North Sound, Virgin Gorda
Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Sat 7 Jan 2012 15:20
So what is it like here? Well, the weather so far has been the best yet, sunshine all day with only 2 rain showers since Thursday, the sea is a beautiful blue colour as the tide, what there is of it, washes right through the Sound from one side to the other, and it is a lot warmer than the water in Anguilla.
On Friday, we met up with Glenn again from Sylvia and had dinner at Saba Rock. This is a restaurant with a small hotel, about 6 rooms, built on an island at the mouth of the Sound. Today, we had a bit of a 'doing day' as we want to treat ourselves to a full day off tomorrow. We washed the top of the boat off when we arrived yesterday, & today we polished the black mullions and cleaned the sides and underneath the boat.
We had a great sail up the coast of Virgin Gorda, it was quite weird though, there were so many boats we had to keep a good lookout all the time and even had to tack to avoid some - just like the Solent on a Sunday afternoon!
The name of the island translates as The Fat Virgin and was so named by Christopher Columbus when he landed in the Virgin Islands. The story goes that from St Croix, where he actually was, the island looked like a fat woman lying on her back. Now, I have looked at various pictures of the island and I am not getting this at all - I am wondering if the fact that he hadn't seen a woman for about 6 months, the approximate length of time it took to sail across the Atlantic in those days, had something to do with what he imagined he was seeing!!