Jost Van Dyke from sea
We made our landfall at the island of Jost Van Dyke, partly for its easy approach, and partly because Customs clearance was purported by the cruising guides to be the most laid back of the available choices. "Laid back" was perhaps an understatement. We arrived at the door of the Customs office 15 minutes before closing time, only to find everything locked tight. The next morning the office opened about an hour after the advertised time, and within a half hour we had cleared customs. The Immigration officer was apparently more laid back than the customs officer in her choice of working hours, and we had to come back a few hours later in order to clear Immigration. It was clear that the clocks here run on Island Time, and there is no way to set your watch for the time difference.
In the afternoon of our first full day in the BVI we made a shore excursion with Glyn and Jenny from Wandering Star. We hiked up Mahjonny Hill, trekking up a dirt track that took no consideration of the topography, but boldly cut straight up the steep face of the hill. The vistas afforded from the top were magnificent, with views of all the surrounding islands and a breathtaking view that appeared to be straight down into our anchorage. After scrambling back down to the beach, we rewarded ourselves with a trip to Foxy's Bar for the local specialty drink, called a "painkiller".
View from Mahjonny Hill, Jost Van Dyke
The anchorage
in Jost Van Dyke is not especially well protected, and aside from the natural
beauty, the assets of the island consist of beach bars, Customs, and a
bakery. So the next day we headed on to the island of Tortola, to
Road Harbour to stock up on fresh provisions and to order replacement parts
for the things that had broken on passage.
The real treat of the Virgin Islands is the sailing, and our sail to Tortola was a wonderful introduction to sailing here. The islands are so close together and distinctive that navigation is all by eyeball--there is no need to set compass courses, plot positions, or use the GPS. The water is deep right up to shore, or at least to the offlying reefs, which are clearly visible due to the light turquoise color of the water, so there are no worries about running aground. The trade winds are relatively constant, so there is never a worry about whether there will be enough wind to sail. But the scenery is spectacular: The mountains tumble down straight to the water, providing ever-varying and fascinating scenery. The water is clear enough to watch the bottom pass by even in depths of 30 to 40 feet. And the overwhelming impression is one of colors--the lush green hills fringed near the water with brown bedrock and white sand beaches, where the water makes a quick transition from the white of the underlying sand into turquoise blue, and then through the spectrum of colors to the inky indigo blue of the deep water.
Sovereign under sail off Tortola, BVI
The beauty of
the islands are their greatest asset, and perhaps also one of their drawbacks:
tourism has taken hold here with a vengeance we have not seen elsewhere.
The small harbors that look inviting on the chart are filled with marinas
and moorings for the hundreds of charter boats that operate here.
These are wonderful for charterers here on a weeklong vacation, but too
expensive for those of us engaged in full-time cruising. We spent
a few days hopping among anchorages looking for one that offered protection
from the relentless easterly swell and enough room to anchor. We
finally came to the conclusion that there are really only two good anchorages
in all of the BVIs, and we have alternated our time between these, with
trips back to Road Town to pick up mail or resupply.
Norman Island was the first good anchorage we discovered. Except for one beach bar and a number of moorings that are not yet so close together as to preclude anchoring, there is not much there. We spent several days around the Christmas holiday, from the 21st through Boxing Day (the 26th for non-Anglophiles) at Norman's. Cathy carries the Christmas spirit for our boat, while I am essentially a scrooge. Here at Norman Island we found a nice compromise for the usually stressful holidays: I was spared the incessant commercialism that we have grown accustomed to back in the U.S., and Cathy kept Christmas alive by decorating the boat inside and out, trimming the little artificial Christmas tree that we keep aboard, and listening to carols on the CD player. We also declared a much-needed moratorium on working on the boat. During the day we would dinghy around the corner and explore the caves or go snorkeling.
Cave at Norman Island
Christmas Day
was unlike any we have had before. We started the day opening the
few small presents we had purchased for each other, and the many Christmas
cards we had just received via our mail service. Later we had champagne
cocktails aboard Blue Heron, another boat that crossed from the U.S. to
Bermuda at the same time as us. In the late afternoon, we went aboard
Wandering Star for a traditional English Christmas dinner, with turkey
and all the fixings, and finished with an English Christmas pudding.
With the exception of the calypso music coming from the beach bar until
the wee hours each night, it was a very quiet Christmas, and perhaps our
best ever.
The day after Boxing Day, we raised the anchor and motored to Virgin Gorda, the location of the only other acceptable anchorage. Along the way we stopped at The Baths, perhaps the most famous of destinations in the BVI. The Baths are actually nothing like you would imagine based on the name. I had pictured natural bathtub-like pools, or perhaps natural springs, or something of the sort. The Baths are, in fact, an area of huge (some of them house-sized) granite boulders sitting at the edge of the sea, some in the water, some out. We picked up a mooring in the open area off the southwest corner of Virgin Gorda, and hung on for dear life as we tried to get into our dive gear while the boat rolled in the huge swells coming in from the Atlantic. It was fantastically crowed. We went snorkeling, but saw far more people than fish, and after only 30 minutes were ready to move on.
The Baths, Virgin Gorda
We went on to Gorda Sound, anchoring first off Biras Creek, and moving around to Prickly Pear Island. The water was flat, the trade winds were blowing 25 knots (our version of tropical air conditioning), there was plenty of room to anchor without worrying about charter boats moored or anchored nearby, and best of all, the beach bars were far enough away not to keep us up all night. It was ideal.
As it approached New Year's Eve, Gorda Sound started filling with boats. Gorda Sound is about two miles long and one mile wide, and by December 31st we estimated that there were probably 500 boats, including three cruise ships, anchored with us. I set up my watch to alarm every hour starting at midnight on the International Date Line (8:00 AM local time), and we yelled "Happy New Year" each hour as the day went by. Shortly before midnight Greenwich time (8:00 PM local time), we went over to Wandering Star, and for each of the next few hours we toasted the New Year--first in England, then the Azores, Falkland Islands, and Brazil. At midnight local time a huge cacophony went up as all the ships in harbor, the huge cruise ships included, greeted the New Year with horns blaring. Fireworks erupted over Gorda Sound, and we watched them as they burst over the harbor. Just for good measure, we stayed up to make sure the East Coast of the U.S. had a New Year as well, and then we said goodnight to Glyn and Jenny, and dinghied back to Sovereign.
We spent New Years Day in Gorda Sound, watching the harbor slowly empty of the hundreds of boats, taking it easy and reading. On January 2nd, we called an end to our vacation. Even though we had stopped working on the boat, things had not stopped breaking, (including the engine brackets whose appliances provide us with refrigeration and electricity) so we returned to Road Town to try and buy ice, and work on putting right all the things that had broken on our little "vacation".
Here in Road Town we finally found a way to get e-mail in the BVI. For the first time in weeks we fired up the computer to send some e-mail. Instead of its usual boot-up procedure, we were greeted by BIOS ERROR 163, followed by a screen to set the date and time, with 1983 as the current year. Oh no, the millennium bug? After playing around a little, I decided that the battery in the computer that keeps the BIOS clock running has finally failed. Unless we leave the inverter running all the time (which takes too much electricity), the computer just forgets what time it is, and we have to reset it each time we boot up. I never thought it possible, but it seems that our computer has learned the lesson that we were taught upon first arriving here: to simply forget what time it is--to switch to Island Time.
Smooth Sailing,
Jim and Cathy