A lazy day with just one plan – to be in Trellis Bay for the full moon beach party. In the last posting I put up a map with our GPS track and although it looks like we’ve been scrawling big M’s (perhaps for Mowzer) across the BVIs this is in fact because this is the joy of sailing; it is almost impossible to get to where you want to go in a straight line. Of course down here that could be just because you drank too much rum, but for us it is because the direction of the wind has been relatively unpredictable from day to day. So, once again we set off on a multi-tack course to our destination and thoroughly enjoyed the trip. For those sailors among you, we’ve always been told that you can’t point a cat as high as a mono-hull but Mowzer was making fabulous way on our second tack today close-hauled to 30 degrees on the wind. We’re hard pressed to get inside 45 degrees most days with Blue-By-You back home.
Arrival in Trellis Bay which is right off the end of the airport runway on Beef Island, found the anchorage jam-packed with cruisers with exactly the same full-moon plan as us. Amazingly, I think we managed to pick up the last mooring ball right off the end of the dock for ‘Da Loose Mongoose’ and are currently sharing the bay with 150-200 boats! Yikes! We found our way into the Mongoose where the bar was pretty evenly split between Americans and Canadians watching the men’s final hockey game. Needless to say we were cheering and celebrating after the overtime win.
Darkness arrived but was abruptly forestalled by the moon which proceeded to light up the bay clear as day. Driving around the anchorage in the dinghy you certainly didn’t need a flashlight to find your way. During the day we had watched a couple of locals stuffing cardboard, wood and newspaper inside a wire frame and a number of intricately worked iron boxes and globes supported above the water just off the beach.
This evening the band warmed up and soon enough the globes were blazing followed shortly by a tall ‘burning man’. We chose to watch from the boat as the place was swarming but it felt like we had front-row seats from the stern which had conveniently drifted round to face the party. We even had a pretty good view of the Moko Jumbies (stilt men mocking the spirits) as they danced in front of the fires. The band continues to play even as many of the folks who arrived by dinghy are heading home.
