Saturday 9 Mar, BVI day 5, Anegada: Rolling at anchor could be used as an effective torture method!
A VERY rolly and uncomfortable night, we didn’t get much sleep. With the wind decreasing at night the swell was creeping in on our beam. Glen moves onto the settee where he sometimes manages to sleep even under bad conditions, but it didn’t work.
So we wake up feeling thoroughly tortured and determined to move. Maybe other boats had the same idea, as there are only two left in this anchorage, the rest are already gone.
The only other anchorage is off the ferry terminal. Where the mooring field is in very shallow (for us) water. We’ll have to anchor further away from that. We motor the 1nm there and feel our way through the shallow sea grass patches which tend to be 1-2ft shallower than the clear sand bottom.
We find a spot with 3m depth and drop the anchor. But it doesn’t seem to be holding. And sure enough, when Glen snorkels to check it out, although it looks like sand the bottom is very rocky.
He goes out in the dinghy with the hand held depth sounder to see if we can actually make it the last 100m to a mooring buoy. But the depths at the nearest buoys are 2.5m, which is exactly our draft. Given its high tide now, we can’t go there.
So plan-B: with a mask and snorkel over the side of the dinghy he finds a sandy spot in between some weedy patches right in front of us. We have a game plan. To make sure we drop the anchor exactly where we want it, he goes out there with the dinghy anchor and a buoy to mark where I have to drop the anchor. Not much room for error, the sandy patch is quite small. No pressure! But I get it right from the first attempt and we are now safely anchored. After a snorkel over, Glen declares I got the anchor within 1ft of the target. High-5 to me, thank you 🙂
And indeed it is more comfortable here. Cloudy Bay is pitching on the small waves but the big swell is not getting in here. Not yet at least. Let’s hope it stays that way!
We remain aboard for an hour to make sure anchor holds ok, during which time we have a bit of an IT predicament. We seem to have accidentally deleted all the videos with the sailing from Anguilla to the BVIs and everything we recorded in Virgin Gorda. How we managed such “performance”, we don’t know 🙁 Needless to say we are pretty upset about that. So we run Recuva on the GoPro memory card, which manages to recover 10 videos. But the rest (more than 100) are gone. Will try a Recuva scan on the laptop hard drive later on, but no energy or nerves for that one now. We need to go ashore to calm ourselves first.
Out comes the kitesurfing gear and we head to Lobster Trap restaurant where they arrange a shuttle bus to take us to Anagada Beach Club across the other side of the island. Yesterday we met a few people saying it’s a good kitesurfing spot and we want to check it out.
Anagada Beach Club looks very nice, with a small pool and generous shady area around it where the restaurant also is. There is also a beach bar and along the beach there are sun beds and two large thatched roofed canopies where one can hide from the intense sun. 15 minutes later we are installed on the beach under one of these shades and Glen is out on the water having fun with the kite.
One guy is out there too, performing some amazing 360 jumps and making it all look very easy. Glen is still working on his 🙂 As yet another kite surfer goes us, I have plenty of entertainment to observe.
He stays out kiting right through till 5pm, only coming in once to rearrange the lines. He apparently managed to turn the kite inside out and got the lines crossed!
The beach is beautiful sand and it’s protected by a reef which runs all down this side of the island, about 200m out. This side of the reef the water is a turquoise blue in the sunlight, interspersed with small coral patches. Glen adores kiting in water like this, with steady wind and flat sea.
We make it back to Cloudy Bay again just before sunset and once on board and relaxed we declare this is where we will stay for the rest of the evening. We will surely be tired tonight after our torture session the night before.