Our bay on Norman’s Island was extremely quiet by BVI standards so we decided to stay an extra day and explore the island. There are tracks over the island that make it fairly accessible, though it’s a bit of a scramble to access them. We walked over the ‘The Bight’, two bays down, for a coffee and to see how the other half live. Our little bay had three boats at anchor (top picture) – The Bight has moorings for at least 100 (middle picture). The Bight is the bay featured in Treasure Island (our regular readers may remember that several months ago we had lunch in a tavern featured in the same book) ; it has a restaurant (the Pirate’s Lair) and, more importantly for its visitors, a bar selling Painkillers, the BVI speciality. We are realising that all the popular bays for the charter fleet have a bar.

We had a lovely encounter with a local chap on Norman’s Island. We were walking back from The Bight and we found a vegetable garden being carved out of the hillside (bottom picture). The chap has done an amazing job of creating this garden and is hoping to sell his produce to the restaurant once it is up to full production. He proudly showed us his herbs, squashes, okra (look like hollyhocks), corn and other produce that all seem to be growing well in the climate. As we were saying goodbye he vanished into his shade house, to emerge with okra seeds, a lemongrass root and a little potted mint seedling – saying that if you live on a boat, you need to have plants to grow. We’ll give it a good try – though the okra may be pushing it at bit.

Anyway; we left Norman’s in the afternoon and headed over to Peter Island. This was all new ground as we didn’t visit here last time we came through. We dropped anchor in Great Harbour, very wide and deep with a large number of charter cats on moorings, this time with a floating bar anchored in the bay. Not too much to keep us there so the following morning we sailed over to Anegada – the northernmost of the BVIs – hit by a vicious squall as we left Peter, but then enjoying a really fast trade wind reach. Anegada used to be one of those ‘there be dragons’ places, ringed by scary reefs. Now there is a buoyed entrance channel, several bars and loads of moorings – and it is so popular that you have to book your mooring online. There must be 60+ cats on moorings over here as well. Boats seem to move early to get the best spots, and most of the fleet will change out at around 10am. Given how depleted the charter fleet was here after the hurricane last time we came through, it has made an amazing recovery.

Charter boats tend to have a minimum of technical equipment - we have noticed that the liveaboard cruisers tend to have wind generators, spare fuel cans and radar whilst the charter cats have large inflatable pink flamingos. I think I fancy one of these for Barracuda.