Travel

British Virgin Islands 2015 Trip – Part 2

(For part one, go here. To see Charles’ part-one post about the trip on his blog, go here.)

Dinner at the Cooper Island Beach Club

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.

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British Virgin Islands 2015 Trip – Part 1

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“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.

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Image

It’s real pretty here

Here’s the view from my boat today, the 50′ catamaran Freedom Seeker.

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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)

BVI Sailing 2015: The Route and Schedule

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.

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Gallery

2014 Photo Year-in-Review: My Favorite Shots

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I’ve gone through my past year of shots in Lightroom, picked out my favorites, and present them here with brief descriptions of where and how I got them.

February 3rd

A bold Downy Woodpecker gets close. Washington Park Arboretum, February 3rd 2014

A bold downy woodpecker gets close. Washington Park Arboretum, February 3rd 2014. ISO 1600 (auto), 400mm, f/8.0, 1/500s

I’d just finished a rather unlucky birding session in the Arboretum when I noticed a small bird climbing around on a low-hanging branch. I carefully circled around the tree to be able to catch the bird in the morning sunlight and sure enough, it not only circled the branch, but climbed toward me a bit closer as well. I liked this shot so much I made it the first photo I had printed onto canvas, and it’s hanging in my kitchen. This is a downy woodpecker, the first of about 4 that I saw in 2014.

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