bvi captains log blog

If you are still following us on our never ending week long circles around the island, we are at the end of another one! This one went very quickly and was very enjoyable! I enjoyed getting to beach comb yesterday immensely. The girls have asked what they have had for cocktail hour several times this week and invariably, it has been Kerrys Blue Drink, Kerrys Purple Drink and Kerrys Starbucks Frappucino! (which gives me an idea for the last cocktail hour to go along with their dirty martini's they want!)
This is not any of the drinks. This was our dinner last night!

We overnighted on the back side of Cooper Island, and continuing along in the vein of "we are hunters, we feed ourselves" week, Bazza took a couple wenches (that just sounds wrong!) into the mangroves at South Sound on Cooper Island (I believe we have hit everything "south" this week!) They were coconut searching today, and Bazza did the he man thing...

and the girls did the hard work of drinking the coconuts! They did not even bring any back for the rest! What is up with that!!!

They visited the conch graveyard back there....

and then we went sea glass collecting on Salt Island. The girls pronounced it the best place, with the sea glass being "cooked" properly and them not having to throw too much back! They looked for Henry but he was not there so they left him some cookies and juices (no beer any more for him!) and after barbecuing hamburgers, we had a chance finally to get our spinnaker up for a run down the channel.

The girls all had on their Promenade shirts, so we took front and back shots...



Then I hopped in the dinghy to take some pictures of the entire boat for them (and my blog!)

These are some happy smiles anyways on the side of the boat.

We pulled into Little Harbor and Simeon tied us stern too so we would be close to shore...

and the girls jumped into their "other" favorite position. In the power lounger!!!! This will round out the afternoon and bring us up to cocktail hour. Hey, I am ahead of myself today, a blog before cocktail hour! Hmmm...I must not have enough to do!

This is my husband! Silly picture!!!

And a couple other tidbits that I have gathered up this week. One is from the National Parks Trust that is a series of photo's they wanted the crewed charter yachts opinion on as far as putting out the proper procedure to pick up moorings. They hope this method will stop some chafe. They wanted to know whether we all had seen bareboaters doing this. Bazza's answer was that they chafed the lines a lot running over the balls after they dropped them and that those who knew how to do this would do it, and the others, which is most, would just get it hooked onto the damn boat any way they could and that is ok.
Here is a link to the PDF of the pictures for those interested in this type of thing.
Also, the Virgin Islands Charter League (www.vicl.org) has announced they are hosting a boating show on the radio! Here is the PDF on that.

I think I left you last night about the time we were cooking up tuna for appetizers, which everyone adored.

We played a silly trivia game during cocktail hour with questions like "how many times did Lisa throw up during sailing?" "what was your cocktail drink the first night?" and so on...Clara our winner won a chart for getting the most right, although the most rights was still only 7 out of 16!!

Steak dinner tonight, always good to have beef!

We overnighted at Savannah Bay on Virgin Gorda, been awhile since we have been in there. Had a good night although we picked up a few flies there overnight which I don't particularly like. We had some rain come in the cockpit sideways during breakfast this morning which made it a tad chilly, and then off we went sailing.

We sailed down past Fallen Jerusaleum to Round Rock

Stopped to see what the Vagabond was doing, and yep, it is still there. Just a bit rustier.

Our fishing prowess continued with the smallest person onboard reeling in a barracuda today. We did not eat him. He quickly went back. They are smelly things they are!

On the outside of Ginger Island there are some interesting caves, we sent Simba scrambling up to see what was in them. What was in them was bats, noisy bats and lots of them he says!

We took the dinghy into the south sound of Ginger for some beachcombing. Since the last time we were there it has acquired a couple more wrecks including this smallish one.

One pelican watched our progress...

We had a great wander, all up and down the beach. It was very pretty!



Lots of cactus around....

A cute little crab shell...

more buoys on the beach then you could ever want. We saw dozens upon dozens...

I went for a bit of a snorkel in the mangroves, lots of schools of fish.

Simeon went on a trek to see if our geo cache was still there, and it was. The container is looking a little sad, so we will have to bring up a new one next time with us.

Lisa also found a crab, to go along with her goat skull I believe!

I kept on looking for a message in a bottle as we usually have good look here, but none today. You would never die of thirst though, as there are tons of bottles with liquid in them, and shoes for all as well!

We found the obligatory weather balloons, 3 or 4 I believe today..

And a series of items that taken together could be quite eerie. We found PFD's (Could not read the name on them though, some were quite old). We found quite a few flares. Some still good (and we set one off and then thought silly, what if the coast guard came!) We found bits of boat, but just little bits, a life raft buried in the beach, and quite a few packages of emergency drinking water there were full. They were all not here last time we were in this bay.



Beachcombing was a lot of fun anyways! I found this strange fish. Bazza thought it was a soap fish, but it was as large as any large snapper, must have been18 inches or more even long. Not sure what it is.

A little Ray was also swimming around...

I like this picture of Margot walking on the beach, it looks so solitary.

An exciting couple dinghy trips back to the boat and then a sunset sail while we ate conch fritters down to Hallsover Bay on Cooper Island for another perfect night! I can't believe it is the last day of charter tomorrow already!