Final thoughts (Clare)

The Caribbean is a very special place. The downside is the heat (40C most days) & the bugs (billions everywhere), but once you get accustomed to the heat and the bugs start to ignore you, then life is very good indeed. There is a strong sense that the British Virgin Islands will eventually succumb to commercial pressures and become much more like their neighbours. Whilst inevitable, this will be a great shame. I hope that someone has the forethought and vision to develop it whist retaining it's special character; the friendliness of the locals. the very low crime rate (at one hotel resort, the rooms don't have locks!) and the atmosphere of a sleepy backwater that has been complicit in letting the world pass it by. I'll be back, next time with a boat at my disposal, so I can have even easier access to the sea. take advantage of those cooling breezes and explore even further.

18. The Journey Home (Mick)

And so to the last day, which I’ll keep short.

It started early, as we had to be up before 4 to catch a small charter boat from Virgin Gorda to Beef Island. Despite the early start this was pretty cool – the day was just beginning to break as we set off, and James our skipper spent the whole trip telling us about the deep waves that we were seeing from Hurricane Bill (which explained the murky water yesterday), the annual cycle of bird and turtle migrations, the physical capacity constraints on air travel in the BVI, his life history and a number of other interesting topics. Clare has a theory on the type of person that talks like this, but I won’t repeat it here for fear of getting flamed.

We got to the airport on time, and LIAT did a good job getting us and our baggage to Antigua via a scheduled stop at St Maartens. I don’t know much about that island but it looks like a Caribbean Benidorm, an instant reminder of just how unspoilt the BVI are. We had a lonnnnng stopover in Antigua before our flight home so just like the outbound journey we got to know the departure lounge very well. Still it did at least give Liam to update his Facebook status for the rest of the day.

Thats it really - the plan was delayed two hours but actually even that worked out ok, as most of that translated into extra sleeping time as we landed just after 7am rather than the 5:30am scheduled time.

17. Mick's Birthday & Devil's Bay (Mick)

One great thing about an August birthday (as reader HotJonesy1 of Cheshire pointed out) is you get to spend it in nice places. In practice that can mean airports and motorways, but mostly she’s right. Clare’s preference for last-minute shopping means the exciting unpredictability of “made locally” presents, but this year was good, books, T-shirts, music and the obligatory Christmas Tree decoration (a strange tradition).

We had a very mellow day, chilling out at home in the morning before heading off for the afternoon to Devil’s Bay. The snorkeling was really disappointing as the distant storms seem to have churned everything up and visibility was about nil. It made for a great sea though, not so much crashing waves as all the water in the bay moving in and out like jelly.


Mike and Ciaran climbed rocks high enough to make me worry, never mind Granddad, and Clare, Liam and I kept getting in and out of the water to keep cool as it was blisteringly hot (too hot to walk on the sand). We had a lovely lunch at the “Top of the Baths”, recommended by our gardener, Ralph, then back home to say hi to my Mum and Dad.

We did a Skype video call to them from the poolside which was a hoot, though it was a miracle that Ciaran’s enthusiasm didn’t drown the laptop. We then all had a final swim in the pool (home tomorrow), and got round to discussing Mike's upcoming GCSE's results - due next Thursday. Liam's sole contribution was at the end, pitching in with "Hey Mike, bet you'll able to spell 'FUDGE' with your results", which had us in fits.

To end the day we went back to the Mine Shaft Café, this time getting their early enough to see the beautiful sunset. Dinner was good but conversation was drowned out by the singer who had set up right next to us. He was actually pretty good, both as a singer and a guitarist, and entertained us with a mix of traditional-style songs that he’d written and folk songs from the 60’s. He was from St Lucia and the general theme was “life was so good then, now its pants”. My philosophy on life is a bit different to that, but I respected his opinion and enjoyed the music. When he reached his Bob Dylan catalogue though enough was enough, your reporter made his excuses and left, cats wailing in harmony on all sides.

It was a great birthday, I must have more of them.

16. Savannah Bay (Mick)

We went half-way up the island today to Savannah Bay, which we’d been told was great for snorkeling. Clare was first in but the weather meant the water was very cloudy (all the sand shaken up by the storms I think) so we couldn’t see far and after moving a few reefs around the bay by kicking them with her bare feet, she lost interest.


We had a nice morning swimming and reading, not much more to report than that really, other than that we had to keep our eyes open for the deadly Manchineel Trees. There was a warning nailed to a tree on the edge of the beach that described the 20 ways that these trees can hurt you – if you chop it the sap will burn you, if you burn it the smoke will blind you, if you eat the fruit (“which is tasty” – how do they know?!) it will choke you, if you stand under it and it rains it will drip acid onto you. It didn’t include a picture of this most fearsome of God’s creations but after 15 minutes reading the small print the description matched the tree the warning was nailed to – we took flight immediately but were lucky to escape with our lives!

So back to the pool, where the boys spent the whole afternoon larking about in the pool and were just getting the hang of "corpse photos" when thankfully the film on our disposable underwater camera ran out ...

15. Spring Bay (Liam)

I woke up very early that morning which was strange because on my normal holiday body clock by the time I'm awake it's time to got to bed, for the night three days later of course, so I got up and had a swim. After an hour or so I went upstairs and watched some TV (the same old american junk: mediocre TV such as the Fresh Prince of Bel Air followed by three consecutive days of monotonous stupid adverts aimed at even stupider people and made by people who are just so stupid that it surprises you that they don't fall down more! But by the way did you know that if you buy the easy maneuverable hovercruise you can also get a free collapsable grabber? And just for inquiring they will send you a free silent alarm clock! But never mind these brackets have been going on for far too long.)

Soon it was decided that we would have a lazy morning (swish!) and then we would go to the springs and continue through to the baths. (not so swish.) And I said that we would get side tracked at the springs and that it would be wiser to go through the baths first and then finish the day with spring bay. But noooo, not for the Hegarty family! We would do it the other way around and 'see how we feel from there on.'

So we went to the springs: a nice little beach just down the road it is in fact Jons favourite beach in the BVI. We went the day before, after buying dad's presents (for details see the 18th, the 21st and dad's facial expression.) So we went there I read a chapter of my book and then got into the water, which if you've been on holiday with me you'll know is an irreversible process, so I played around in the water. Dad came in showed me a few interesting fish one that had a nasty predatory head but with a body the size of a tadpole.

So anyway i soon decided that it would be cool to build a mound of sand that was large enough for it to stick out above the water and for me to sit on (this would require about a meter's height.) But sand being too fine would not withstand the tide so I began to build the mound with rocks from the sea.

What was interesting was that soon a group of fish started following me back and forth which was weird but I soon saw why: every time I shifted a rock these little fish would swoop down and eat whatever was hiding beneath the rock. And so I went back and forth, back and forth and guess what? Did we move through to the baths? Nope. Did we get sidetracked in exactly the way I said we would? Yes. And soon we had to leave because we were in danger of the restraunts closing and us having nowhere to eat.

So we went home undressed, washed, dressed quickly and sped off to a place called the Mine Shaft (going over a lot of speed-bumps fast resulting in a lot of sore heads) and had a blast. At the end of the night we went home, Mike and Dad argued about having gap years, I watched a little TV (see rant above) and then I went to bed.

14. Scuba Diving (Mick)

I've been interested in diving since I was a youngster, but wasn't sure I'd ever get to have a go myself. We used to go on holiday in Ireland with my Dad's brother and sisters and their children, often to Valentia ("Paradise Island of Ireland" I now learn). We were always impressed by my Uncle Billy, who was very involved in the Irish Sub-Aqua Club, and would disappear out into the bay in all his gear and bring us scallop shells, starfish and sea-urchins. He also gave my parents a plate that was recovered from a wreck, the "Tayleur", that went down off Dublin in 1854 with the loss of almost 300 lives (Billy's story of how they discovered the wreck makes great reading) .

The temperature and clarity of the water make the British Virgin Islands an ideal location, so Mike and I signed up for the first step on the ladder, the one day "Discover Scuba" course. They could only cater for people 16 years or older so Clare and the rest of the Blue Team headed off to Spring Bay. We hooked up with two other nubes and had the "classroom" and "pool" sessions in the morning, before heading out on a boat for a proper dive. Another advantage of doing this in the BVI was that the "classroom" consisted of us sitting on recliners on the beach, while Paul our instructor took us through the gear and the safety info, and the "pool" was the shallow bay at Little Dix Bay

This was the first time I’d ever tried scuba diving and I loved it. The things I thought would be challenging proved to be very easy – breathing through the equipment was no harder than breathing normally, and going underwater (40’ was our maximum allowed depth) didn’t cause a problem with either ears or nerves. What was challenging was trying to do everything at once. Its amazing how much you control your depth by the way you breathe, and trying to do this while “clearing” my ears proved to me beyond doubt that men can’t multi-task.

We got to do our “proper dive” after lunch, when we took a boat up the coast to Mountain Point. Our guide, Johann, undid all my years brainwashing Mike to be a steady chap with a solid career, by regaling him with tales of how he’d chucked it all in for a life of sun and sea. He looked good on it too, young, fit, tanned, relaxed, with his own boat and an all–female crew, but was he happy? That aside, he certainly knew his stuff, in our one-tank 45min dive he pointed out about 30 different types of fish, writing their names on a kind of slate. Best were two fish about 4-5’ long (whose name escapes us), a huge lobster that wouldn’t come out of his hole in the reef, and an Arrow Crab, about 9” across with legs thinner than matchsticks.

The dive seemed much shorter than it actually was, and I can’t wait to do it again, though when and where we’ll just have to see.

Clare picked us up from the harbour (technically we picked her up, from the outside bar, “Painkiller” in hand). They'd discovered Spring Bay and had a great time amongst the rocks - tomorrow it would be our turn.

13. Ana passes us by

There are two reasons why this is the "off season" in the British Virgin Islands.

One is that people like coming here when it is cold at home, so peak season starts with Thanksgiving in the US and runs through to the end of spring in the UK. The other is that it is hurricane season (which by the way led to some poorly-informed arguments about pronunciation and etymology , but lets not go there).

Its been pretty quiet while we've been here, but as Tropical Storm Ana became the first named storm of the season we saw how the storms become a part of everyday conversation, and noticed they were picked up a couple of times at mass on Sunday. In the end the BVI were very lucky, the storm swung south and bypassed us, but we did get really strong howling winds and lashing rain all through Sunday night. Monday morning was cloudy and still quite windy so we got a bit nostalgic for Mayo and went for an old-skool drive-around-in-the-rain kind of day.

"Just like Mayo" has actually been a recurring quote through this holiday and while its usually delivered in the smart-Alec sense, referring to the temperature of the sea or the heat of the sun, there is quite often an element of truth in it. Perhaps that's one reason we like Virgin Gorda so much, the rough landscape, the hills (once you get away from The Valley), the often-empty long clean beaches and the Atlantic crashing in.

Of course, not everyone is all that nostalgic about long drives in the rain, use your powers of deduction to see if you can work out which member of the family stayed in the car reading Harry Potter every time we stopped to admire the view...

When I say long drive, thats a relative term as the island is only ten miles long and two across at its widest, and the roads don't reach all the way to the north end. This is the fashionable North Sound, much of it only reachable by boat, and very big with the yachting crowd. We drove as far as Gun Creek, which we'd been told was the only resort that was still open. In fact everywhere was shut so we headed over to Leverick Bay passing the local jail on the way. Leverick was open, that is at least the resort was. Like the resort at Long Bay beach, this had the pros and cons of globalisation - on the down side you could be eating in any bar restaurant in the US, on the plus side it was actually open and the chips were terrific. You'll not be surprised to hear that we swallowed our ideals almost as quickly as we swallowed our Painkillers. It was striking though just how quiet it was, there seemed to be only about a dozen other people in a resort geared up to cater for hundreds, so hurricanes or not, this is the time of year to come here.

After lunch we headed back home. The weather had started to lift as Ana receded so the views just got nicer and nicer. The plan was to spend the afternoon chilling out in the pool, but in the end the 20-mile round trip and the challenge of lunch proved to have worn some of us out ...