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.
