Sailing Takes Me Away....

Or, a day-by-day run down of our sailing adventure in the British Virgin Islands

We saw beautiful water on the flight from Miami to St. Thomas.

 After touch down in St. Thomas, we took a ferry to Tortola.

We saw a rooster at the ferry terminal!

And a chicken, too! 

After the ferry ride, we took a taxi to our hotel for the night.  We were the first to arrive  and we enjoyed the sunset while waiting for the rest of the crew to arrive.

 

The next morning, we attended our sailing orientation and got oriented to our boat. 

Then, we made an easy sail across to Norman Island.

The boys took the dinghy out for a spin.

 

Norman Island is home to Willy T's, a permanently anchored barge-turned-bar.  Girls can get a free t-shirt if they jump naked from the second deck. Our boys made the jump, clothed, but none of the girls needed a free t-shirt badly enough to take the plunge.

First night group selfie

The next morning, we thought about snorkeling at The Indians, but it was pretty crowded and we couldn't find a place to anchor the boat without taking out some snorkelers.  We changed course and headed on to Cooper Island.

During the day, the boys snorkeled and Grey and I relaxed at the beach and the bar.

 

We had a delicious dinner at the Cooper Island Beach Club and everyone asked "Where'd you get your hat at?"

Not a bad view for dinner on a Sunday night.

After Cooper Island, we headed to one of the most popular attractions in the BVIs, The Baths. 

 

We were misinformed at our sailing orientation and thought we could not dock our dinghy at the Baths; this led to an exciting dinghy ride and exit into the water at this beach nearby the Baths National Park.

A short walk later, we were at the official Baths National Park.  We saw this cool rock:

There were plenty of rocks on our walk to the beach.  We had to climb through them and over them.  I was so over the hiking in my swimsuit and flip flops and wanted to return back to the nice pool at the Top of the Baths.  

Fortunately, my friends peer pressured me to continue and the beach was so worth it. 

We ate lunch at the Top of the Baths restaurant (which has a lovely fresh water pool).

The view from the dinghy as we 
left the Baths:

The Baths from our boat

We left the Baths and headed north east to the Bitter End Yacht Club.

This is one of the navigational charts- we are the black boat on the left hand side of the screen next to Great Dog.

What's that island?  Oh, just Necker Island where our good friend Sir Richard Branson lives. 

I just stayed out of the way of all the sailing action and enjoyed the view.

But our captain did have time to cheese it up in a picture with me.

Our view from the boat while we moored at Bitter End for a few days.

We stayed at the Bitter End Yacht Club for longer than we anticipated.  It was just so lovely, we didn't want to leave.

The Crawl Pub, where we had lunch and maybe a beverage or two during our stay.

Photo opp in the gift shop

This is the lobby of the resort.

We found a nice shady spot one afternoon.

Amphitrite, our home for the week, moored at the Bitter End. 

We dinghied over to Saba Rock for dinner one night while we stayed at the Bitter End.  This is a restaurant and resort truly on a rock in the middle of the harbor.  The underwater lights around the rock show all the tarpon swimming around at night.  

Your eyes are not playing tricks on you; that is a bottle of rum on the table with a woman's bare rear end on the label.  We were welcomed to the BVIs by the very friendly manager at Saba Rock.  He told us we had to take a shot of the "Booty Rum" in order to be official tourists of the islands.  All the guys had to slap the rear end on the bottle before he opened it.  Then, J and I were presented with ginourmous shot glasses of the Booty Rum.  The things you do for locals...

Yes, three days later, and we are still lounging about Bitter End.  We couldn't pull ourselves away!

I earned my keep in the kitchen.  The last couple days of our trip, we cleaned out the provisions with hamburgers and hotdogs for lunch.  I did double duty as cook and dishwasher. 

Look at the spread of food we had to eat up...we didn't have any troubles, though.

We finally had to leave Bitter End and head back to the dock.  We spent our final day and night on Peter Island.

 We could not have asked for better weather, ports of call, or captain and first mate.  

We can't wait to take another sailing trip again very soon!