This shot or something like it…in every BVI brochure ever made.

The Baths are part of a National Park, and there are several parts to this waterfront area.  Mostly it’s the rock formations, and the crystal clear waters studded with patches of coral and sea life.  The Caves are a walk through the rock formations, underground, through the water.  Very beautiful and interesting.  The Caves come out at Devil’s Bay, another clear cove with excellent snorkeling.

You can approach The Baths several ways – by land (taxi, car, walking) or by sea, where the BVI park system has a number of mooring buoys you may use for the day if you have a permit.  There are also mooring lines for dinghies, you may come in from your mooring by dinghy and tie up there and come in to the park.  Sometimes it can be too rough to come in by sea, and the day we decided to go we had a lot of roll and swell at our anchorage.  In the morning we were concerned that the park might be closed to boat access, by the time we left for the Baths it appeared there were a lot of boats moored and we were more concerned we wouldn’t find a mooring.  So we took a cab.

Arrival at the Baths is at the top of the bluff over looking them.  There you will find Mad Dog’s bar (we didn’t stop this time, but ten years ago when we were here we did), as well as a restaurant and gift shop associated with the park.  There is a path that wends down some 35 yards or so through the boulders and trees to take you to the water front.

At The Baths you can go in at the beach at the bottom of the walk, we opted instead to head through the Caves to Devil’s Bay.  In Devil’s Bay we started our snorkeling, checking out the rock formations and coral there.  One of the cooler things we saw was a small school of cuttlefish.  As you can see from the picture, they can change color, they do it quite rapidly.  The reddish one if the foreground is rather upset with me and my persistence in following them for this picture.  Shortly after this the whole group took on this reddish cast and aggressive stance.  It was amusing to me that I immediately picked up on their aggression/threat response – it was so obvious in their quick color change and change in posture.  We gave them some space and they quickly calmed down.  Squid and cuttlefish are really fascinating to watch in the open water; usually we think of them fried with a bit of garlic butter and hot peppers but these are really fascinating creatures capable of some sophisticated and impressive behaviors.

Don’t get me wrong, in no way am I giving up calamari!

Kathy and I had been to the Baths about ten years ago, when we took a Windjammer Barefoot cruise in the BVI for our tenth anniversary.  A few things have changed; the restaurant with a pool at the top of the hill wasn’t there that we recall, and we didn’t remember the Poor Man’s Bar down at the Baths either.  But it wasn’t a bad stop for lunch.  After snorkeling in Devil’s Bay and a round trip traverse of the Caves we all needed some refreshment and the Poor Man’s Bar was surprisingly good for a beach snack bar, and reasonable for Virgin Gorda.  We bumped in to a group of friends there from the Salty Dawg Rally and had a pleasant if brief reunion as they stopped for drinks.

After lunch it was back for some more snorkeling.  The one question Kathy and I had was about the difference between now and ten years back.  Ten years ago we had a guide of sorts, some instruction on where to go to see the coolest things.  Not that we didn’t see a lot of interesting and beautiful things but we both felt we didn’t replicate our experience of ten years previous.  Oh well, we can always do a bit of research about what we might do differently and come back!

Bitter End Yacht Club!

Yeah Salty Dawg Rally for setting this up!  The Bitter End Yacht Club graciously offered to host our rally arrival when we all got to the BVI’s.  Extended courtesies included use of their beautiful facilities, beaches, moorings, and pool, a trial of their water sports, hosting our final rally party, and of course gracious help with getting acquainted with the area and finding things.  They’ve got a nice little store with fresh baked goods, a pub, a restaurant, dinghy docks and in general is a great place to stay.

Big Top Pee-Wee

Looks like hell, but man is it cooler when it’s up!

 Oh yeah, we pitched a tent.  As we were emptying our shed before we left for good we came across these large pieces of canvas.  I’d vaguely recalled seeing them when we bought the boat and took them off, and supposed they were some kind of cover for the boat.  But we were years away from leaving then and I just stuck them in the shed and forgot about them.  When we found them again we laid them out and measured them and realized that it was in fact a full length sun cover for the boat.  It had no poles or external lines, but we dumped it off at our sail maker and asked him to “sort it out” for us.  They made up some poles and got it back to us.

BVI Flowers seem to compete for gaudiest beauty!

Putting it up the first (so far only) time was an adventure, as we had no clue what we were doing, nor did we have any instructions or a picture of the final product.  We did have some trim and neat boat covers on neighboring boats to admire.  Suffice it to say, our end product was neither trim or neat, but it made a HUGE difference in the comfort of the boat.  All of a sudden it was completely shady and all that warm sun was no longer heating up the boat.  Cool breezes could do their job, and we had a few minutes more warning to close the windows when a rain shower came through.  For now it’s an eyesore to be sure, but we will get better at how to make it up right!  The only downside is that it is such a nuisance to set up we only want to install it when we’ve come someplace to stay for a while.

North Sound

The North Sound of Virgin Gorda is a vacation spot paradise.  You’ve got a wide open bay with decent breeze for dinghy sailing.  There are easily accessible reefs with excellent snorkeling.  Within a short dinghy ride you have a handful of night spots with good happy hours.  Our favorite was Saba Rock, with $3.00 painkillers and a nightly fish feeding for the kids (and adults to watch).  They’ve got handful of 6′ long tarpon that will catch a piece of fish out of the air.  There is the Sand Box, a beach abr where we spent Thanksgiving with a cruiser’s thanksgiving pot luck.

The water is clear, clean and warm and the scenery is stunning.  It’s a place you could easily lose weeks spent in idyllic relaxation just taking in the casual routine of sun, snorkeling, happy hours and watching the stars come out.

We ended up staying a week, and left not so much because we were “done” with the North Sound, but because there is so much else to see in the Caribbean.  We have 30 days on our visa here in the BVI’s before we have to decide if we want to pay a couple of hundred dollars to ‘Import’ the boat for the season and we want to have a look around and see it all.  And we’re only planning one winter in the Caribbean and there is a lot to see ‘down island’ in the Windward and Leeward Islands.

So we had to leave.  But we didn’t go far, after a week we took an easy sail to Spanish Town where we planned to do some provisioning, and visit The Baths, one of the highlights of the BVI’s.

Forgive me Readers for I have sinned, it has been two weeks since my last blog entry.  We’ve been…busy!

Our first couple of days in the British Virgin Islands were busy…both with resting and recuperating, and with making some arrangements for a few things we needed to get done.  It goes without saying that since we are on a boat…things will break and stop working.  So combining the paperwork inherent in entering a new country and the things we needed to sort out we had a couple of days worth of errands to figure out.

Ill mannered pelican in West End.  Kept sitting on dinghies and splashing them with it’s dives!

Clearing in customs on Sunday was a breeze, the folks couldn’t have been more helpful and friendly.  My only problem is that everyone down here is so soft spoken that I sometimes struggle to understand them even with my hearing aids in – brash loud Americans are a lot easier to follow than a soft Caribbean lilt!

With Customs cleared we landed in West End to check it out.  It’s a small place with one cluster of buildings near the marinas there on one side of the cove, and Customs on the other side.  There’s a small market, a few shops & boutiques, a Pusser’s Restaurant where we had some lunch, a small local restaurant that wasn’t open…not much more.  Clearly we weren’t getting most of our needs here, so the next day it was off to Road Town.

Road Town is the capitol of the BVI’s and the largest city town.  Here we’ve got chandlers (marine stores), sail makers, riggers, grocery stores, and a host of services.  Our to-do list for Road Town included:

• Getting a local BVI cell phone.  This is important to be able to call for services, taxis, reservations, and have a way to be reached by local services.  As we move from country to country we will purchase different Sim cards for the region, but having a local prepaid phone is the simplest and cheapest way to be able to operate in the country.
• Supplies to clean the water maker.  Turns out it wasn’t quite put away properly in the fall in spite of my hiring someone to do it, and some biological growth developed.  When we tried to make water off shore we got stinky rotten egg smelling water – so chemicals are needed to clean the biological growth from the membrane.
• A new Air Conditioning pump!  We had copious heat, too much heat really when we were on the dock in Hampton.  The Reverse Cycle Heat/AC system was working beautifully.  As soon as we got to the tropics and it started to rain…not a whisper of cool air to take the edge off the humid swamp down below with the windows closed.  Turns out the pump is dead.
• A part for our life lines, which dropped over board in about 15,000 feet of water in the North Atlantic.  I jury-rigged a fix so the lines stayed up but I needed a new turnbuckle drum.
• Fishing license – the BVI’s are very strict about non BVI residents fishing and will come down hard on anyone that fishes without a permit.
• Park Pass for the boat.  The BVI’s are sprinkled with National Parks, where there are moorings you can pick up for the day if you have a pass for the boat.  Without the pass you may fass large fines for using the moorings.
• Getting food, looking around.

Our Cruising Guide for the Virgin Islands isn’t too helpful with Road Town.  There is an inner harbor area with what looks like a shallow channel in, so we didn’t want to chance the channel.  The outer harbor has a lot of “no anchor zones” were you can’t get in the way of the cruise ships and ferries.  So we hoped to maybe pick up a mooring.  Being new to the BVI’s, our only experience with moorings was in West End, where you picked the unmarked moorings up and someone came by to collect the fee.  So we spotted a few open moorings at the edge of the harbor, picked on up and made our way in.

That day we made good progress through our list, traipsing all over the city finding what we needed.  Our patient kids got the uninteresting “get stuff done” tour as we raced around with empty stomachs trying to get everything done before things closed.  The only tricky thing was the fishing license; few people seemed clear on where we had to go and we were sent to a couple of government offices before getting to the right one.  When we got to the right one the cashier was gone for the day.  So we relented and had a nice dinner and headed back to the boat, though we did get caught by some rain and had to wait it out.

The plan for the next day had school for the kids, and running around for me wrapping a few things up with visits to the rigger, the chandlery, the fishing license place, and meeting a Spectra supplier to get me the chemicals for the water maker.  On the way back from this meeting I was stopped by someone to talk about our mooring.  When I asked what I owed, he politely informed me that they weren’t actually rentals,  they belonged to a charter company and they needed me off the mooring ASAP as they needed to put a boat there. Oops!  So we moved the boat in a hurry and anchored in the slim anchorage allowed in the outer harbor.