Part 2 in a 376-part series of our 18 day trip around the British Virgin Islands:

December 1-3

Days 4-6

Finally, our wandering souls found their way back to one of our favorite places on earth.  We pulled into:

White Bay, Jost Van Dyke

and it was just as lovely and beautiful as I remembered it.  A long crescent beach, broken up by reefs in the water and a small cropping of trees in the center, White Bay is best known for its beach bar, The Soggy Dollar.  Named for the wet money that sailors use to pay for their drinks after swimming to shore, it is a quintessential beach shack with sand floors, weathered painted signs, and lots of outdoor tables, benches, and hammocks.  The rafters were decorated with police patches, so we had fun looking for NJ towns we knew!

This is the birthplace of the Painkiller, the unofficial drink of the BVIs.  The Painkiller is a cold, sweet, and spicy concoction of Pusser’s Rum, pineapple juice, cream of coconut, and orange juice, with a dash of freshly grated nutmeg.  We are quickly becoming adept at making it aboard s/v Patronus, but the Soggy Dollar version is amazing.

(Side Note: Yesterday, Christmas Eve, the kids found a coconut on the beach and a man used a machete to cut it open for them so they could drink the juice.  Reese looked at him and said, “You can drink it plain?  I thought it was just used in Painkillers.” Uh-oh.)

We got our drinks, counted the number of kid heads bobbing up and down in the surf (six?  good.), and plopped ourselves down on some beach chairs.  We didn’t move until we needed a refill, and after that only to hit the head and the gift shop.  We sat and talked and soaked up the sun all afternoon.  When we pulled our dinghies up on the beach, there were a dozen boats and even more twenty-somethings, drinking in the water, laughing loudly, and acting like, well, twenty-somethings.  We outlasted them as they piled back in their boats and set off screaming for Willy T’s (more on that later).  Before long, we had the beach to ourselves and allowed the sun to move from blinding, to brilliant, to golden, to soft yellow.

We finally looked at one another and agreed it was time to get Olivia back to the boat for her 7^th birthday dinner.  We all enjoyed watching the pure and innocent delight of a child on her birthday, especially when she got her dream gift: a pair of handcuffs to complete her police costume!

We all stayed up way too late, and we were off and sailing the next morning for:

Diamond Cay, Jost Van Dyke

where we knew our friends would be blown away.  A short hike across the coral beach and up the hill led us to the Bubbles, or Bubbling Pools.  The sheer power and strength of the ocean waves on the other side of the mountain had, over thousands of years, cut a narrow passage in the side of the island.  This narrow cut allows waves to crash into a small lagoon up high on the hill.  I have never seen anything like it and am not sure I am even describing it accurately from a scientific point of view.  The speed at which the water is squeezed through the rocks creates tiny bubbles, so that you feel like you are swimming in champagne.  Sounds just awful, right?  The fun part is to try to stand your ground as the waves come crashing in.

 

It’s a bit dangerous with all the rocks, so we had to keep an eye on the little ones.  Unfortunately, Porter was playing with some smaller rocks and hit Reese in the back of the head.  She had a decent sized cut that was bleeding badly, so we headed back to clean her up and assess the damage.  It seemed pretty bad.  But oh, look!  We have a doctor with us!  How convenient!  Craig checked it out and decided she would be fine without stitches, so we wrapped up her head and sent her off to relax.  We set out the next morning for:

 

Soper’s Hole, Tortola (again)

because we were able to set up an appointment with a canvas-maker to measure and design some side panels for our dodger/bimini top.  The side panels would help reroute the rainwater that slides off the bimini so that our cockpit stays dry while it’s pouring.  Anything Goes sailed on to Nanny Cay for some boatwork of their own.  While that was going on, I took the kids for a dinghy ride to the old Fort ruins, which are now just “decorations” at a resort.  It was a little disappointing, but the kids still liked seeing the large stone pillar and imagining how the soldiers kept a lookout for pirate ships.

On the way back, we spied Anything Goes in the distance.  They were back to meet us in Soper’s Hole.  We stopped at an awesome resort, which had its own beach and really cool lounge chairs, which we all tried out.  We had a quiet night so that we could be off for:

Norman Island via the Indians

in the morning.  Yay!  Norman Island is the setting for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.  I really love this magical, time-stands-still place and couldn’t wait to go back.  On the way, we stopped at the Indians, an outcropping of rocks, which boast good snorkeling.  We swam around, seeing barracuda, a nurse shark, and some other cool fish.

Anchored in The Bight (a harbor) on Norman’s Island, we got some schoolwork done and took a beautiful hike to the top of the mountain, which had one spectacular view after another.

 

 

The next two days, Bryson and I completed the open water dives for our SCUBA certification.  We went on two trips with Blue Water Divers BVI and had a great instructor.  She gave us a refresher course and was incredibly patient with me.  She literally HELD my hand when we saw tarpon for the first time because I started hyperventilating at their sheer size and mean mugs.  I probably used half of the air in my tank in those thirty seconds.  She also went nice and slow with me when it came time to take off our masks at 40 feet below the surface and replace them, clearing the water out of them, while still managing to breathe (I’ve got a thing about getting water in my nose.)

She also helped me to figure out how much weight to carry in my weight belt because I kept floating to the surface on our first dive.

Craig and Wendy came over to play cards in the evenings and we swore we would get up the nerve to head over Willy T’s, but we never did do it.  Willy T’s is an old decrepit ship, moored in the harbor, that has been turned into a bar- a raunchy bar, that frowns upon shirts, for all guests.  The music blasted most of the night, so we saved battery power on our boat and got to listen to their music instead.

 

Well, I have SOOOO many more pictures to share with you, so I really hope you can take a minute to check out the next post!  Jost Van Dyke and Norman Island are really spectacular places and the pictures tell a thousand words…