Marina Cay to Anegada

One of our favorite spots is Anegada – there are fewer people and its not your typical BVI island. The rest of the BVI are of volcanic origin and are “mountainous”. Anegada is the only island in the BVI to be made from coral and limestone. It is really flat (28ft above sea level at its highest point) and without good charts would wreck many boats. Anegada is 11 miles long and has beautiful white sandy beeches.

We headed directly east from Marina Cay then as we rounded Scrub Island we got out the sails and had a perfect sail up to Anegada. We set out early but because of fantastic winds, and reaching at 6-7knots we made great time and had managed to tie up to one of the last mooring balls by noon. Don’t worry, if you get there and cant find a ball there is plenty of space to anchor.

The Moorings charter company gives the captain an Anegada cheat sheet to help with the trip. Since the island is surrounded by coral reefs and there is only one narrow channel into the mooring field, this fact filed sheet was helpful to the skipper. The information tells you to look for the red buoy – that wasn’t a problem. However, the paper charts, and the GPS chart all disagreed with one another and with what was actually there. If you take the trip follow the buoys and you will be fine. The cheat sheet also tells you that the first sign of Anegada will be a gray line which we refer to as the Palm tree skyscrapers given that they are the highest point of the island.

Both on this trip and our previous trip one of our trusty crew members was charged with reading out the depth periodically. As we entered the channel the depth came to 16 feet, 11 feet, 10 feet, 8 feet. We had a draft of 6 feet. The guide book says that the mooring field is between 5 and 9 feet deep. As you can imagine we motored slowly – 7 feet, 6.5 feet. Fortunately we didn’t get a reading less than 6.5feet and there was no crunch. As we were coming along through the channel we were going slowly in case we grounded. However Catamarans, with their shallower draft, were going at high speed – they wanted to get mooring balls, and we had them overtake us. They probably wondered what our problem was – 6 inches between the bottom of the keel and the seabed.

Once we tied up at the mooring ball Brian came over to us in his motor boat to collect our mooring fee ($30 – the norm for the area) and to sing to us about the restaurant that he is from. Brian is a celebrity in BVI and is on the cover of one of the guide books.

We went to shore, had a lovely walk along sandy beeches for a couple of hours and returned to the restaurant area for Anegada lobster dinner. We learned last time that these are big lobsters so this time we split a lobster between 2 people. Perfect portion size.