Tuesday 20th February

Norman Island
British Virgin Islands

18 18.981 N
64 37.035 W

We woke to the rain clouds and wind. Our plan for the day was to go to Normans Bay and introduce Rose and Mark to the famous Willy T’s (William Thornton), a boat which was turned into a floating bar many years ago and became famous when guests began leaping naked from the top deck into the water below for the reward of a tee shirt with “ I jumped naked from the Willy T” printed on it. We dropped our mooring and motored out of Lameshure Bay, Rose and Mark were both quite surprised by the very cloudy sky – that’s just not meant to happen in the Islands! Once clear of the bay we put the jib out and managed to motor sail for a while until it began to rain then we had to furl it away and motored for the rest of the trip, arriving at Norman Island around lunchtime. The bay was only half full and there were plenty of moorings available so we picked one and tied up then got ready to go ashore for a late lunch. I expect by now you will be wondering why we seem to be going backwards and forwards between the US and the British Virgin Islands, the simple answer is that the spots we want to visit mean that you have to go backwards and forwards all the time to make logical progress. It also means that we are supposed to check in and out of each as you go, in reality most boats go between the 2 lots of islands checking in once and out once and changing the flags each time they arrive at one or the other. We took the dink ashore and tied up at a dock we hadn’t used before, the Pirates Bight bar and grill was right next to the dock so we went there and ordered lunch and the obligatory drinks, this time Rose, Lorie and I tried Bushwhackers a cocktail which has rum, Baileys and Kahlua as its base, they were delicious! Once we’d finished with lunch it was time for a sleep before we made our way over to the Willy T’s for dinner. Having been there before we knew that the place was just a drinking hole for the drunks on boats but Rose and Mark seemed to fit in as well as we did. We found to our surprise that they have stopped people from jumping off the top deck by fencing off the area where the jumps took place, I have to say I think it’s a wise decision – it always seemed a dangerous thing to me, especially as the jumpers were always a bit worse for drink and there is a very large barracuda that lives just under the boat! I guess those that jumped deserved the tee shirt! The food we had there was pretty good, even if a lot of it was fried. After we had finished our drinks we found our way in the dark back to our boat and once onboard we cracked open a bottle of wine, had some cheese and crackers whilst watching Gattaca on DVD – a good movie for a very windy night on board.