A Kind of Summer Holiday

Dear reader: throughout March we took over 600 photos, all of which are great shots. I selected a few highlights to post here, but I encourage you to go see the ones I've put on my Facebook account. And yes, I'm quite modest about the quality of my photography.

The month of March has been chock-full of fun activities that made it easy to ignore the crummy weather of the first couple of weeks. There was socializing for kids and grown-ups, plenty of snorkelling, hiking, SCUBA diving, tough pounding to weather, and easy sailing. The Virgins have lived up to their famed beauty. The 15-mile long Sir Francis Drake Channel, the heart of the Virgins, houses some of the most beautiful and easily accessed coral reefs.

Our young free diver in The Caves, Norman Island

 From beautiful Francis Bay, Saint John, we crossed to Jost Van Dyke, Brittish Virgin Islands and met up with Skylark. We hadn't seen them since George Town and both crews were eager to compare notes on the different routes we took to get from the Bahamas to the Virgin Islands. By crews I mean the adult members of the crews; as far as the two boats' kids are concerned, the passage, however rough, was already an event that had taken place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

Coolest shot of yours truly to date, at The Indians. I'm happy under water

Newsflash for cruisers: White Bay in Jost Van Dyke can get annoyingly rolly. Newsflash for Taia's captain: when people on ActiveCaptain say that an anchorage is rolly, it's because they've been there and have found it rolly. I fail to see how a discerning captain would completely and utterly ignore other captains' experience. And yet we spent 2 nights there. Although after the first sleepless night we moved to a flatter area of the bay before the place got crowded for the afternoon spectacle.

Sunset from the top of the hill at The Bight

White Bay is a bit of a happening place, or, in the words of Taia's captain: a zoo. Have you ever been to the zoo on a beautiful spring Sunday afternoon? Do you remember how impossibly crowded it was? Well, that's what White Bay felt like when we got there. Add a few 20-year-old girls showing off their pseudo-sexual dance skills on a power boat blasting music for the whole beach and a few 40- to 50-year-old men acting the same age as those girls, and you get the picture we found in White Bay. Rather entertaining.

That's when our time in the Virgins started to feel like a summer holiday. The folks on Skylark are a lot of fun to hang out with, and so we did. The kids had sleepovers almost every night; one of the Skylark kids would sleep on Taia and one of the Taia kids would sleep on Skylark. We even did school together as we moved from anchorage to anchorage. We snorkelled, hiked, sailed, biked, and generally enjoyed everything the cruising lifestyle has to offer.

Skylark under sail. Natalia was crewing for Stewart that day and Louise crewed on Taia

Then our water maker kicked the bucket. I'd been nursing it for a year and knew the moment would come when it would spit out its last drop of fresh water. After 2 or 3 days of researching alternatives to solve our fresh water production problem, we decided to buy a new one and the enjoyment of life resumed. We placed the order for the new one almost 2 weeks ago and it should be on its way to Saint Martin, where we're going next. The installation shouldn't be too complex, as the plumbing is mostly already there. But, like any other boat project, this one will most assuredly suffer from Paul's Pi Rule: every boat project takes Pi times the amount of time initially allocated to it.

I rigged up the spinnaker pole with a rope swing at The Bight. The kids love it

We visited almost every island in the BVI, the touristy ones and the more secluded ones as well. It truly is a marvellous place. Initially I thought that the Bahamas was better, but after a few weeks here, I conclude that they're just different. Both have a special place in my heart. While the Bahamas has a broader abundance of fish in general, the BVI has all its beauty within a 7 mile radius.

Michael Beans's Happy Arr! show at Jumbies, North Sound, is excellent

After hanging out with Skylark for a couple of weeks, we ran into another kid boat we had met in the Bahamas: Almost There. The kids were ecstatic to share play time with yet another kid. It's great to make friends in one place and run into them in a totally different country. There's something I find inherently cool about that. And we also spent time with Distant Shores, whom we hadn't seen in about a year.

Almost There on a broad reach. While they easily sailed at 8 knots, we were happy to get to 5

Almost There have plenty of SCUBA gear on board, including a compressor to fill their tanks. Robert invited me to dive the RMS Rhone with him. I borrowed tank, BCD, and regulator. The dive was excellent and short. Although I'm PADI certified, I have very little experience (only 5 dives!), so I haven't mastered the art of consuming little oxygen, which shortens the length of my dives. I guess I'm going to have to get my own gear and dive more to remedy this situation.

Robert, from Almost There, my patient dive master at the RMS Rhone wreck

And here we are in North Sound, Virgin Gorda, the north-eastern end of the BVI, ready to move on to our next destination: Saint Martin. Tomorrow we'll do our first overnight sail since we sailed the south shore of Puerto Rico in early February. It's only 80 miles to Saint Martin and we expect to get there in a bit less than 20 hours.

Oh, and I forgot to mention: I turned 42 some time during our stay in the BVI.