Our final night in the USVI was spent on a NPS mooring in Waterlemon Bay on the north side of St. John. The morning of 4/6 we had a final USVI snorkel around Waterlemon Cay where I saw my first octopus in the wild! As usual, I was dubbing along quite a bit behind Dave, when I looked over at him to see him waving me over, his eyes fixed on a small coral head. I kicked over quickly and followed his finger to… a rock? The rock twitched, and it had an eye. It was a small octopus about 6-8” from head to tentacle tip. It was not happy that we were watching it, so it moved under the coral, where the fish it had replaced showed its displeasure by repeatedly nipping at it. The octopus went back to the coral’s surface, then swam on to another piece of coral. It was so exciting! After our snorkel, we set off to clear into the BVI at West End, all of 1.5 nm away. That done, we had lunch, then headed over to Benures Bay on the north side of Norman Island, a place we’d anchored when my folks were with us last month. We had a couple of days of calm seas ahead of us and we wanted to make the most of them by doing some diving. The first location was around the western side of Norman Island.
We hauled anchor right after breakfast the next morning and headed around the corner to the west side of Norman Island before it got crowded. It’s a popular spot. There were two things we wanted to do, a reef dive and a cave snorkel. We picked up a mooring ball between the two, loaded our dive equipment into dinghy, and grabbed one of the dive moorings at Angelfish Reef on the SW corner of Norman Island. At first, I was unimpressed. The reef is in a sad state, but once we got around the point to the south, there was much better coral structure, which means lots of nooks and crannies for fish. There were also a fair amount of sponges and corals. The highlights of the dive were the large eagle ray that passed within a few feet of us, and a 4’, ~80 lb snapper that emerged from a rock overhang. We believe it was a Culebra snapper. It was huge!
After our dive, we returned to Lady, grabbed a quick snack, and offloaded our dive-specific gear. Then we headed to the dinghy tether at the caves. There were three caves to explore. They do not go inward very far, and the water inside is not deep. We could easily stand in each. Most of the fish were schooling just outside the entrance to each cave, but two of them had schools of glassy sweepers inside. The cave farthest north was the deepest and required a dive light; it got dark pretty quickly in there. Dave illuminated the school of glassy sweepers, but, alas, none of my photos of them came out. Fortunately, I had video of them from an earlier dive; I just hadn’t yet identified them.
Dive and cave snorkel complete, our next stop was Deadman’s Bay on the eastern end of the north side of Peter Island. We went by way of Dead Chest, a rocky little island just outside of said bay, to scope out its three purported dive sites. The mooring ball for the western dive site was missing, but we found one on the north side and two on the south side. After a quiet night anchored in Deadman’s Bay, we popped across to the south side of Dead Chest with Lady and picked up one of those two moorings. The reef right below us was unimpressive, but Dave followed an easterly ridge and we found the good stuff. I haven’t sorted through those pictures yet. I’m backlogged on my BVI dive pictures. Back aboard Lady we had lunch, then set off for the anchorage we had selected to ride out the big winds that were forecast.
The big winds were predicted from the NE-ENE for several days, so we needed a place protected from those directions. Our other criteria were that it have cell signal so we could tend to some business, and so I wouldn’t lose my 3+ year streak on Duolingo, and we wanted to be able to anchor rather than pay $45-$55/night for a mooring ball. Many of the anchorages here in the BVI have been filled with mooring balls, greatly reducing the space available to anchor. It’s peak season here, too, so there are many boats vying for the same anchorages. We opted for the south side of Peter Island, which is not frequented by many charterers or liveaboards, and settled in at South Bay. We were there five nights, Monday-Friday. In hind sight, we probably could have spent Monday & Tuesday night elsewhere, done another dive or two, and been fine. The big winds didn’t really kick in until overnight Wednesday. Then it was very windy, overcast and rainy most of Thursday & Friday. Hind sight is always 20:20. Such is life.
We weren’t completely idle while in South Bay. Tuesday, the day after we arrived, we hauled anchor and popped over to Key Bay and the wreck of the Willy T2. We’d already dived on the wreck, but we wanted to spend time on the extensive reef arms between which it is sandwiched. We returned to South Bay afterward. We cleaned our hulls. Dave made water, and he replaced the starboard engine room fan and a bilge switch that had failed, which he discovered when he went down to replace the fan. He also replaced the dying fan in our cabin. I did laundry and some baking and spent many hours sorting through and editing dive photos from the USVI.
This morning we decided to head elsewhere. We went around the west end of Peter Island and up into Drake’s Passage and found it manageable until we got past the east end of Peter where it’s more exposed to the open ocean. The seas were bigger there and it got a bit bumpy. We aborted our attempt to check out Cooper Island and turned toward the east end of Tortola and Buck Island, which was supposed to be a pretty sheltered, shallow anchorage. We dropped anchor in 10’ of water inside three other boats anchored there. It is indeed pretty sheltered here, just a little wrap around swell from the SE point of Buck Island, but not bad in a catamaran. We went ashore for a bit of a walk; it had been 4 days since we’d set foot on land and we wanted to stretch our legs. Dinghying back to our boat, we swung by our neighbor’s catamaran. They were about to head over the shallows into Fat Hogs Bay to go to the Riteway market, so we followed along. Fresh produce- yay!
Not sure where we’ll be off to next. The wind and seas will decide that. I ran out of energy to put together a slide show of dive pictures for you, so for now, enjoy the short video of that octopus we saw.
Until next time. Stay safe, and take care of each other!
Life on Lady 