British Virgin Islands

Well it is Xmas eve in the BVI and it is glowing (I think I meant blowing!) a gale. Literally, we have seen 35 knots quite a bit today and have had various glasses and soda cans flying around the boat...
Here is last nights dinner, we had steak! Not on the barbecue in big winds though....

We made our way down to Mountain Point to partake of a dive and also some pull toys...

We had a brand new resort diver today, which makes 7 out of the 9 guests that we have managed to get diving this week! First thing we saw when we went down was a nudibranch...or flat worm as you have,

We took family photos....



Neil picked up a conch and he looks like he is saying "mine, and noone is taking it!"

Here we have SCUBA Barbie and SCUBA Ken, AKA, brother and sister....

A little ray that was down there...

Neil was bound and determined he was doing a Steve Irwin, but the Sting Ray took off on him....

This Ray here was at the anchor, siphoning up everything the anchor stirred up...

We were attempting some split shots, although the wind was so gusty it hurled the boat around and we were constantly trying to catch up to the boat...Still turned out not too bad...

Neat silhouette of our snorkeler in the water watching us...

We had lunch, we banana boated, we snorkeled to the beach and finally about 430 we figured we better get a move on if we were going to get anywhere. Put up wing and wing sails and made our way in no time at all down to Muskmelon Bay on Guana Island....

Where else would we spend Xmas Eve? Maybe Salt! Everyone made there way into the water for a night dive, although apparently there was not much visibility at all....Tonights dinner was seafood..

And we have the 5th nights dinner on the table shot....

The rest of the festivity pictures will have to wait until tomorrow. Merry Xmas everyone, if we don't get blown away. Nice to see our Xmas winds are living up to their name. We have also had a few wicked rain squalls tonight as well, but no one else is in our anchorage.. Most people probably think that with ten foot seas and north swells with 30 knots of wind that Muskmelon would not be that good, but we are so wide, we hardly feel it at all...Go trimarans for stabiliey!!

I forgot my nightly dinner picture last night, Chicken Pasta Pesto we had and they did pretty good considering I always make mounds of pasta!

We were not up and moving at 7 this morning, but they managed to spend several hours in at the Baths, David took these pictures again...

Must not have been too many cruise ships around as there were not that many people other then the million boats that were there...



They enjoyed their climb around there, and we made a trip into the yacht harbor for a few provisions as well as picked up a spare boat hook behind the boat that apparently a monohull had messed up getting totally a ball (obviously) and after 20 minutes they motored away in disgust and left there boat hook in the water!

It is Xmas time so that means that it is time for some of the large mega yachts to show up on our shores...Pelorus is the 14th largest yacht in the world, as is owned by Roman Abramovich, Russian Oil Billionaire and buyer of English football teams....The yacht apparently has a crew of 40 and cost $300 million to build!

And then even larger is Rising Sun, about the 5th largest in the world with 82 rooms on 5 levels, owned by Larry Ellison of Oracle. We see this yacht quite a bit here...It only cost $200 million to build though!

The guests particularly were amused at the pictures of our chinese laundry ship in front of the yacht....

And just in case you wanted to look in Rising Suns garage, there are jet ski's and power boats galore....

These boats dwarf a lot of normal megayachts, like Starfire with is about 120-130 feet and you can charter it for a quarter of a million dollars a week plus expenses, if you are not quite in the Pelorus league....

We anchored up by Biras Creek out of the wind somewhat, and looking behind us the Sound looks quite empty...

This is a new twist on Bazza napping today, although notice, he is still napping with his computer, just a different position! Poor man, on the way up here he had a fan belt go on the dive compressor and the engine within about 5 minutes of each other so while the guests played and had massages at Bitter End, he fixed all his toys....

We saw the guests off for cocktail hour ashore and then I was busy getting steak ready for tonight. It turned out it was way too windy to barbecue, so we did them inside, but I also made yummy baked potatoes just like Outback Steakhouse, rolled in Olive Oil and Butter, rolled in Sea Salt and then baked for an hour and a half. Man, they were tasty!

We have now made about 4 trips into CCT Boatphone attempting to change our packages to one of the newer (of course a lot cheaper!) packages. I mean, Bazza has sat and waited for hours, and the person (apparently the ONLY person on the island who can accomplish this gigantic task) is never in. To tell you the truth, I call this bullshit.
The first time we gave up after being told that we had to apply to have it changed, and go to another place, and we could only change it IF we signed a new contract AND we had had our service for over two years so our last contract had expired. We had had our service for over ten years, so I guess the old service was expired. We put it off until the next time we had a good spread of time off for this process AND the packages they offer new people are just getting cheaper and cheaper so the one we have it almost three times as expensive as the current one!
The second time he waited for well over an hour and still could not get served.
The third time after waiting for about twenty minutes he was told (by the security girl no less as there was noone manning the desk) that the person was not there he had to talk to.
CCT Boatphone are you reading this? This is horrible, despicable service, AND you just put out an article in the newspaper saying that you were "focusing your efforts on KEEPING your current customers instead of getting new ones!" We have given CCT Boatphone SSSOOOO much money over the years and you hear stories like ours all over the place!
Then we went to the banks, yep, lets go on about that for a bit... Just had to make a check deposit at Banco. The ATM was out of order, went in the bank, well they were practically swinging from the rafters there was so many people in line. Went outside to the ATM machine at the drive through, dodging cars, with a few other people trying to do the same. By the time it was my turn the people in the car in front of me walking said it was not working! Went back inside, no line no shorter, went away to spend an hour in the line at the Scotia Bank, and then back to Banco to repeat the entire process I had done an hour ago to finally deposit my one check in the bank. Always fun when you feel like crap!
On another note, diesel was "only" $3.28 a gallon at Delta Dock today. Nice to see that is coming down, I don't have to cringe quite so much when I see our diesel bills every charter.... We took off over to Salt Island afterwards, and Bazza decided that Simeon would do man overboard drills on the way over so he was put on helm..
This is the man...

and Bazza even picked up the mooring balls again!

Speaking of Bazza he came home with pressure cookers today. Either it was a very exotic Xmas present for me or it was for his ROV! Of course it was for his ROV!! He spent the rest of the day threading blue spaghetti through holes for those who are following this procedure...

I am waiting for the day this thing finally hits the water, the man has more patience then I do!

Nice sunset over Peter Island tonight....

and to close off this entry from the sniffly snuffly one, a nice picture of a triggerfish....

We woke up to seas pounding up on Guana Island like crazy! Lots of seas on, which meant although we could do our morning swims, the hike up on the top of the island was out. Could not get a dinghy near there! We debated, do we go left, do we go right, but in the end were very decisive and decided to go a direction that we had not been planning on going at all! Off on a spinnaker run we were to the Bubbly Pool on Jost Van Dyke.
I think we got all the important things in the picture here, all the guests, the spinnaker and the Swim Vacation Banner!!

And what a good looking group they were as well....

It was the upper limits for the spinnaker run, but we sure had a fast sail there! The group made their way over to Taboo...

And had biology lessons on the way, all about sea urchins...

I think Courtney is saying here "but, I'll get wet!!"

The Bubbly Pool was bubbling away and they all had a good time as usual...

Then they continued on their merry way...

To the brothel they go, to the brothel they go...

It was decided that a break was needed this afternoon from swimming, so the answer was White Bay for a little beach time. Some napped, some walked the beach (actually I think I hear that most napped!) Surgy on this beach as well....then we had the worlds best sail hitting 9.6 knots over to Little Thatch and Watermelon Cay!
We noticed pulling into the anchorage a cat from CYOA behind us with what looked like a tribe of people on board. We wondered how many people were on the boat! We did soon find out as one of the forum members from Virgin Islands On Line popped over to say hi! This is another good island forum, that seems to have a very close group on it. I am not a member, but I follow it as it comes into my RSS reader. Keeping on meaning to sign up as there is often questions I want to pop on and answer and then I realize I am not signed up..Sydney is the same age as my sister and has the same name of my sister (obviously!) and it was nice to put another face to a name. They were hosting a party for forumites this afternoon so it did look like they had tribes on board!!!!

They were telling me stories on their rescue of two divers on the Rhone a couple days ago, which we had heard something about on the radio. Guy is ok, but they came up on the deep end out of air and were exhausted. One apparently had a lung and a half full of water and spent the night in hospital. I would think that would mean a lung infection would come, but they are all fine!
While the guests have tablecloths and shrimp and lobster tonight (and they do look like a happy group as well)

The charter cook saved the best for herself for dinner...macaroni and cheese!

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.

This was sunset last night looking down toward Jost. We actually had some rain last night! It has been very dry for this time of year....

The wenches gave me their cameras today for some pictures on them, and since Bazza loves the Xmas decorations at Bobby's so much, I thought he would appreciate having a permanent record of them. Everything should be right in his world now..

One of our infamous roosters that don't know how to tell time and crow at the most inopportune times...

and they found parrots! I don't even know where these are on Tortola, I know I have never seen them anyways.

Today we put on our bright red shoes (not clogs but who is looking when they are this bright anyways?) and a couple of the girls went for the hike on guana Island.

They took pictures of cactus (no I don't know what kind they are!)

and more cactus..

And looking down at the rocks on the outside of Guana...

and looking up on the outside of Guana...

They enjoyed their little walk quite a bit....

They found spiders...

and found photo ops of the boat in the background as well!



While hiking and snorkeling was going on, Wendy took the opportunity to go for a dive with Simeon and apparently that was a success with them seeing turtles...

Someone took a picture of me up on my perch! How did that happen. I asked her to redo it later so I could pull in my stomach, but she did not! I guess I have to put up one of me occasionally. I think I should be losing weight since I am doing charters again this year, but apparently that is not the case. One of the girls told me yesterday that turning the helm and saying "coming about" did not count as exercise! Too bad!!

Our girls are having better luck in the fishing department then many of our groups have. Today between Guana Island and Tortola we (using the we loosely, I only took pictures!) hooked a tuna...

Who bled all over the back decks..The very reason a lot of boats try NOT to catch fish, but they do taste so good!

Yes, he is going to be appetizers tonight, coated with some cracked pepper or montreal steak seasoning and then seared in the pan over high heat and served with some wasabi. Our tuna we catch here is not a high enough grade to totally leave raw for sushi, so we cook it lightly...