Red Flag Day

The Bitter End Yacht Club is one of those places that we had read about, several thousand miles ago. Yesterday, Rebecca and I had the pleasure of enjoying a Painkiller in their bar, accompanied by our friends on Top O’ The World, but not before first exploring the infamous Baths of Virgin Gorda.

Like many of our other excursions, this visit was not without its challenges. When we arrived at The Baths we found numerous red flags flying. Remember when I mentioned that the color red was nature’s danger signal? Well that is exactly what these meant. The seas were very stirred up, breaking hard over the rocks and onto the beach. In these conditions you aren’t supposed to swim to shore (you can’t land your dinghies on the beach, nor would you have wanted to try) and in truth, it says you aren’t even supposed to tie to a mooring there. Someone should have told that to the other boats there though, because there were “several.” Anyway, we didn’t come all this way to turn back so after packing the expensive non-waterproof camera in 4 layers of dry bags, we donned masks and fins and swam in. As I am here to tell this story you can pretty much assume that I didn’t die during this exercise. Rebecca was keeping a watchful eye on me, I think.

The natural rock formations at The Baths are spectacular and we could easily have spent some more time there. Perhaps we’ll go again. I do know that before I bring the big camera in the water again, we need to get some new dry bags because it was only the final 4th bag that kept the camera from getting soaked, allowing me to post these pics.

For those of you with far too much time on your hands, here is an 8:30 minute clip of us snorkeling at The Indians. I originally used some Led Zeppelin as the music on the clip but YouTube didn’t like that very much. Enjoy!