November 14-27, 2012

Virgin Gorda, North Sound

We pulled into the North Sound of Virgin Gorda on, you guessed it, a perfectly sunny and gorgeous day.  In fact, I’m just going to stop talking about the weather completely on our blog.  You can assume that, whatever we are doing, it is being done in perfectly gorgeous weather.  Sunny, clear, not a cloud in the sky- all that jazz.  The only exception is once or twice a day when, without the sun disappearing, it will rain, sometimes torrentially, for about 4 minutes.  For this reason, opening and closing our hatches and portholes (windows), has become a bit of an obsessive job.  If we leave the boat, we always need to remember to close the hatches.  Many times, we will be off somewhere when it starts to rain, and one of us will turn to the other in a panic, shouting, “Did we remember to close the hatches???!!!”  But you didn’t come to read about rain…

We got a mooring at the Bitter End Yacht Club, which is a sponsor of the Salty Dawg Rally (the group of boats with which we did our ocean passage).  The Bitter End was extremely generous and had offered all of us Salty Dawgs free moorings until December 21^st!  Use of their pool and grounds was included and I even managed to finagle (first time using that word in writing. I like it.) a discount at the spa.  Yay for me!  It only took 80 minutes for my therapist to crack through the insane knots in my shoulders- a result of compounding and waxing our hull.

 

It was nice to know we could stop here for a bit and cool our keels (get it?).  We had been on the move since leaving Annapolis.  Although we were at my mother’s house in North Carolina for a week, we were working so hard preparing for Hurricane Sandy and our passage that it hardly felt like we stood still for two minutes.  We experienced one of those “we have arrived” feelings as we looked around us.  This is where our dream started in February 2011.  The Bitter End and Saba Rock were a magical part of our amazing week-long cruise aboard s/v Xanadu with our friends Bryson and Cindy Hall.  We looked around and couldn’t believe we had made it back, on our very own sailboat.  Yes, let’s stay awhile and soak this in…

We had left North Carolina 5 days before most of the other Salty Dawgs, so we settled in while we waited for everyone to arrive.  We did laundry.  Actually, we had our laundry done, which ended up being an insanely costly mistake.  I can’t bring myself to type in the amount, but it was A LOT.  We have since found a Laundromat in the area that only costs $8.00 a load so that I can sweat and swat at bugs while I do it myself for two hours.  We also cleaned the boat (thus the massage).  We got back into our homeschooling routine (not pretty, but I managed to reel them in after 8 days off).  And we discovered the bakery, where we treated ourselves to fresh banana bread a few times.  Get this.  We can’t find bananas (to make our own bread) down here in the stores.  What’s with that?  Aren’t we in the place where bananas are grown?  Is it not banana season?

We balanced our work with lots of fun.  I was so happy to start swimming again.  I swam four times a day: once doing laps in the pool and the other three times just jumping off the back of the boat in between chores to cool off and get some exercise.  By the end of the week, I was able to swim as far as I was swimming this summer (though it still isn’t pretty).  Best of all, the water is clear blue, warm, and feels simply delicious on my skin.  It felt like coming home.  I also discovered the Bitter End yoga classes.  It was pure bliss to welcome the mornings with yoga, overlooking the North Sound while listening to the waves and the birds.

Next up: snorkeling.  We found some great areas to snorkel within dinghy distance of our boat mooring.  We checked them all out, but the kids love Prickly Pear Island the best, where they could collect conch shells by the dozens, build sand castles, and snorkel with daddy.  We saw a sting ray, lots of interesting corals and fish, and even two sunken cannons!  We made up all kinds of stories about pirate battles that must have occurred there years ago.  I also saw jelly fish, which made me scream under water every time, sending Chris into a tizzy.  He thought I was being literally eaten by a shark the way I was carrying on.

The kids discovered the outdoor movie theater at the Bitter End and quickly became addicted to going ashore every night at 1930 for the evening showing.  Unfortunately, they also discovered that the DVD player works only sporadically, the DVDs are sometimes scratched, and sometimes the woman at the front desk can’t find the scheduled movie at all.  Welcome to the Caribbean!  They are learning to just roll with it.  One night it took us three hours to watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  It’s all good.

By the time we figured out the lay of the land, the Salty Dawgs started arriving in droves.  We have a Salty Dawg Rally banner flying from our mast and, before long, the mooring field was full of banners.  We spent the afternoons visiting with other Dawgs by dinghy or running into them on the docks.  We met long-time cruisers and first time passagemakers.  We met folks from Long Island, Maine, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.  We all shared stories about the passage and I was amazed at how every boat seemed to have a completely different experience.  It is slightly possible that ego may have played a role in relaying their stories, not unlike a fisherman who caught one “this big”.  It seems that no one wants to admit: 1. Feeling seasick, 2. Having a tough time sailing, or 3. Wanting to just get there already.

We heard multiple tales of smooth, easy sailing with absolutely no problems (reminds you of those women who talk about how magical and comfortable their pregnancies were) and some who admitted moments of feeling miserable, seasick, and worried that they would run out of fuel due to the lack of wind.  Did we all sail the same 1400 miles?  The ocean is certainly unpredictable.  A fast boat leaving a day early can encounter completely different weather and conditions as another boat leaving a day later.  We left 5 days early and had very different conditions than most of the fleet.  But we all made it safely, and just in time for the big welcome party on November 21^st.

At various cocktail parties, a banquet, a Thanksgiving beach buffet, and an onboard pancake breakfast, we met more Dawgs and really enjoyed the feeling that comes with sailing camaraderie.  At the big party, we enjoyed a delicious meal, listened to speeches by the rally organizers, and did a lot of clapping to show our appreciation for a job well done.  In addition to our free moorings, we had a fuel discount on Tortola, discounts all season at the main supermarket here, free weather routing from Chris Parker, and much more.  We had considered doing the passage alone, but this rally experience was wonderful and we would definitely recommend it.

The Boyers, our friends from s/v Anything Goes, arrived on the 20^th, and none too soon.  The kids on both boats were looking forward to seeing each other again.  We had been stalking their Spot position five times a day, trying to give the kids an accurate answer of when they would arrive.  The kids wasted no time getting back to playing.  We went on a hike together, played at the pool, went

to the movies, and swam back and forth from our boat to theirs.  The kids kayaked, paddleboarded, and used the Boyer’s sailing dinghy.  We flip-flopped each night, letting the kids play on one boat while the adults had cocktails on the other boat.  Tough life, I know.

 

 

On Thanksgiving, we spent the day together with the Boyers, going to the Prickly Pear Island beach to see the other Salty Dawgs before returning to our boat for Thanksgiving Dinner.  I have to hand it to us for managing a full, authentic Thanksgiving Dinner, complete with Wendy’s homemade cranberry sauce and turkey (which sailed all the way here from the States with them!).  We had an amazing time together and are all so grateful for our new friendship.

Over several nights of cocktails, we devised a plan to tour the rest of the British Virgin Islands together and set about finishing boat projects, doing more laundry, and getting groceries, in between more boatschooling and swimming.  In our next post, I will post bonus pics from our first few weeks in Virgin Gorda.  Thanks as always for voyaging along with us!