In the British Virgin Islands….  28/04/2022

I’m sitting out on deck starting to write this at 5:40pm, making the best of the late afternoon sun. Just came out of the water – was checking the anchor. Not a great bottom here, some sand but a lot of small rocks too. We’re at the north end of St Thomas Bay on Virgin Gorda, with the capital Spanish Town just a few hundred metres away. Not much of a town, more like a village. It’s an absolutely beautiful spot, with rocky hillsides at both the north and south ends of the bay. The terrain here is dry and rocky, with cacti and other hardy vegetation. Looking out to sea, there are numerous islands: to the south is the small and wonderfully named Fallen Jerusalem, and past that a couple of outcrops of rock equally wittily called Broken Jerusalem. Several islands beyond them – Ginger, Cooper and Peter. To the west is Tortola, the largest Virgin island, and north of that Scrub Island and West Dog.

We left Statia on Sunday afternoon (the 24th), sailing 112 nautical miles overnight to Road Town on Tortola. At dawn on Monday morning we were approaching the outerlying islands to the south of Virgin Gorda, which form a sort of barrier about 5 miles before Tortola. Sailed through the gap between Salt Island and tiny Dead Chest Island straight into Road Harbour, where I anchored and went ashore to check in. 

The British Virgin Islands likes to call itself the world capital of yachting. It is certainly a major yacht chartering centre. Most of the customers are American, and it apparently gets pretty crowded at times. We seem to have timed it well: the peak season for yacht charters is December to Easter. By now, many of the charter boats are lying idle in marinas and things are not crowded at all. A lot of cruisers aren’t keen on the BVI because of the charter industry – lots of noise and plenty of accidents (people who don’t own their boats tend to be less careful with them!). But the islands are certainly very attractive, it’s just a matter of timing I think – come between Easter and the start of the hurricane season in June, when most of the holidaymakers are conveniently back at their desks.

Because of charters, there is a rip-off going on. Privately owned mooring balls are everywhere and are ridiculously over-priced: $30 a night (or $40 for pre-booked). It is ludicrous to pay $30 just to tie up to a mooring ball. Elsewhere in the Caribbean it would be $10 a night – and even then I’m still not buying. So the trick is to find a spot in-between or on the edge of them and simply drop anchor. Here in St Thomas Bay I’m between a few mooring balls and the shore. 

The British Virgin Islands are a British Overseas Territory – much like the Falklands and Gibraltar – the last remnants of the British Empire. The currency however is the US Dollar, mainly because they are so close to the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The islands were named by Christopher Columbus (after the 11,000 virgins of the 5th century martyr St Ursula). The first European residents were pirates, including Blackbeard and Captain Kidd. Tortola, the largest, means turtledove in Spanish, while Gorda is a fat woman (named for its shape!). 

We sailed from Road Town over to Spanish Town yesterday, which took about 2.5 hours motoring into both wind and current – there was little point in raising the sails. Today I went ashore and walked the two miles or so down to The Baths, which are near the southern end of the island. An extraordinary place! Huge boulders lie higgledy-piggledy on top of one another on the shoreline, forming grottoes and little beaches into which the sea surges. It’s basically a case of squeezing through little tunnels between and under the rocks and sometimes climbing up and over smaller ones. Incredibly picturesque, and a couple of spots great for swimming. There were a number of people there, but it certainly wasn’t crowded. A very friendly atmosphere: I took a few photos of a group of Chinese Americans and chatted with them and got into conversations with a few other people besides. It was the usual story: when they asked me where I was from and I said that I’d been in the Caribbean for over a year, there’s huge interest…!

Sometimes in quiet places you meet interesting people. Yesterday afternoon I was on the southern beach of the bay and there was one other person. He came up and asked if he could get into the boatyard this way. That sparked a very interesting conversation. A black American man, he was surprised when I said that my background was South Africa. This led to a long conversation about racial problems in America, and then it turned out that he’d worked for NATO in Western Europe for some years, so quite naturally the conversation then switched to Putin/Ukraine. He had had a boat here, but it was destroyed by Hurricane Irma which devastated several Caribbean islands in 2017. Although his boat was in the boatyard on the hard, it was smashed to pieces – winds apparently reached 180 miles an hour. 

From here we will travel around the islands. Tomorrow up around Gorda to North Sound, then will head west through The Dogs and along the north coast of Tortola, stopping at Cane Garden Bay and probably Smuggler’s Cove. And from there 5 miles northwest to the island of Jost Van Dyke (named after a Dutch early settler and former pirate), which has a couple of famous beachside bars…