As we were going to be leaving relatively early the next day, it was a good time to evaluate our food and drink supplies and restock, which I did, with the help of several of my crew. However, the grocery store at the Virgin Gorda Yacht Harbor didn’t have much of a selection, and one of the crew of the other boat had already purchased the store’s entire supply of Pusser’s.
Lucky for me, that’s when Glenn showed up again.
(For part one, go here. To see Charles’ part-one post about the trip on his blog, go here.)
That evening all seventeen of us joined together at the Cooper Island Beach Club for our dinner reservations. It’s a nice place with some pretty darn good food: I had the seared scallops & pork belly as an appetizer (which was quite delicious) and some blackened mahi-mahi as my main course (also good). Others had things like conch fritters, tuna, West Indian chicken curry with roti, and pork, while we all had some really tasty cocktails. Not just painkillers, this time!
After dinner my crew hung out near a wifi hotspot for a while, uploading a few pictures and checking in with loved ones, before I took them back in groups (since we couldn’t just fit all nine of us into the dinghy at once). A few went to bed, a few stayed up a while longer in the quiet, and I showed them the game of shining a bright flashlight into the water to see what we could attract.
“Hold the flight, there’s 15 more behind me coming!” I yelled, out of breath after sprinting down the Miami terminal from my previous flight. Our flight from St. Thomas had gotten in on time, but a jet with mechanical problems was stuck in our original gate, and we’d had to wait for the new gate–only a few doors down from our connecting flight to Seattle–to be available. It turned our 45 minute connection into less than 5 minutes.
But I should back up to the beginning of the trip if I’m going to tell this correctly.
Here’s the view from my boat today, the 50′ catamaran Freedom Seeker.
Needless to say, we’re having a wonderful time. We’ve been snorkeling and enjoying the sunshine here at Cooper Island all day, and we’re headed to Spanish Town on Virgin Gorda tomorrow.
(unrealiable WiFi means this is being posted the day after it was taken)
Several times over the past several weeks my friend Tim and I have met up to plan the schedule and route for our British Virgin Islands sailing trip this coming May, with additional input (and experience) from Charles. The trick has been striking a fine enough balance between seeing as much as we can and keeping it as a vacation, with plenty of time to relax and lots of different activities available for us and our crews.
Sure, we could just arrive there with a rough idea of where we’re going to go and wing it: in fact, in some areas that may be just fine (it’s what we did on my May 2014 sailing trip in the Sea of Cortez out of La Paz, Mexico: we had a direction picked out and where we ended up was a combination of what we decided in the morning and how the winds were that day), but in the British Virgin Islands in May, there are going to be a lot of other charter boats as well as cruisers, and we’ll be competing each afternoon with all of them for mooring balls or anchorages. It also means we don’t have to make a decision each morning, instead we can pick from what we’ve already planned as the primary and alternate sites for that day.
Today we finalized it, for as final as these things can be: You’ll notice that we have alternate anchorages/mooring sites for each day. It’s a good idea to have a flexible schedule due to variances in weather and even traffic from other boats. So, without further ado, here’s what we’ve got planned.