It has been a very quiet week by our normal standards of lots of sailing and trying to do much in too short a period of time. We spent an unprecedented three days on a mooring buoy at the Bitter End Yacht Club - a large resort in North Sound, Virgin Gorda. See www.beyc.com
The impressive Richard Branson house on Necker Island
We have added a couple of photo's of Annette and Marco missed from the last blog posting. The photo of Pam in the last blog described her as being at the Bitter End. This was literally true but the background was the quite extraordinary and small resort called Saba Rock - it occupies the whole rock and we did visit one evening for a Painkiller. See www.sabarock.com
Saba Rock resort from ahigh
We are finding that the painkillers vary and have concluded this is a function of the type and quantity of rum. The rest of the ingredients seem to be delivered in plastic casks! They sell a lot of this stuff!
But we did seem to fill our days with boat maintenance work (lots of small jobs that have been on the list for ages), exploring the three resorts in this area and completing the half walk/half climb that is called Guy's Trail.
Pam on Guy's Trail
Keith on Guy's Trail
This latter exercise brought us out unsuspectingly onto Big Bay with its beautiful beach, horse stables and artificial surface floodlight tennis courts all part of the Biras Creek resort. See www.biras.com
Big Bay part of Biras resort
Biras Bay resort
And then to top them all off is the very exclusive and upmarket Costa Smeralda (see www.yccs.com) This is the new state of the art superyacht marina and resort. We called in by dinghy but did not get any warm welcoming looks so did not disembark. Despite its reputation it seems very empty with only a couple of qualifying vessels in the marina.
After three days of hibernation we made the major move and motored over to Leverick Bay, still in Gorda Sound, and picked up a mooring buoy. There is yet another resort there and this is accessible by road. See www. leverickbay.com
This was yet another occasion for a visit ashore to Jumbies Bar to sample their painkillers. Their happy hour runs from 1500 hrs to 1700 hrs and is then followed by a local world famour singer/entertainer who vaguely takes off Jimmy Buffet and/or Harry Belafonte with a lot of pirate type stuff in between - it is happy aaaaar in his book and many people attending were suitably dressed in pirate gear for the occasion. And he does this show most nights - we lasted about 45 minutes!
Famous entertainer at Leverick Bay
We then sailed back westwards to Spanish Town so we could meet the marina manager and discuss boat storage. We anchored off, had a very useful meeting with him and then motored to Lee Bay on the west side of Great Camanoe Island. This is a quiet bay and we were at anchor with only three other boats. Great snorkling spot as well.
We had heard that Jimmy Spithil was going to be at Bitter End Yacht Club on Thursday 23rd January along with another of the Oracle crew members, Shannon Falcone. On calling up the BEYC we found that they were putting on a dinner and Jimmy and Shannon we going to speak on "How we won the Americas Cup." Naturally we had to attend so it was a few hours of beautiful sailing to windward to get back to the Bitter End where we spent last night.
Pam on the wheel - Tshirt says it all Smile-Relax-Enjoy
Met Jimmy and had a chat, met a number of very interesting people and a long buffet dinner under the stars! The presentation from Jimmy and Shannon was very casual and interesting - they were suitably dressed in shorts and jandals (thongs for the Ozzies) and they did speak generously of Team NZ. One thing he did imply was that bringing Ben Ainslie on to the boat made a big difference.
Jimmy Spithill our new best friend
Today we meet up with Goran and Birgitta who arrive in from Sweden and minus 8 degrees for a week or so on board with us.
Cheers
Keith & Pam