Part 4 of our BVI Tour (we’re almost done with the BVI’s. hang in there.  this is a good one.)

December 9-11

When we last wrote, we were leaving Virgin Gorda for a potentially rough ride to:

It was a bad day on Patronus.

Anegada

And rough it was.  We hit some surprise squalls less than twenty minutes into the trip.  The kids and I instantly felt yucky.  As more and more green water came over the topsides, we shut all the hatches.  One didn’t get latched and as we lurched over a particularly huge wave, gallons of water flooded the deck, lifted the hatch up, and soaked EVERYTHING on the port side of the saloon.  The walls, floors, couch cushions, the cabinets of food, the chargers for our VHFs and walkie talkies, and our keyboard all got soaked. Yelling and screaming ensued, and while I was using our precious clean towels and our even more precious fresh water to mop up the mess, I got thrown all over the place and ended up smashing my foot underneath the bulkhead (wall), nearly ripping my toenail off.  So now I was bleeding all over the place and crying on top of it all.  So for those who might be harboring just a little bit of jealousy regarding our voyage, here is your opportunity to chuckle to yourself and say, “See!  I knew it couldn’t be all that great,” (though I hope you aren’t, because when something wonderful happens for you, I am nothing but thrilled and happy for you. Really really.).

It was a seriously bad day on Patronus, and Anegada had even more in store for us, including the most frightening experience of our whole trip.  But first, we pulled into the harbor, holding our breath through the infamously shallow and reefy channel.  We still need to cut our teeth with our first grounding, but thankfully, it didn’t happen here.  We found Anything Goes, who had arrived from Trellis Bay only moments before us.  We anchored, finished our disaster clean-up, and attempted to regroup.  Craig and I took a quick trip to the village to arrange a car rental for the next day.  I’m not sure we could get away with renting a mid-sized SUV for 10 people in the US! The woman just looked at us and shook her head, but we saved a bundle.  That night, we cheered up after seeing Craig and Wendy and the kids again.  We made a plan for our two days in Anegada and we were all excited that we had managed to make it to this out-of-the-way destination that promised to pay off in spades (or “shovels”, as we call them in our nightly games of Euchre).

The next morning, we did Speed School and dinghied in with 6 children, 5 sets of snorkel gear, 4 adults, 3 beach chairs, 3 boogieboards, 2 beach bags, two dinghies, and a partridge in a pear tree.  We then proceeded to put all of that (minus the dinghies) into a Mitsubishi Montero.  We laughed and squeezed and said to hell with seatbelts because it’s a 7 mile wide island anyway.  We found the rearview mirror in the glove compartment and a wrench in the console.  Craig started driving and we all helped to remind him to drive on the left side of the road while hoping that Cow Wreck Beach would not involve any turns.  As we rumbled past the car rental place, we tried to keep the shouting and laughter to a minimum, but we are pretty sure they noticed our clown car as we passed.  Ten seconds later, we were faced with a traffic circle.  That was too much to deal with.  Thankfully, there were no other cars on the road as Craig just turned left without entering the circle.  Looking back, we’re pretty sure he actually did that correctly.  But we didn’t really care that much.  We were having too much fun.

We somehow found the beach with our cartoon map and spilled out of the car with a thump.  We were famished from all the hard work of getting to the beach, so we had lunch with our feet in the sand and the trade winds blowing through the restaurant.  We walked the length of the beach, watched the kids play, and got “pedicures” from Kate and Reese.  It was a lovely day.

On the way back to the boat, we took the “scenic route” and saw cows, goats, flamingoes, and lots of bumpy dirt roads.  We drove through The Settlement, which is where most of the inhabitants live.  It was sobering to see the difficult living situations there.

 

 

 

That night, Anything Goes and the folks from s/v Troubadour came over for drinks and playing.  We had a great night and waved everyone off before turning in.  We were headed for Loblolly Beach in the morning and were tired from a long and exciting day.  But when we got to bed, the wind started kicking up.  It was a warm night, so we had to keep the hatches open for some air, but rain kept coming through in short storms, so we had to keep getting up to close them.  Then, when it stopped raining and got hot again, we would get up and open them up again.  By 0430, we were tired from the interrupted sleep and annoyed that it had started to rain yet again.  We closed the hatches (again!)and as I drifted back to sleep, I heard the creaking and moaning of the anchor chain and the lines of our snubber.  The winds were really starting to howl, which put more pressure on our anchor.  I asked Chris if he had checked our ground tackle since we went to bed and he assured me that we were solidly set and were fine.

Of course, once I asked him the question, he laid there and realized that he would feel pretty awful if we did end up dragging our anchor.  So he got up and moved some things around in the cockpit to keep them from getting soaked in the now torrential rain.  As he poked his head out of the cockpit to look towards the front of the boat, he saw the large, imposing side of a 47’ catamaran careening towards us out of the black, rainy night!  Somehow, in a burst of adrenaline, know-how and quick thinking, Chris ran to the wheel, started the engine, and drove us forward and to port, allowing the catamaran to miss us by less than six inches off our starboard stern railing.  The sound of the engine starting had gotten me out of bed in a panic and I came on deck just as the catamaran was spinning by our stern.  We realized that they had come detached from their mooring, which explained the high speed at which they were flying through the harbor.  If they were dragging their anchor, they would have been moving much more slowly.  Chris started yelling over the howling wind and crashing rain to wake up the crew of the catamaran, while I blew the fog horn and shined our spotlight on them.  Finally, someone came up on deck, but he was so confused that he started yelling at us!  He must have thought it was our boat that was about to crash into him.  He quickly realized his situation and got his engines on just in the nick of time.  In thirty more seconds, he would have crashed right into a boat anchored just to leeward of us.  Beyond the that boat lay the incredibly dangerous reef, which would have torn his boat to shreds in minutes.  After a few minutes, he motored back past us and into the mooring field.

We took a deep breath and the gravity of the situation started to sink in as the adrenaline wore off.  We were almost in a very serious boat crash.  Their boat would have done immense damage to ours, in the middle of the night, in a storm, on an island with no emergency assistance available.  We couldn’t calm down enough to go back to sleep, so we just tossed around the rest of the night, thinking about all the “what ifs”.  I believe that my intuition caused me to land on that moment in the long night to question Chris about our anchor.  Normally, I would just go up myself to check on things if I was worried.  But I wouldn’t have had my wits about me like Chris did when he saw the boat coming at us.  I would have stood there and screamed.  I still can’t believe how he was able to get us out of that situation in only seconds.  The Universe (and Chris) is certainly something amazing.

By the morning, we had calmed down enough to remember that anything awful that happens on a boat is an automatic cool story to tell fellow boaters.  So we got our bathing suits on, headed to shore, and met Anything Goes at the rental car.  We told our saga all the way to Loblolly Beach, and ended up having a magical day.  It helped that they had hammocks hanging everywhere you went.  We all spent some time snoozing and swinging while the kids played in the sand, dragged giant pieces of driftwood around to build some mysterious structure, and even had ice cream.

By the end of the day, we were lulled back into an easy, cruiser, liveaboard calm, but as night drew in, I remembered the horrific events of the night before and became a bit unglued.  I couldn’t think about going to sleep, so I sat up on deck, staring into the blackness of night and counting the mastlights that were upwind of us.  I was thoroughly exhausted from the sleepless night and the day at the beach, but I just didn’t feel safe.  I was up most of the night.  Everytime I heard a creak in the anchor rode or felt a heavy puff of wind, I climbed out of bed, walked through the boat, up through the companionway, and out onto the foredeck.  I would stand there for a few minutes, convinced that one of the lights seemed closer this time, and then would head back to bed.  By the morning, my security was restored somehow, and I was convinced that what happened to us was a rare situation.

It was time to leave Anegada.  We had enjoyed two lovely days on two unique, windswept, white-sand beaches.  As far as the eyes could see, there was nothing but the beautiful, awesome, powerful sea.  We enjoyed our car trips through this strange, unique, coral-formed island and imagined what it would be like to live in such an isolated place.  We also had a fair share of drama and adventure.  Either way, we won’t soon forget our trip to Anegada…