Wednesday morning we headed to the island of Anegada – the northern most island of the BVIs. It is a coral & limestone island rather than volcanic. We arrived at the Setting Point anchorage at about lunch time after a lovely sail across from Gorda Sound. The anchorage is very open & quite choppy. There are mooring buoys available, but you can anchor on the outside of the buoys. It is very shallow here too – only 2.4 metres for the majority of the channel coming into the anchorage. After lunch we took Mr Slappy ashore & went for a good walk. Very quiet here with few shops & a couple of restaurants – well known for their fantastic lobster dinners. We walked to the inland lagoon hoping to see the Caribbean flamingos that live here, but all we could see was some splashes of pink as they hid in the scrub. We made a dinner reservation at Potters By The Sea for our dinner then headed back to PANNIKIN & watched boat after boat arrive. Anegada is very popular for such a small, quiet place – especially for the lobster & the snorkelling on the northern side of the island. All the restaurants were packed by 7pm & lobsters were flying every which way! We had a great dinner seated next to a couple from Pennsylvania, John & Nancy (he English, she American) & their guests from Ontario, Canada. They gave us heaps of tips for the Virgin Islands so hopefully we will be able to see a couple of the places they recommended. After dinner the music started & heaps of people were up dancing, but we headed back to Pannikin.
Thursday we sailed south towards Road Town on Tortola. We tried to grab a mooring buoy at Great Dog to do some snorkelling, but they were all taken. We will try & get back here at some stage as the snorkelling is supposed to be fantastic & comes highly recommended. We continued on to Road Town arriving late afternoon as we stopped in a small bay on the south of Beef Island to have some lunch & go for a swim. Road Town doesn’t have a lot of options for anchoring.... outside the break wall near the cruise ship terminal is recommended in our Virgin Island guide, but it is very rolly & unprotected. Boats were rolling all over the place & it looked very uncomfortable. We headed into the channel that leads to the charter yacht marinas to the east & the Village Cay marina on the western side. We managed to anchor in a very small area near a mangrove island which is well protected from the swell, but still gets the wind to cool the boat. We were a bit hesitant at first as there were 3 NO ANCHOR buoys at the head of the bay but we decided this was to keep boats out of the channel leading to the marinas. We got online & applied for our ESTA visas for the USA once we arrived – we need to take a ferry across to the US Virgin Islands to get our passports stamped before we can enter with PANNIKIN. A lot of fluffing around!
Friday while we waited for emails to say our visa application had been processed we started getting ready for our guests arriving on Sunday – Mum, Gayle & Frank. Cleaning cabins, making beds & storing all our junk away took most of the morning. We had a wander around some of Road Town & did a bit of grocery shopping – not much here really. We had drinks on board PANNIKIN on Friday night listening to all the music coming from various restaurants & clubs.
We received our visa approvals in the early hours of Saturday morning. We headed to the ferry terminal at 8.30am for the 9.30am ferry to Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas – US Virgin Islands. As our departure time approached we were herded into taxis & left sitting in the car park for 15 minutes..... then told we would be transported to another ferry on the western side of the island! After our 20 minute trip we were hurriedly but on the ferry which then sat there for another 20 minutes!!! We were getting nowhere fast! The trip over to St Thomas though was great – we saw lots of lovely anchorages for later on. Once we arrived at Charlotte Amalie we sat on the ferry for 50 minutes as US Immigration processed another ferry load of visitors that arrived before us. When we were allowed off the ferry we lined up for another 25 minutes before our turn to be processed by Immigration. Finally we had that stamp in our passports & we had time wander down town & have some lunch before heading back to Tortola on the 2.30pm ferry. Charlotte Amalie is much more geared up for tourism than Road Town – lots of shops for the cruise ship passengers. To make another long story short our 2.30pm ferry left at 3.45pm due to a number of reasons & we finally made it back to Road Town & passed through Immigration at 5pm. A long day to get not much done! We are happy not to recommend the ‘Native Son’ ferry line – pick one of the other 2 ferry services to get to the USVIs!
As I write this we are heading to Trellis Bay on the north of Tortola to wait for our guests arriving tonight. Can’t wait!