Meeting friends...on trails...and a Pirate

Karen enjoying the scenery at Bitter End Yacht Club

North Sound in Virgin Gorda has so many wonderful sights and fun things to do...it's hard to know where to start when sharing it with you. There's the Bitter End Yacht Club, Saba Rock, Biras Creek Resort, Leverick Bay Resort, entertainment, great restaurants, as well as a number of different small islands and bays to poke your nose around.

We arrived in the afternoon and anchored our boat right in front of "Plane to Sea", the sailboat we had gone to St. Maarten on last year. Jim and Connie were getting ready to head over to St. Maarten again (early am next day,) although they admitted it would probably not be in the record time we all had together. They invited us over to Saba Rock for happy hour with some of their other friends, so we hussled up, as happy hour was almost at halftime. Karen and I can't resist a bargain...$2.50 rum punches, painkillers and Carib beers! Yeah, I know...you're all thinking I'm nuts to think that's a bargain, but hey...it is for this part of the planet.

We dinghied over to Saba and squeezed our way into a slot at the dock. There must have been 30 dinghies tied up...seems the Saba Rock happy hour is very popular with a lot of sailors and resort guests. Anyway, we spotted the party at the end of the bar, grabbed some extra chairs and started to sit down. About that time, we spotted some other friends we had just recently made, Bruce and Emmy. We invited them over to join the rest of us, and boy-howdy...we all had a good time. It is always amazing to us how easy it is to strike up conversations and friendships with boaters!

Bruce and Emmy are from Vancouver Island, British Columbia and are here enjoying their newly purchased boat "Off Island." It is a rather unique boat...a Freedom 38 sailboat. What makes it unique is that the mast is free-standing...no shrouds or stays (the guywires used on most sailboats to hold up the mast.)

Off Island
Look, Ma! No wires to trip over and hang up in the trees

Karen and I got up at 6am the next day and said our farewells to Jim and Connie. They figured to arrive in St. Maarten by 9pm...15 hours of motorsailing. They texted us later to let us know they arrived about 8pm. Not too bad.

Later in the day, we met Bruce and Emmy for a hike on the mountain above Bitter End Yacht Club. So nice to stretch our legs and get some exercise.

On the trail, looking North.
That's the Atlantic Ocean...next landfall,
Anegada reef. If you miss the reef, then it's Greenland.

Emmy, Karen and Bruce

Looking down into Deep Bay

Hey Ken...another Aruban dragon!

Caribbean pink flamingos on a salt pond, Prickly Pear Island

We headed across the sound to Leverick Bay Resort to introduce Bruce and Emmy to the "Pirate Michael Beans" show. We highly recommend his show to anyone, especially those with kids. He is quite popular...it's possible to see about 2000 different youtube videos of his performances (we even have one.)

The four of us sat at our table on the beach, shoes off and toes in the sand, listening to Michael play the music. There were about 60 people at his show that night, with all of the beach tables taken and most of the gazebos above the beach full also. Bruce attempted to beat the competition in the conch blowing contest while Karen was one of the winners of the "name that pirate" competition...Emmy and I cheered them on. Then everyone got up and danced the night away.

Bruce tried his luck at the conch horn blowing contest

Who's the most famous pirate of them all?

Emmy and Bruce dancing under the stars
in the Caribbean sand

Goat for a boat?

Karen and I anchored at Haulover Bay. The bay sits on the western shore of Cooper Island, along a narrow strip of land that has some history. There is some historical evidence that shows this narrow, low-lying section of the island was used for neer-do-wells to escape larger official-types by dragging their small boats over the island to the other side and escape, while the large vessels had to go around.

The anchorage has really good holding (a nice sandy bottom that holds anchors well.) It isn''t a very nice place to be when the wind is ESE, though, as the waves (driven by the winds) wrap around the southern end of Cooper Island and turn northward into the bay. These waves make the boat rock side to side like an amusement ride. It would be an outstanding anchorage if the wind was NE, though.

Before leaving for smoother waters, we took the dinghy to the shore. A local man had also landed his small boat on shore, but headed off toward the interior of the island through the brush. Very suspicious, indeed! We headed over the narrow section to the other shoreline about 100' away to check out the scenery. It's unbelievable the amount of flotsam/jetsam (floating debris) that has accumulated on some of the shores; we've seen boat parts (from whole boats, I guess,) countless plastic bottles, tennis shoes, flip flops, bits and pieces of fishing net and even surfboards. This shoreline was no different except for a goat...a little tiny goat about 50' away, that was looking for mama. Thinking it would be fun to see what would happen, I made a couple of bleats like I thought a goat sounded like. The goat ran to us as fast as it could, bleating all the way. Just great! Now what do we do. I picked the little one up and it acted like it was in goat heaven. Or maybe it was just hungry. We looked all over the area for mama, but no sound was heard except of the local man tramping through the brush, rattling a plastic bucket. Karen suggested taking the little goat over to the local man and see if he had any ideas, so off I went looking for him. Nope, Karen stayed put next to the shore...she wasn't tramping around in the bug-infested brush to look for a possible show-down with a local drug-lord tending his "ganja" crop (marijuana.) I found the guy, finally, walking around dropping what appeared to be rocks into his buckets. He was put in charge of the little goat, assuring me that the mama was around somewhere, and the goats belonged to his family anyway. The rocks he was dropping into the bucket?...hermit crabs...I have no idea what he was going to do with them...surely, he wasn't going to eat them. Maybe he collects them and sells them to an exporter that, in turn, ships them out to pet stores. A pretty weird way to make a living, if that's what he was doing. And, no, we didn't see any "ganja."

Either this little one has really poor vision
or my goat calling skills are superb

I was trying to figure out how to make a goat on
a boat work...I could have called it "Billy" or "Billie"

AWWWW!

The little one still had a dried umbilical attached

Karen has some ammunition to use on me some day if she says I sound like an "old goat."

Percy Chubb's former playground + cool fishy stuff

Ahh, Super Bowl Sunday...here's a nice joke to acknowledge the event:

A man had great tickets for the Super Bowl near the 50yd line.

As he sits down, another man comes down and asks if anyone is sitting in the empty seat next to him.

"No," he says. "The seat is empty."

"This is incredible!" says the other man. "Who in their right mind would have a seat like this for the Super Bowl, the biggest sporting event, and not use it?"

"Well, actually, the seat belongs to me. My wife was supposed to come with me, but she passed away. This is the first Super Bowl we haven't been to together since we got married."

"Oh ... I'm sorry to hear that. That's terrible. But couldn't you find someone else, a friend or relative, or even a neighbor to take the seat?"

 
The man shakes his head. "No. They're all at the funeral."

Maybe next year we can all say...

Go Cowboys!

Anyway,

I've written about this place before in the blog, but here's some background information about it...like my dad always says: "It's a poor day when you don't learn something new!"

Percy Chubb purchased the land many years ago and built a home on top of the hill just east of Little Harbor on Peter Island. He was the 3rd generation owner of Chubb Corporation, an international marine insurance company. The home appears to have been abandoned for the last 30 years or so and is in severe disrepair. I don't think it will be resurrected from the dead...another casualty of the climate, termites and plant growth. I am not sure who owns the property now, but it's too bad it hasn't been rebuilt...the view from here during it's early years must have been spectacular. The expense and effort that went into the construction and development of the property must have been tremendous. 

Fruit pods of a tree on the property, possibly a tamarind tree?
They are about 12" long with red on the inside and white seeds .

Sue and I are looking at a portion of the ruins of the house

Toddy and I are standing in the doorway to what
must have been the great room...the floor and beams
holding it up are so rotten, we don't dare go in!

Here's what we were after...hermit crabs. We found 4 really
nice ones to take back to grandson Tomas for pets.

Yes, Karen was present and accounted for on this trip...she took the pictures!

The following pictures are of some of the tile murals that are still left on the buildings.

This mural is still fairly intact, showing various flowery stuff

This one has been damaged by vandals. It depicts a
unicorn or horse with rider and other animals. There appears to be a
devil or bat-like creature being crushed underneath.



This was on an outbuilding, with some tiles of fish



Speaking of fish...here's some of the recent pics of things that swim under our boat:

This is the extremely rare variety of the yellow tape eel!
Ok...so here's the truth...it's a yellow
marker used to show locations of the fish below...

A lionfish that belongs in the Pacific Ocean...not in the Atlantic...where it
isn't welcome. We mark them so official lionfish
killers can do their job. We have a video on the link, but
only those not in the US can view it...something to do with copyright
 infringement

A spotted drum, adult version, about 8" long

This is a blackfin tuna, about 24" long. It
jumped right into the back of our boat, surprising
Karen and me. It appeared to be a friendly fish, so we asked him/her
to stay for dinner and wine.

 

Mmmmm...a Caribbean spiny lobster. We've invited his
relatives over for dinner, but decided to just say hi to this one.

This is an example of a non-swimming version of stag-horn coral.
Not very friendly looking either.

A southern stingray, searching for food, with his buddy
fish (barjack ?) waiting for something to get kicked up.

A couple of flamingo tongue snails dining on a common fan coral, slowly.

We all agree, it might be agony to put your knee on a sea anemone