Traveling To The Virgin Islands

​I last left off was with us sailing away from what I imagined to be the best island to ever exist. Unsurprisingly, that title lasted all a week before a new island was awarded the honor.
After we left Mayaguana we made our way to Turks and Caicos, where we spent a day before continuing our slow progression to Grenada. Our plan is to try and get there sometime in either June or July for hurricane season, but we want to see anything and everything we can on the way.
We spent most of our day on Turks and Caicos sucking up sun light on a beach. We later regretted our decision to check out of the country so soon, but to check back it would be too costly.
Eventually we found ourselves in White Bay – Jost Van Dyke in the BVIs (British Virgin Islands) after a few days of traveling. I was less than merry when we finally arrived. You don’t know how precious sleep is until you miss six hours of it for watch duty. I didn’t even have to go on all my shifts. No one was out there with us and we were in thousands of feet deep of water, so my dad usually let me sleep for one of my two shifts.
It was our longest passage yet, with little to see beyond the endless water in every direction. As we pulled away from Turks and Caicos, I had my first look at a whale. We couldn’t identify it, but the assumption is that it was a humpback.
We spent our first few hours in White Bay searching for a mooring ball we could use. We began our search in a mooring field with a single open ball to use. So, we connected, spent 20 minutes on it before realizing it was rockier than any time we’ve spent on passage. And that’s saying something.
So, we moved to a deeper area to anchor and planned to snatch one of the mooring balls in the next anchorage, Great Harbor, the next day.
We spent the next day on our new mooring ball and cleared into customs. School still takes priority for me, so I had a good time on that before going in to explore. There’s a famous restaurant in Great Harbor called Foxy’s that my parents ended up going to for a date night.
The one restaurant we regularly went to had decent food. All island food is similar, so there wasn’t anything particularly interesting about the burgers and wings we ate. I did, however, discover that the restaurant was the perfect place to do school the next day.
One of my teacher’s had to call me the next day while I was in the restaurant. The music was blaring, and she asked me to move and all I could think was, “How do you tell your teacher it’s too loud because you’re in a bar in the Virgin Islands?”
When I eventually sat outside on the beach to finish our call, she asked me to move AGAIN, because it was too windy. I was snickering internally because I had no where to go. I was on a beach in the Virgin Islands and I couldn’t move too far from where my computer was still sitting within the bar. I just turned my back to the wind and hoped it’d be enough.
Apparently, it was, because we got through the call with only a few minor mishaps.
We spent the rest of our week jumping from one anchorage to another until we arrived in Cane Garden, Tortola.
Tortola was supposedly named by Christopher Columbus meaning “land of the Turtle Dove”. He originally called it Santa Ana, but the name was changed once the Dutch arrived. They called it Ter Tholen after an island that forms part of the west coast of the Netherlands. The last name change was to Tortola when the British altered the name.
I think a better name would be pelican. I did see some turtles swimming around, but they were nothing compared to the (with little exaggeration) hordes of birds around the water. Our plan for this island was to avoid spending money and eating out, we did far too much of that on the last island.
That rule lasted all an hour before we found Pusser’s. Pusser’s was our favorite restaurant to frequent when we went to Annapolis boat shows during the spring and fall. Our first assumption was that this was just some bar with the same name. It wasn’t. It is owned and operated by the same people. And what really melted our resolve was that they were having a pig roast that night.
We spent hours at our table happily munching on snacks and sipping on drinks while we waited for the pig to be served. We watched as the restaurant slowly filled with more people as the pork was almost done cooking. And rightly so. The food was so good.
After a delicious dinner we prepared ourselves to return the next day for a day on the beach.

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