On the agenda for today was a sail up the Sir Francis Drake Channel all the way to the Bitter End Yacht Club in the North Sound. The weather was, for the BVI, pretty miserable – numerous rain showers came through and the sun rarely made any appearance at all. Malcolm took the helm for the long sail and we had a reef in both sails as we preceded Serenity out of the sheltered waters in the Bight. We did 2-3 long tacks and Serenity didn’t seem to be catching us by much but then we made a tactical mistake. In a rain squall which was so strong that Malcolm’s watch fogged up and I resorted to using my dive mask to see ahead we didn’t notice the wind shift in the rain and ended up losing all of the distance that we’d fought so hard to make upwind and after that we lost Serenity ahead of us. As it later turned out, she was being helmed by Gary Jobson which took the edge off our disappointment. We didn’t join the other boats at the Bitter End docks because Malcolm and I were going to have dinner upstairs at Leverick Bay and because I don’t like to dock in any case. We ended up dinghying from Leverick to the Bitter End because the shuttle only goes to Saba Rock. We had a couple of libations and were looking forward to hearing Gary Jobson give his presentation but were disappointed in that the buffet dinner was first on the agenda and we had to leave. Dinner at Leverick was fantastic, I had their lamb creation and think that the food at Leverick Bay was consistently the best I’d had in the BVI.
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