Trellis Bay

In the last blog we mentioned the Full Moon Party at Trellis Bay that we decided not to go to. Well later that week we decided to walk over to Trellis Bay to see what it was like. The guide books mentioned that it was a one minute walk from the airport. We had noticed the road sign for it when we walked to the airport (to access an ATM) and thought it was probably more than a one minute walk. Road signs here don’t give mileage. We headed along the road from the airport and walked for about 5 minutes before we saw the buildings of Trellis Bay on our right. Looking to the left sure enough there was the airport terminal and a paved road that was probably one minute’s walk.

Trellis Bay is a unique little village. It reminded me of some of the artist villages on the islands off Vancouver Island. The main building was a pottery studio and a studio for steel sculpturing and of course the usual store for selling the artists’ wares.

We did see some evidence of the Full Moon Party – the steel sculptured balls used for the fireballs, some wooden replicas of the stilt dancers which were full size and some of the masks that we assume were used during the stage presentation.

I guess the full moon party would have been fun except the weather was rainy and you couldn’t see the moon and although we did attend the carnival in Grenada with thousands of other people and lots of loud music and crowd noise, we are still basically “stay on the boat at night” people so we were just as happy looking at the party trappings in the daylight and at our leisure .
Maybe when we get back to Canada we will start a tradition of at least one full moon party a year at the acreage. Wanna come????

Bloggin' On In BVI

So here we were in Virgin Gorda thinking it is time to move. We wanted to see our friend Clive and talk about the boat while we were in BVI so after talking to him on the phone, he suggested sailing over to Fat Hog Bay on Tortola and meeting him there. So we did - sail over that is. As in the other anchorages, there were a lot of mooring balls taking up space and since our charts said the bay was quite shallow, we decided to take a mooring ball until we could explore the bay a little better.

The sail over we no big whoop - lots of charter boats to miss on the way but we had a bit of wind so it didn't take long. The bay itself is quiet although quite close to the perimeter road on Tortola. There are three small marinas there and Clive suggested we touch base with Walter at Penns Landing as he is very accommodating. We did that and he is a really nice guy - there are showers and nice washrooms. We went walking a couple of times, once towards Roadtown, the capital of Tortola and once towards the airport and Trellis Bay. Trellis Bay is where they have the full moon parties which apparently are quite exciting - burning fireballs on the beach, special music, Mocko Jumbie stilt dancers and lots of arts and crafts to see. We had talked about anchoring there but heard on the Coconut Telegraph that it is really really crowded with charter boats. It also sits right at the end of the runway for the airport on Beef Island. We considered going to the full moon party on December 2 from Fat Hog Bay but it is quite a distance to walk at night and no sidewalks.

We talked to Clive by phone and found he couldn't make it to the boat until after the weekend so we decided to go to Marina Cay, a trip of about six nm around the corner of Beef Island. Marina Cay is a small piece of land kind of surrounded by Grand Camanoe, Scrub Island and Tortola. There is a dock there and of course mooring balls. Again, they take up all of the good anchoring area unless we wanted to anchor in 30 feet or more of water, which we don't like to do, so we took a mooring ball.

The Cay has a Pussers store and a small resort hotel as well as a fuel dock. Pussers are world renowned for their rum (I think they originated with the British Navy)and they have stores in a number of different places. Something interesting if you want to see our picture latest and up-to-datest. There is a red phone booth on the dock that takes pictures every 15 seconds and sends the pictures to their website so if you want to see us, go to www.pussers.com/redbox/archive. There is a spot where you can put in a date and time and it will show the pictures from that time - well actually is shows a couple of minutes before and after. You can go to Nov 29 at 3:15:46 or Nov 30 at 2:41:16. Kind of neat.

Marina Cay was the scene of a book called "Our Virgin Island" written by Robb White in 1953 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robb_White) and you can still see the house where he and his wife lived up to WWII. It is now a bar.

We also saw another instance of the "danger" of charterers. We had watched a boat come in towards the middle of the afternoon the day before. There was a guy standing on the front giving directions to the helmsman while someone else stood by with the boat hook. The guy standing at the front was one of these guys - you know the type - posed like Washington crossing the Delaware - giving instructions like "hold your course", "cut the engine" etc etc. When they hooked up they tied the mooring line directly to their boat instead of using their own mooring lines (the proper way) although the helmsman did run up with a line which they used somehow on the cleat.

Anyway, that was just an indication because when they left they started out across a reef clearly marked with a red buoy. They got in far enough that they must have hit bottom but luckily for them they were able to back out - but "charterers!!!!!

Stay tuned.