Tonight, we are on a mooring in Francis Bay, St. John’s, United States Virgin Islands. We arrived yesterday after being effectively kicked out of the BVI. That requires explanation, which I will provide shortly. But first, tonight Amanda and Nick are with us and we are having a great time together. They are cooking dinner, including baking fresh bread, which Jae and I are hoping will become a regular part of life aboard.
Our ability to bake bread is somewhat happenstance. On our way back to Nanny Cay marina after another very unpleasant BVI customs/immigration experience, we drove by the local department store. I asked the taxi driver if the store was open on New Year’s Eve. It was. Jae had been to this store, but I had not had the chance to explore it. I was very curious because it is called The House of God. And as you walk in the front door, a sign greets you with the message: “Look what God has wrought.”
Nick, Amanda and I went inside, prepared for wonders and rapture. Our driver stayed outside. We had one mission – to purchase a Dutch Oven that could actually go in the oven and make bread. It would be a reasonable salve after the burns we suffered at customs/immigration an hour earlier.
And the House of God did deliver in the last aisle we explored of this cavernous, wondrous store. There, nestled among the cast iron cooking implements, was just one Dutch Oven that would fit into our oven. Tonight, Nick is curing that oven for its first batch of bread. In the meantime, we are drinking wine, enjoying a wonderful USVI sunset and having a good time. And in fact, the mooring here is free because the United States government is closed. Thanks to President Trump’s silly wall politics, there is no park ranger to collect the daily mooring fees.
Yesterday, we tried to pay by jamming the payment envelope into the payment receptacle. It took quite an effort from Jae and me to accomplish this task. As I thought about it afterwards, it occurred to me that no one from the Park Service was collecting the payments. Sorry, Donald, we cannot pay, much as we would happily do so. So, today, we watched someone else try to force an envelope into the receptacle and decided that we did not need to engage in such heroic efforts.
Had we not been forced to leave the BVI, we would have spent money on a mooring, on rum punches, or on some other expense to help rebuild the BVI – we are on board with BVI strong! Here in the USVI, we are off the grid, including the payment grid. Thanks for today’s savings must go to the thoughtful BVI immigration officer who greeted Amanda and Nick when they came off the ferry from St. Thomas. Her ability to “greet” visitors at a time when the BVI really needs outside cash was not evident. She chased us away.
In addition to a low cost NYE, we enjoyed a delightful NYE party aboard a rally boat called Sawdust. Several rally boats gathered in Francis Bay for NYE and Sawdust, a large, comfortable catamaran, invited all of us aboard. I brought guitars for Nick and me and we played with Cliff of High C’s and Chris from Eclipse. Pierre, from Fluensea, offered an original song, based on the The Beverly Hillbillies, that catalogued Cliff’s many misadventures aboard. The video of that song is under the videos tab on our website. We all had a grand time, except it was hard to wait until midnight. We are not accustomed to staying up so late. But, we soldiered through it and shortly after midnight, got into the dinghy and found Sirius in the night.
The next day, Amanda and Nick went snorkeling and saw sea turtles. The fish and the coral were not so good, unfortunately, perhaps partly because it is generally not so good there, but the water is not so clear when the winds and the seas are as active as they are in December. After a couple of days, it was on to the BVI again, clearing in through Soper’s Hole and making our way to Cooper’s by sail. This was one of the best sails with them aboard. Cooper was again disappointing. The anchorage was crowded and the wind died, causing boats to lie at strange angles to each other and nearly colliding. We had our share of fears about bumps in the middle of the night. All the charter cats were having parties and making lots of noise. The drinks ashore were still expensive. Jae and I did not want to pay for an overpriced dinner, so we ate aboard.
In the morning, we left for North Sound, which is part of Virgin Gorda. Once there, we anchored on the north side, far away from Leverick Bay. While this was not a problem when Jae and I had visited, we learned that two more people in the dinghy, combined with the easterly swells, made the dinghy ride back to the boat rather wet. Nick sat in the bow and always bore the brunt of the sea spray, albeit with good humor. I eventually promoted him to dinghy captain and sat there instead.
That Friday was the BBQ and jumbie dance, where local islanders dance on stilts. We have a video of one dancer picking Nick as her partner, perhaps because of his height. Look for the video under the video tab. From North Sound, we sailed up to Anegada, for a reef tour, lobster hunt and a lesson about gathering and cracking conch. Unfortunately, in the small area where Sirius’ depth is not a problem, we could not get the anchor to set in sufficient depth. Every time it set, we were in too shallow water. Perhaps we should not have worried about sitting on the keel for a few hours during low tide, but we did, and so reluctantly weighed anchor and sailed back to North Sound. We were all very disappointed, but rather than cancel the reef tour, we arranged an early taxi ride to the local ferry terminal and took the ferry back to Anegada the next day.
Our tour problems did not end there, however. While Kelly was a nice tour guide, his morning customers from a small cruise ship were indifferent to the time, causing him to show up two hours late for our tour. We did not have time to do the whole thing both because of the ferry schedule and the remaining light. He gave us a mini-tour and still wanted to be paid. I will write a bad review about it someday.
On our way back, I learned that Jae had turned the anchor light off on Sirius. We had left that morning at first light. I left the anchor light on so that we could find our way back to the boat in the dark when we returned. Jae, thinking the light was wasting power, turned it off. So, when we got back to the dinghy in Leverick Bay, shortly after dark, there was no moon and no light from Sirius. We knew the boat lay out there somewhere, but Sirius was not near any other boats and we had only a general sense of direction to it. It was again a wet ride, with jokes about whether we would find the boat, and Amanda later admitted to being quite frightened about being in such a large body of water in a tiny inflatable and no sense of the right direction. I would agree that looking up into the night sky, while in the middle of a large body of water and the wind howling and limited fuel supply, does give you a strong sense of humans’ small place in the grand scheme of things.
After the disappointments of Anegada, Jae and I wanted to ensure a good Virgin Gorda experience at the Baths. These are very large boulders at the south end of the island that it seems a giant just tossed in a pile. There is a series of grottoes and a trail that winds through them. While it remains a fairly pristine site, every charter boat passenger and every cruise ship passenger visits the Baths, polluting the whole experience. Rather than move the boat over there and compete for a mooring – there are not that many -- we jumped into a taxi and arrived at 7 am, two hours before the park opens. We had the place to ourselves until 9 am when we hiked back up the trail to the road. Just steps from the shuttle bus parking lot, a horde of cruise ship passengers came barreling by, forcing us off the trail. Many of them were clearly not physically fit to hike the trail, tottering along with big bellies, weak knees and canes. They were also oblivious to the notion of sharing the trail.
Hurricane Irma really devastated the BVI as we saw repeatedly in the lengthy time Jae and I spent there. Much of the infrastructure has not returned. Soper’s Hole, a favorite harbor and hang-out, remains a wreck 18 months later. To my knowledge, nothing is open there. Virgin Gorda’s North Sound is ghostly with 3 of the four marinas shut down. Only the uber rich Mosquito Island and Branson’s Necker Island are up and going. Trellis Bay looks like a bomb dropped there, with shipwrecks lining the shore and businesses closed permanently.
Yet, the anchorages are full of noisy charter boats, competing for the last mooring at dusk and the cruise ship terminal in Road Town is usually full. Smaller charter boats, like the one that ousted us from the Anegada tour, anchor all over the place. I support the notion of BVI strong and I want to see it rebuild, but the lack of infrastructure, coupled with all the annoyances from visiting boats, make it hard to imagine I will ever return. If I do, I will stay ashore in a resort that provides for all my needs.
We spent a couple more days in the BVI, off Guana Island, at Foxy’s in Jost Van Dyke and in the easternmost anchorage of Jost Van Dyke. We then returned to Caneel Bay and reluctantly sent Amanda and Nick on their way home.
Next stop, St. Martin, French West Indies.