Day 2 - The Baths and Saba Rock
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Saba Rock, our next mooring for the night, is about 15 miles Northeast. See the daily map.

The Baths, located on the South tip of Virgin Gorda, are a collection of giant boulders at the edge of the shore, through which you walk and wade in pools of water. One small catch: after picking up a mooring ball (yes, one was available despite our late start), we would have to drive our dingy and tie it up to a rope indicating the closest you can take a boat in, them swim carrying anything you need, about 50 yds to the beach where waves are breaking. Plenty of opportunities for another mishap, but even so, it was well worth it!

Me swimming into shore without flippers, the (not so) dry bag on my arm.Dingys are tied up to the protective bouys.

We learned from this episode that is not so easy to climb back into the dingy from the water, especially with no flippers on your feet. But we eventually made it and boarded our beloved Hull 908. There were no major screw-ups the remainder of the day, and really for the remainder of our week. We had a nice afternoon of sailing into about 12 knots of wind to Saba Rock.

Sidebar: 1 knot = 1.15 mph, so 12 knots = 13.8 mph of wind, which is good wind but not overbearing. Our entire week was blessed with good, steady wind and warm weather, in the mid-80s during the day, mid-70s at night. Richard was surprised that we had no rain to speak of. Apparently the norm is a squall or two each day.

Saba Rock is literally that, a small rock in the middle of a channel.


Saba Rock

The highlight here was feeding the giant Tarpin. They would continue to swim in the vicinity all evening around the floodlights in the water. We had another nice, expensive meal, had several drinks, saw another nice sunset, then played another fun game of 'ride around in the dingy trying to find our boat'.

In the morning we dingy'd to the Bitter End resort to stock up on more provisions (a few pastries and beer). Steve was a great helmsman as long as he was sucking on a can of Carib. In the drinking department, he was leaving me in his wake.