Tuesday, April 29, 2014

The Long Way Home

Our original plans were to spend about a month or two exploring the British Virgin Islands. Now with the funeral, we were down to about two weeks at the most. On April 25th we did a short sail from Virgin Gorda Sound North down to Spanishtown, where we anchored the boat just outside the marina.  We needed Internet to help make funeral arrangements with Meryl’s sister Durlyn, so we spent a long evening at a local restaurant communicating back and forth. The next morning we took the dingy back to one of our favorite places in the world, The Baths.

Huge house-sized boulders create a labyrinth of passages, both above ground and underwater, for cruisers to explore.
 Try to imagine a long stretch of what would normally be white sand beaches, but this time a shoreline covered by huge prehistoric boulders — some the size of small houses. A trail of sorts winds in and out of the labyrinths formed by the balancing of these gigantic rocks on each other, so when you shinny through a narrow passage you come out to a hidden pool of azure blue water as clear as gin, with the light dancing from one spot to another. Now imagine all of this underwater.

It is common for 50 to 60 boats to be anchored off The Baths on any given day.

Since The Baths are immensely popular, you need to arrive early to get a mooring ball for your boat. We made it simple by just anchoring at Spanishtown and taking the dingy down. We tied to the outer buoy rope line, designed to allow a little swimming room for people amongst the bevy of boats, and slipped over the side into an underwater wonderland. I took my little underwater video camera, but it simply doesn’t do justice to the majesty of the place. As you round corners and slide through cracks in the rock, usually propelled by a little surf action, you can come upon a group of parrot fish nibbling on the coral, or even better, a school of brilliant indigo Blue Tangs, whom you follow along as they wander through the underwater valleys. It’s as close to a religious experience as you can get. As you dive deeper, shafts of light penetrate and add magic by dancing from rock to rock. Then a wave will break and the effervescence of a million bubbles washes over your body in a sensual delight. We spent over an hour, mesmerized by the beauty and wonderment of it all. We’d been to The Baths several times before and never tire of the experience, always wanting to spend more time exploring all the nooks and crannies.

We dingied back to Spanishtown and upped anchor for our next port, Manchioneel Bay on Cooper Island. We were at the point now where we just wanted to rest, girding ourselves for the long trip back to Seattle for the funeral. Cooper Island Resort was the perfect place, a protected little lagoon with about forty mooring balls, all of which were full by about noon each day.  We basically did nothing for a couple of days, with the exception of a morning snorkel at nearby Cistern Point which proved a good snorkel location with an interesting reef and many fish. We think we got a drive-by from two huge tarpon, but we’re not very good at fish identification.

While at Leverick Bay, where we had Internet, we tried emailing a number of marinas to find a place to leave the boat for two weeks we would be back in Seattle. Naturally two large sailboat rallies, one from Europe and one from the US, were due into the BVIs that week, so our favored marinas were booked full. We used Active Captain (a sort of social networking tool for sailors) on our navigation computer to check out some additional ones, and found one called Penn’s Landing that had great reviews. We emailed them and they had room on their dock (or so we interpreted the email).

On the 26th we motor sailed over to Penn’s Landing, which is located in Fat Hog Bay, about 10 minutes from the airport. We initially took a mooring buoy while they rearranged some boats at the dock to make room for us. Once we got in we found the great price we had been quoted (I didn’t read the email as close as I should have) was for a mooring ball, not moorage. We decided to spend the night at the dock while we got packed and prepared the boat for an extended stay.

The dock was interesting:  two immaculate Mason 62’s right next to us (they are made in the same yard our boat was) and a Tayana 47, also Taiwanese constructed. It was like old home week on the dock. We met a nice couple from North Carolina who live on their boat, My Deere (he’s a John Deere dealer), about five months a year and the rest of the time back in NC.  They were leaving the next day on the flight before ours.

Early the next morning we took Flying Cloud out to the mooring ball we’d originally been on, closed her up, and got a lift into the dock by one of the marina workers. Ironically, it was much cheaper to be on the mooring ball. Security wasn’t an issue since the marina keeps a close eye on the boats for theft, etc.  With our new solar panels we can now leave Flying Cloud with the refrigerator going (saving us about $100 in not having to throw food away) along with the $300 we saved not being at the dock. When you are a cruiser, every little bit helps.

Ironically I'm the one with flight training, so they put the cute brunette in the co-pilot's seat.
That's a very forced smile on Meryl's face given everything she's facing when she returns to Seattle.
It's very hard to leave Paradise on a day like this. Here's one of our favorite places to eat, Marina Cay.
We took a short cab ride out to the airport, had a quick breakfast, and boarded our Cessna 410 (9 place aircraft) for the 40-minute flight to San Juan. Ironically, Cape Air gave us a free confirmed space ticket to San Juan since we were going to a funeral, yet United Airline for whom Meryl worked for 25 years didn’t offer any confirmed seating. Weird, but thank you very much, Cape Air.

Once at SJU, we had three flights we could take to get us back to Seattle. Once we told the UAL gate agents our story, they really tried to get us on the Chicago flight but two guys showed up at the very last minute with confirmed space tickets. We quickly ran over to the Houston flight, but that was also full. Luckily, through help from the gate agents (thank you very much Ms. Sepulveda) we got the last two seats on the Newark flight. We were the only two stand-bys to leave SJU that day. Ironically we ran to the My Deere crew on the concourse when we arrived and had a nice chat with them. Nice people.

We had to spend the night in Newark, but we’ve found a great hotel at the airport that gives airline employees a good rate. We almost thought we were on the wrong bus to the hotel since the driver is a former Marine drill instructor who gives an “interesting” welcome speech. Our driver looked like him but was very quiet, until a few minutes later he went into his spiel. We were on the right bus.

Had a good night's rest and caught the morning flight to Seattle. So good to be back home, but so sad the reason we were there.

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