Recalling the BVIs

OK, I'm back again. Now I'm a lil' less cranky and a lil' more centered. I suppose it's time to recount my adventures. I'll do it in a pretty disjointed and completely out-of-order way, cuz that is how I do things. So deal with it.

Well, for those of you who don't know, the British Virgin Islands is a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea. Which is south of Florida. And it's blue. Oh, and really warm too. Anyway, this island chain is composed of mostly sparsely populated little chunks of land that jut from the sea like beautiful, rocky, ocean pimples. They were created volcanically a long, long time ago.

All but one. One is a coral atoll, and it's located a little farther north than the rest of the islands. This anomal-island is called Anegada, and it's got some of the world's most beautiful beaches... and mutant lobsters the size of your head! These things are insane. We went ashore for dinner, and of course, I had to try one. Check it out:



Another island we checked out was called Virgin Gorda. On its southern tip, we moored at a place called "The Baths". This is an amazing place. It's basically a conglomeration of boulders on a beach. This may not seem all that big a deal (it didn't to me as I looked at pictures and read about the things on Ye Olde Internets before our journey) but let me tell you, this place is a force of nature to be reckoned with. Looky:



That's me and my darling sweet life-partner bathing in the shallows among the house-sized boulders strewn along the sand. Yes, house-sized. The things were e-frickin'-normous and piled atop each other like some titan had just thrown a Jupiter-sized temper tantrum and tossed all his rock-toys in the corner of his room. I got separated from the groupat one point and became completely lost among the rocks; and let me tell you, I had an adventure of epic proportions trying to navigate my way back to my companions. Dawn had the camera, otherwise I'd have some ridiculous adventure shots of me getting my ass kicked by nature. I saw squadrons of crabs skittering across boulders. I squeezed through crevasses barely large enough for me to fit my head. I sat atop monoliths fifty feet high looking out on the Caribbean. And I swam through bathwater-warm grottoes that seemed like they'd never seen another human footprint. Anyway, to give you another idea of the sheer scale of this place, here's another shot with me and the new fam-to-be:



OK, on to another island. How 'bout Marina Cay? Sure, why not? Here it is:



Marina Cay is this tiny lil' island in the middle of the BVIs, with exactly one bar and one hotel. That's it. This bar is famous for its "Pirate Happy Arrrrr" (get it? Happy Hour?) where they serve Painkillers that will melt your brain and have a conch blowing contest while some dude named Michael Bean rambles on about pirates on a stage up front. It's awesome. Anyway, I entered the conch blowing contest. Now, this is only because I was virtually forced to by my compatriots. Apparently I was full of enough bullshit and hot air to warrant the title "biggest blowhard of the crew". Fine. Whatever. I won second place. Yes, apparently I CAN blow a conch shell. But I was defeated by this scurvy geriatric dog wearing a scraggly Castaway beard and a fake Harley Davidson skullcap. I'm not bitter. How 'bout another photograph of Marina Cay? This one's from the bar atop the island's promontory:



Anyway, on to my last stop on this slightly abridged tour of the British Virgin Islands, Jost Van Dyke. This was probably my favorite island that we visited. Apparently it has less than 200 inhabitants, and about as many beachfront bars! These places were awesome. They were these lil' shanty lean-to structures made of driftwood, palm fronds, license plates and duct tape. We went to two of the more famous ones, the Soggy Dollar Bar (birthplace of the miraculous Painkiller) and Foxy's (which has become popular enough to get an actual roof and one or two walls). Here's an example of the type of night we had at Foxy's:



I have no idea who this dude is, but he didn't move from when we arrived to when we crawled back to the dinghy that took us back to our boat. The party was raging all around him, and he was just passed out in a puddle of rum-drool. What a rock star. He missed one helluva night. Anyway, I forgot my camera when we went to the Soggy Dollar Bar, but here's a picture of Dawn wearing the visor we got there:



Is that good enough? Good. Anyway, if I didn't tell you before, the whole vacation took place on a 45 foot Catamaran. We sailed in and out of the little straits and channels among the islands, anchoring where we wanted to, snorkeling around, SCUBA diving here and there and going to random uninhabited beaches. We dove the wreck of the Royal Mail Steamer Rhone, which sunk off the coast of Salt Island in 1867 in a hurricane. 128 people died on that wreck, and we checked it out like intrepid ocean explorers. Ever seen that awful movie, The Deep? If so, then you've checked it out as well!!! I found a set of enormous open-ended wrenches (these things must have been about 5 feet across) on the ocean floor. The skeleton of the ship was still more or less intact, and it is now home to a babillion little sea creatures. No killer 5 foot moray eels to report, but there WAS an enormous barracuda named Fang.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the only way to experience an island chain as majestic and primal as the BVIs. Living on a catamaran forces you to be pretty environmentally concious, as you must live as minimally as possible to make the best of fairly cramped conditions. However, you are generously rewarded for your relatively small ecological footprint, as the places you can visit on this type of vacation are far more breathtaking for their remoteness. A cruise ship, for example, can't anchor at a tiny uninhabited island surrounded by coral reefs. A ritzy resort is a little too stationary to allow for such a diversity of destinations. And both of these options allow for much more extravagant living than a catamaran does. I believe that the austerity a catamaran forces really enhances one's appreciation for the unspoiled beauty of these islands. Swathing oneself in luxury kind of blinds one to the roughness and grandiosity of an island chain like the BVIs, and I'm extremely glad I toured them in the manner I did. Big thank-you to Jimmy and Klovers, without whom this trip would have been one hundred percent impossible.

Well, that's pretty much all I have to say at the moment about my trip to paradise. I hope I was able to take you there for a brief moment. Or perhaps I was able to get you to consider chartering a catamaran instead of making that reservation at a ritzy resort for your next Caribbean getaway. Either way, thanks for stopping by. I'll be back to random monkey humor once I've been able to wash the blissful memories away and replace them with the good ol' vitriolic cynicism you all have come to expect from me. Until then, I bid you farewell with a sunset I captured at the Bitter End Yacht Club on Virgin Gorda: