Taking a fancy to the Virgins!

16/4/2011

$30 per night mooring buoys do not appeal to us, so we headed over to Sopers Hole on Tortola, to stock up and provision for the next week around Jost Van Dyke and Cane Gardens. Mastercard systems problems struck yet again, and once again we found ourselves holding up supermarket queues, scrambling for cash because the bloody card won’t work! Thanks to our secret weapon, Katiloo, who has been on Standard Banks case so often in this regard, we now have after hours hotline numbers . $40 of cell phone call time to the bank revealed that there was nothing wrong with the card, but there seemed to be a connection problem reading the magnetic strip on Standard Bank cards in America……”But I’m not in America!” , …”Our systems regard BVI as America! Tell the cashier to manually input the details, and not to “swipe” the card.” This we did, and it worked! Great, but it still wouldn’t let me draw cash from the only ATM in Sopers Hole! The delay meant paying another $25 to stay overnight on the buoy. It struck me that for the $65 Standard Bank cost me, through no fault of ours, we could have spent another night at the Willy T, drinking plenty of beers, getting tattoos , and watching topless ladies jumping around! The upside was that we were able to have a farewell drink at the Sopers Hole Pub with Walter and Jackie ( Jean Marie), and Mike and Lesley ( Extasea), as we are all setting off in different directions from here. A big black squall messed up our plans to negotiate the tricky reef entry to White Bay, so we diverted to Great Harbour ( Jost Van Dyke), and dropped anchor in 12mts, just as the heavens opened. We caught 200lts of water in the two hours it rained, filling our tanks to the brim (all 650lts). The sun came out, and we headed ashore to explore, and to sample conch fritters ($10), and Jamaican Jerk Wings ($10) with our sundowners at the legendary “Foxy’s”! Gadzooks! R14 for each golf ball size fritter, or a single chicken wing, and R28 for a beer! Been there, done that, and bought the T shirt to prove it! The next morning, we moved on round to White Bay, with Mary playing every trick in the book to persuade me not to go through the reef pass into the beautiful palm tree lined beach beyond! In vain, I might add, as we are now safely anchored in this lovely bay, with at least a metre below the keel….now! At one stage it registered 0 mts! Later it was off to the Soggy Dollar Beach Bar, to sample their world famous “Pain Killer” rum punch, which is basically a Dark Rum over lots of ice, mixed with pineapple juice, a little orange juice, coconut milk, Angostura, with grated nutmeg on top! $6 a go, and very more –ish! Cheapskates that we are, we had one, and made the refills on the boat ourselves! We watched a shoal of Spanish Mackerel and Rainbow Runners in a feeding frenzy around the boat, as the charter boats headed home at sundown. Saturday. Welcome to the circus! The charter boats from the US Virgins packed in, taking up every square inch of anchor room, and then some! We watched in awe as one idiot dropped an anchor between two other cats, where clearly there was not enough space……. panic, go full astern over his dinghy tender’s tether, foul the prop, dive over the side to untangle the mess, while the boat is being fended off by those on either side! The name of his boat? I kid you not…”Paw Paw of Wight” !!! Despite all the drama’s it is still a very beautiful bay, and the entertainment has been non stop. We have just been too scared to leave the boat unattended to go ashore, with all these monkeys around! We understand that the US skippers ticket of competence is called a “Six Pack”, which has something to do with the 6 disciplines they need to have mastered. We think the ticket means something entirely different, given our observations!! The professional skippers’ in these parts reckon that their ticket is a credit card!

BVI – A second glance!

15/4/2011

We tore ourselves away from the North Sound, and enjoyed a leisurely 17 mile broad reach sail down the Francis Drake Channel, towards Cooper Island. Had a quick look around the crowded buoy filled anchorage at this resort bay, and then continued to Great Harbour, Peter Island, past Dead Man’s Chest. We anchored in 16mts, and chatted to Ti Bay over in Little Harbour, which sounded great. So we moved round to this beautiful little stern line to shore anchorage. What a gem!! It was our first experience of this type of anchoring arrangement, which is required because of the catabatic back winding. Only about a handful of boats can fit in, and there are no facilities, apart from a beach braai area made by cruisers out of flotsam and jetsam! No “boat boys”, no Ba Ba Boom music, and no one lives on the island apart from a flock of goats! No question about it…the nicest little anchorage we have experienced yet. Nature at its best. From the boat, we swam over to coral reefs, and observed big Spotted Eagle Rays feeding, and a pair of mating Dolphins slowly circling the anchorage, oblivious to the curious snorklers just a respectful few metres back. Mike and Lesley,( Extasea), whom we had met down in Ilha Grande Brazil, joined us for a couple of days before they head west. Another interesting cruising boat was a 21ft plywood homebuild painted in Rastafarian colours of red, yellow and green, which had sailed over from Belgium. The young skipper, who always wore his Rasta beanie, was accompanied by two girls who spent most of their time topless. We christened them Bob, Boobs and Bee Sting for obvious reasons! “Tenacious”, and “Bolero”, two other 80ft plus yachts we had previously seen in St Martin, were also in the anchorage. The skipper of Bolero, which was built 25years ago in South Africa, was also a South African. He and his wife had just bought a house in Baviaanskloof, Hout bay. They left to rush up to Antigua, to take part in the “Spirit of Tradition” classic races. After an idyllic week, we headed for Norman Island, in the “Bight”, picking up one of the hundreds of buoys, which make anchoring almost impossible! It is a big protected bay, with some nice dive sights, and a couple of well frequented places…..Pirates, a pub restaurant ashore, and the William Thornton, (Willy T), a ship restaurant pub. We managed a beer at Pirates, but the combination of $30 per night mooring buoys, and sudden runaway tummy bugs, forced us to cancel our trip to the notorious Willy T, of the stick-on tattoo barman, and the free drinks to all the ladies who jump topless from the bridge……perhaps it was a blessing in disguise!

Our first feel of the Virgins

01.04.2011

Mary and I have been looking forward to the BVI with great expectations! Yet the closer we got to being here, the more the Doom Sayers had to say about the overcrowding, the Bareboat charters, limited anchoring choices, expensive mooring buoys, and prices in general! So we left Anguila at 5pm for the 80mile overnight sail to Virgin Gorda, with mixed feelings…. Would it be a highlight of our cruising, or a bit of a disappointment? The trip up was a dead downwind, rolly motor sail with only 10knots of breeze…..just enough to keep the diesel fumes in the cockpit all night! Not Mary’s best! We arrived at Round Rock at first light, and headed up to Spanish Town to check in. Contrary to what we had been led to believe, anchoring was easy and available, and we dinghied over to the Yacht club and walked over to Customs and Immigration. The paperwork was a bit more extensive than usual, (and a lot more tedious than either the French, or Eseaclear signatory islands), but not too bad. The cruising permit for the two of us for 4 weeks was $17.50, which was also a lot less than we had been led to believe. After checking in, we headed up the Fat Virgin coastline to the North Sound, making our way through the well marked channel, into this protected stretch of water. We were too tired to spot any virgins, (rumour has it that there aren’t any), but we did find a very nice anchorage off Vixen point. There are buoys at $30 per night, but there is still plenty of room to swing off your own hook, which we chose to do. (must drop the hook in sand……anchoring on coral is prohibited) The next day we watched a huge fleet of racing yachts(+/- 100) fighting to the finish line, inside the Sound. We chilled, rested and swam in the crystal clear waters, taking the opportunity to dive and clean off the last of the weed and barnacles that we acquired in St Martin. Later we watched the start of the next leg of the race…. A downwind start under kites and bags, led by Richard Branson in his150ft + catamaran “Necker Belle”. He organizes a number of BVI racing events. It was quite a spectacle! The big man himself arrived by seaplane, landing somehow amongst this field of yachts, 30minutes before the race got underway. Recognize the Cat at anchor in the foreground? Yes, Klaus and Beryl , on “Ti Bay”, are en route to the Bahamas, and we have spent good times together, whenever we have met up along the way since Grenada. We all went the Bitter End Yacht Club for sundowners and a light meal that evening. When we returned to the yachts at Vixen Point, we found Sheer Tenacity surrounded by huge (3ft to 5ft) Tarpon, swirling around, hunting down jacks attracted by the cockpit lights. At first I thought they were sharks, with their bright orange eyes, but their profiles and silver shining bodies soon revealed their ID! Earlier in the day, we had been watching big Green Turtles surfacing around the boat. So although the fishing on the route up had been quiet, the sea life seems alive and well here! On Friday we left the Sound, and anchored between Prickly Pear Island and Eustatia, alongside a snorkeling reef. The islands themselves appear quite scrubby, reminiscent of Pilanesberg by the sea, but he beaches are white, and the water a beautiful clear turquoise! Yes, we like our first look at the Virgins, and look forward to using up our full 4 week permit, as we explore the islands and anchorages that we have dreamed about for years.