Old Home Week, Tortola, BVI

[Kyle]After Norman Island, our next stop was our old neighborhood at Trellis Bay, Beef Island. Back when we were living on Footprint and I was still working, my commute to work would start and end with a dinghy ride and then a short walk to the airport here. Trellis Bay suffered pretty badly since from Hurricane Irma (in 2017), and has only partially recovered, but it still has a laid-back atmosphere, occasionally punctuated with airplane noise. I may have been so eager to secure a good spot that we got here a couple days too early.

That wasn't too big of a problem. Did I mention there was an international airport across the street from the dinghy dock? Airports have car rental counters, which allowed us to convert unstructured leisure time loafing in the cockpit into an odyssey of steep roads, thick traffic and heavy provisioning.

Actually, that was only about half of it. Since it was the one day this week when Tortola didn't have a cruise ship, we were also able to get personal tours of both the J.R O'Neal Botanical Gardens and the Old Government House. We also found a delicious Jamaican (Ital/Vegan) restaurant perched high up in the hills above Road Town.

Road Town - The small, but enjoyable, J.R. O'Neal Botanical Garden

Road Town - Old Government House small, but grand, was filled with beautiful nooks to get comfortable and enjoy a book.

Road Town - Main Street felt like we'd gone back in time

Lunch with a view of Road Town at a Jamaican 'Ital restaurant

Mount Sage National Park trails proved to be mud-slides so we kept to the road

Then, in a failed attempt to walk to Tortola's highest point, we got ensnared by the charms of Jim, who runs a gift shop and restaurant at the trail head. We were still full from our big Jamaican lunch, but he convinced us to at least try a couple of his banana smoothies. They were VERY good. Jim clearly has a flair. As we sipped our smoothies, we learned that he was once the chef on the Royal Yacht Brittania. He then spent two years cooking at a British Antarctic base before eventually making his way to Tortola, where he is now on his fourth restaurant as owner.

We were having so much fun chatting with Jim that the tail end of our provisioning expedition ended up being pushed until after dark. That and the poor-quality roads, and a detour due to road-works, made for a few white-knuckle miles home. We were glad to return to the peace and quiet of the still mostly deserted anchorage.

The murals of Fahie Hill

We had a relatively restful recovery day afterwards, with just us and a handful of other boats in Trellis Bay. We went for a low-effort stroll along the beach, which we completely overcompensated for, calorie wise, with a Happy Hour stop at the place with the dinghy dock. I mean, it would have been rude to walk right through.

Most of our days, we got ashore and took a stroll around the trails of Trellis Bay

... and possibly partook in the odd cocktail at one of the several bars/restaurants at Trellis Bay and nearby Long Bay

Maryanne took sime time to snorkel about the rubble of Bellamy Cay (ruined in Hurricane Irma)

Late the next morning, the mooring field started filling up fast. There were the usual crewed boats, who were stopping for an hour or so to meet guests from the airport, but their moorings were quickly snatched up by overnight guests. It's been a while, but I see Cruiser's TV is still on the air in Trellis Bay, where one can watch all manner of charter boats get into wacky hijinks as they struggle to navigate the bay and pick up moorings.

Today's winner was a SunSail catamaran that got on the wrong side of a buoy and quickly ran aground. After freeing themselves in a cloud of sand, they turned ninety degrees the wrong way and then promptly did it again. With more effort, and even more churned up sand, they managed to free themselves a second time. By then, one of the company's paid captains raced up to their boat in her dinghy, checking for damage and then following them to their mooring so closely she could have been a tugboat. I imagine some of that boat's next bottom paint job will be coming out of their deposit.

A little later on, just after sunset, which is about eleven pm to us cruising types, Maryanne said she fancied going ashore for a drink. C'mon, Maryanne! We have drinks on the boat and we can be safely tucked in half an hour later.

She wasn't having it, and insisted I would have fun, too. Well, I'm not a big fan of fun, but I was willing to give it a go for her sake.

Kyle's birthday conveniently coincided with the regular "Full Moon" party in the bay

... And a Raku Pottery Firing Demonstration was another attraction of the night

It turned out Maryanne had much more planned than mere fancy drinks. There was also a delicious dinner, flaming artwork, Fire dancers, a pottery demonstration, music, and dancing, including a performance by a troupe of Moko Jumbie stilt dancers. Most of the charterers in the area were in attendance, as well as what seemed like a third of Tortola. How Maryanne managed to arrange all of this while being rarely more than arm's length away from me is a minor miracle. She is my little dynamo!

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Mooring location >> On google maps

Snorkelling around Norman Island, BVI

[Kyle]The moorings at Cane Garden Bay are widely spaced enough that I got it into my head that we would be able to cast the lines off and maneuver out of the bay under sail. Maryanne apparently knew this before I had even had the thought. When I started with, "Hey, Maryanne, I've got an idea..." she interrupted me with, "Are you sure? These boats are pretty close together."

What an odd thing to say to someone who is about to use two-engine control to deftly maneuver out of the mooring field. I guess we can do it her way, since I had already figured out how much room we would need to fall off before the sails bite and give us some control.

It worked out just fine. We left the last of the charter boats behind, and then gybed for the leg through the pass. That's when the forecast let us down.

Since we're in the Trade Wind Belt, we were expecting winds out of the east-northeast at nearly twenty knots. All of the forecasts said it would actually be a little stronger than that for a few days. In Cane Garden Bay, I was happy to be in the lee of the hills, where the five-knot winds acted on our pre-double-reefed sails to make for a nice, slow getaway.

After we left the pass, the wind decreased to three knots or so. Fine, I thought. We'll just wait until we are out of the lee of the hills. As rain showers raced overhead and occasionally doused us, we saw almost none of it at sea level, but I was loathe to shake out more sail for fear of getting blasted by a squall. As all of the charter boats from Cane Garden Bay went motoring past us, I tried my best to remain patient and enjoy the zen of sailing very slowly.

After tacking past the western end of Tortola into the gap between it and St. John, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, The wind stopped and then came in from the west at two knots.

Undeterred, we tried to keep sailing, but it seemed that every time another two-hundred-degree wind shift would hit us, we would end up having to alter course in front of someone who had just dodged around us from our last swerve. I didn't mind making the charterers do it as it was a good review of the rules of the road, but I was feeling distinctly more guilty about being constantly in the way of the big ships. It must have seemed to them like it was our first time renting a boat.

Eventually, with only about two miles to go to our first stop, we finally got some real wind and were able to behave like a proper sailboat again for about twenty minutes. Then it was time to pull all of the sail down and pick up a park service mooring ball.

Our first stop was at The Indians, billed by many sources as the best snorkeling in the BVI. As we had crawled along earlier, we had been carefully watching with interest the turnover of the few mooring balls there. They appeared to be all gone when we arrived, but then a helpful neighbor pointed out to us an empty one that had been obscured from us by another boat. Woo Hoo!

We took two circuits at The Indians's site to enjoy the underwater geology and life, there is a 90 minute time limit on the mooring balls so we couldn't do more

Having been there now and seeing it firsthand, I think we would both agree that the reports are true. The snorkeling at The Indians is very good, with plenty of interesting geology to add to the above-average diversity of coral and fish species. We did two laps together for good measure and then moved Begonia the short distance to the caves at Norman Island.

Here, the big draw is not the fish or the coral, but a few caves accessible from the adjacent moorings. We got there when the only other boat was just untying and had the place to ourselves for a while before the next groups started showing up.

Almost all of these were clearly commercial tour groups, yet they seemed to be pretty universally unprepared for the site. Not one of them had any sort of underwater light for use in the caves and a third seemed to be flailing around with just a mask and snorkel, but no fins.

No matter the size of the contingent outside, Maryanne and I could always find solitude by finning past them and then using our light to find the deserted back of the cave. The coolest stuff to see was all back there. For example, we spotted a pretty big Lion Fish, which was cool to see, but also very much not something you would want to accidentally step on in the dark. I'm surprised none of the tour operators even had a group leader with a light.

The 3 caves of Norman Island are a popular excursion, you can swim right in (no need to dive down and hold your breath). There was some great growth on the walls (Sponges? Algae?) and a couple of nice picture views, but they were small and quickly seen (but worth the visit). One cave is soon fully dark, and fewer of the tourists seem to visit beyond the entrance, thankfully we'd brought along our underwater flashlights. And we visited two days in a row! The caves (and surrounding waters) were filled with comb jellies that were sometimes so thick you'd have to swim through them and several would bounce off our exposed cheeks and appendages.

When Maryanne and I were done, we had just enough time to cast off our mooring and drop anchor on the other side of the bay before the rapid tropical darkness set in.

The next day, as dozens and dozens of boats came and went, we spent our time slowly snorkeling the entire length of the bay and back. With Begonia around the corner, we did get a couple of confused looks from people as we emerged from the caves with no obvious dinghy or mother ship in sight.

Snorkelling for hours on the surrounding cliffs and shoreline was just as much fun, we are fully aware of our huge privilege in this life

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Anchorage location (Privateer Bay, Norman Island)>> On google maps