of mooring balls, a nice open Pussers <br>Restaurant and a tiny beach. Just watch the approach around the marker showing<br>the large reef surrounding the island. You can get water and fuel there too. Dingyed in after arrival and walked to the top of the island and had spectacular views of boats sailing around the island. We ate dinner at the restaurant and it was good. If moorings are full, go across to Trellis Bay, a very protected anchorage with moorings balls.<br><br>Wednesday Night - Cane Garden Bay, Tortola,<br>Had a good day here. Very uncrowded and the water was clean and there was no garbage present in the water. Walked the beach and stopped at a few of the bars and had some frozen drinks along the way to cool off. At dinner on the boat. <br><br>Thursday Night –<br>Little Harbour at Jost Van Dyke<br>Snorkel, swim, explore stop at Sandy Cay & overnight at Little Harbour, Jost Van Dyke. <br>Pretty deserted anchorage. Picked up a mooring ball at east end of beach. Tried snorkeling neat the shore and found there was not much to see here. Bottom very grassy and there was a pretty good current going past the boat. Just hung around the boat in some tubes we brought along and relaxed for the afternoon. In the evening Randy, his wife and two kids went to Sydneys ashore for a great lobster dinner. Sydneys is a pretty laid back bar/restaurant with a self serve bar. Just make your drinks and pay when you are done. My wife and myself hopped in a cab and headed to Foxys for our dinner. Got there at the end of happy hour. Walked to the other end of the harbour and found that there was not much open beyond Foxys. Seemed very quiet. Had a good dinner at Foxys listening to the sounds of Elvis. He is an interesting performer. Plays American pop tunes on a steel drum with a recorded backround music. Seemed people were willing to pay $20 for his homemade CD’s of this music!!!! Little expensive if you ask me. Called Sydneys for our cab ride back to Little Harbour. Woke up in the morning to the sounds of goats in the hills right outside our boat. Seems 2 guys were capturing the goats for sale to a local restaurant.<br><br>Friday Night - > Friday Night - Great Harbour, Buttonwood Bay, Peter Island, BVI<br>We were going to go to Sopers Hole but decided we would like our last night to be a quiet one. Boy were we right. This anchorage was very quiet. Had our best snorkeling of our trip here. Saw numerous stingray, squid, turtles, etc. Nothing to do at all ashore except hunt for shells and snorkel. There was what lookes like a party tent and beach chairs a shore that were deserted. Our guess was that they shuttle cruise ship passengers to here for a taste of island life for a few hours. We did not miss them. At night all we had was the lights of Tortola and the stars to look at with no lights from the island at all.<br><br>Saturday – Time to turn the boat in and head to the Treasure Isle Hotel in Road Town for our last night. Returning the boat was anti-climatic except when I hit the Moorings guy in the head with the dock line. He was not too happy with me!!! Treasure Isle Hotel is a nice place to stay as there was no room at Mariners Inn. The only complaint we had was with the pool. It is in need of a facelift. A lot of tiles missing or cracked. Bar had 2 for one happy hour. Made reservations at C & F for dinner. Took taxi over. I could not figure their reasoning for how they charged for the ride. $2 per person. So if there was 2 of us it would have been only $4. There was 6 of us so it was $12. Strange way to charge! Dinner at C & F was good but it did not live up to what I had heard about it. They must have had an off night. Conch fritters were just OK, seafood platter had too much rubbery conch. Service was very slow, even for island time!!!<br><br>Sunday – Leave for ferry around 11AM and have no trouble getting to West End or onto ferry. Decide to go up on top deck of ferry for last look at islands before heading home. All week I spend applying sunblock and don’t get burnt until today! Seems 45 minutes in the sun on the ferry is enough to make for a very red face and arms and a hot plane ride home. Arrive Newark about 11:00PM, pick up car and arrive at home 1:30 am. Already making plans for the next trip. <br><br>