Caribbean Capers

Day Thirteen: Friday 8th January

Breakfast consisted of croissant and scrambled egg. The destination of choice for today was Salt Island: a faintly run-down, desolate place with two inhabitants and a beach littered with bits of broken glass, sad-looking palm trees, old rubber tyres and other assorted debris including some odd concrete structures of questionable habitability. Otherwise quite pleasant. The snorkelling wasn’t too good though, so we swam for a couple of hours and then hauled ourselves out of the sea for lunch, served on the beach and consisting of stir-fried chicken and rice (excellent) washed down with bottles of Piton beer, brewed in St Lucia and named after their famous volcanic mountains.

Right and below: Cooper Island

This was the best day of the holiday for Richard as it involved a trip round the other side of Salt Island to the Wreck of the Rhone, complete with a yellow marker buoy declaring it an official “marine park” which is situated at the site of a sunken mail steamer which went down in a hurricane in the 1860’s. A graveyard in a sort of boat shape is located on Salt Island and contains the bodies of the hapless people unlucky enough to be on the boat when it was dashed against the rocks of Salt Island. The wreck lies in only 30-40 feet of water, and is easily visible from the surface. Diving down even a short way it is possible to see (and touch, should one wish to do so) the enormous propeller, and see funnels, masts, and bits of the boat “skeleton” which is all fabricated in iron (naturally now very rusty and sea-damaged). This was a absorbing and wonderful experience, the best snorkelling of the holiday and the most interesting local feature yet of the area.

Below; Cooper Island

The Sir Francis Drake then sailed to Cooper Island, a semi-exclusive retreat where they seem to attach great emphasis to their privacy and the fact that they “do not accept garbage”. Sam stayed aboard while Richard went to shore and took a few photographs. This had been the first opportunity for any “real” (i.e. non-snap) photography: having taken his Hasselblad and expecting plenty of amazing photographic opportunities, Richard was surprised at just how drab and uneventful most of the scenery is around the British Virgin Islands. The islands are not particularly lush and consist mostly of dry scrub trees, plain beaches and palm trees, and there’s little else except sea and sky. The light tends to make photography tricky except for sunsets and there were few opportunities for good compositions in colour or black and white.

Dinner – the last aboard and therefore a sort of farewell “Captain’s Dinner” – was served in the dining room and consisted of lobster with pasta and garlic sauce. This was delicious, although the captain told us that they weren’t really lobsters, simply big crayfish of some sort, imported from Florida, along with virtually all the fish in the area as fishing is forbidden in BVI waters! A curious consideration, that so much energy should be expended getting the fish out of the sea, taking it to Florida, and then transporting it all the way back out to sea again. Odd how humanity does itself these little disservices in the interests of ecological caretaking.