I finally woke up after a two-hour nap from hell. The boat was still pitching and I decided it would take less energy to sit up at the helm and give my hallucinating father moral support than to stay in the cabin and death-grip my bed frame trying to keep me and my mattress from crashing to the floor. I made my accent to the helm, the whole time thinking how delicious a five-course breakfast would be after not eating anything in two days but some crackers and a granola bar; I could have eaten damn near any thing.

I slowly drug my carcass to the wheel where my paps was still sitting, a bit more cheerful than I had seen him in the last two days. I looked toward the bow and realized why. He was studying two chunks of high rock with a narrow pass in between. I then looked to the stern and was even happier to see that my “Corvette” (our 14ft rigid inflatable dingy with a 48 horse power outboard) was still being quickly towed behind our 50-ton ship and hadn’t been lost at sea during the night’s high seas. The only reason I think my corvette was still behind us in the morning was because the day before my dad had promised to give her a couple big smooches if she was still following us when we got into port, and later that day he kept his promise.

We still had about two hours before we made our way through the Ginger Island Pass into the lee of the islands south of Spanish Town. While we sailed toward the pass, Captain Daddy Paps told me about an experience he had had the night before. He had not slept properly in about thirty-eight hours and was starting to get a little loopy around 10:00 pm when our small red-lit Danforth compass started to make animated faces at my sleep deprived father, then proceeded to give the captain little pearls of knowledge which he couldn’t quite make out. Moments later, mom (The Admiral), walked up to the helm to see how he was doing. Paps’ immediately asked if she was coming to relieve him explaining the compass’ antics. She stopped him halfway through and told him she didn’t want to hear any of that freaky stuff. After he had finished telling me his story, I was even happier to see the Virgin Islands because that meant he wouldn’t be having any more late night conversations with Mr. Danforth Compass.

We had just done our first passage in our refurbished boat from St. Martin to Virgin Gorda and it was an absolutely hellish trip. When we pulled into Spanish Town and performed one of the most perfect anchor jobs we’ve done to date, the majority of the crew was ready to jump ship and never do an overnight sail again. Then we all went ashore. My parents found the immigration office and filled out the repetitive paperwork, while my sisters and I explored the waterfront, letting our sea legs wear off and searching for all the facilities on our list (drinking water, grocery stores, restaurants, garbage bins, laundry, fuel, bar, coffee shop, internet, bus stops and routes and an assortment of other cruiser necessities). Then we went on a search to finding the greasiest cheeseburger on the Island. I’ve never really related to Jimmy Buffet’s “Cheese Burger in Paradise”, but after that sail, it was one of my favorite songs.

Once satisfied with a big grease bomb, we all did our own thing. My parents, Sara, and Tracy stayed at the Internet café, and Alexis and I walked down the shore of Spanish Town, which after St. Martin, I found to be old and run-down. The only businesses on Virgin Gorda are about 3 restaurants, a hotel, a marina, a small expensive market that is stocked mostly with booze, and one gigantic taxi service that transports all the large, sun burnt tourists from the ferry terminal to The Baths and back. Just before it was time to get back to the boat, paps and I did a quick beer run and had our first relaxing evening in a week on a small beach being bathed by an amazing sun set and gently lapping turquoise water. Later the girls showed up and we went back to the boat for a big family meal with bottles of champagne and many toasts (and hooting and hollering in between) congratulating each other for surviving the sail and finally being at anchor. Many of the charter boat tourists tied off to mooring balls all around us peered in our direction wondering why they weren’t partying on our boat.

In the morning we had a long and proper breakfast of Texas toast, scrambled eggs with cheese and sausage, fresh fruit and a cup of hot coffee. And after not much contemplation, and despite the long boat to-do list, we decided to waste away the afternoon at The Baths. All six of us piled into the dinghy and headed off toward the marina in search of a taxi. After we tied her off, it didn’t take more than thirty seconds until we had numerous cabbies asking if we needed a ride. We quickly found our man, JD, and piled into the back of his 15 year-old shiny white ford truck that had red, steel, cushioned bench seats welded into the bed with a red and white striped cover to keep baking sun at bay. He pulled out of the parking lot and off we went twisting and turning down a dusty paved road snaking through a dense carpet of dry, coarse shrubby and low growing trees with the occasional huge granite boulder poking out among them.

When we got to the parking lot my expectations were smashed. We hopped out of the taxi and the whole area was swamped with tourists. We started walking down the main trail, and though it was beautiful, there were so many people at some points on the trail we had to stop to let groups of them squeeze between us and the boulders and trees. The experience was a bit like walking through throngs of people at Disney Land. We finally arrived at the beach and took a right, walking to the northern portion were there weren’t so many sizzled people. My Mom, Alexis, and Tracy went snorkeling while Dad, Sara, and I explored the huge stacked granite boulders at the end of the beach that lay upon each other from the top of the hill to the bottom where they disappeared into the sea. It was like climbing straight into an Indiana Jones movie minus the bugs, snakes, and Nazis. After an hour or so of climbing over, under and around walls of roots, 50ft high rocks, and small cavern beaches, we came back out and all the tourist were gone. It was like after hours at Disney Land but we were allowed to stay.

In talking to some locals, we discovered that the last ferry left the docks at 3:00 pm so the park was emptied by the pushy cab drivers by 2:00. By the time we came out of the boulders, we had the trail on the south side of the beach (the popular side with its dedicated trails, stairs and rope handrails) to explore and tourist-free snorkeling to still experience. Sara, Dad, and I were sweating from climbing on, in and around hot graniteboulders and decided to get on our snorkeling gear and jump in the water. It was the perfect Caribbean blue (a little murky from the wind swell), but the sea life was diverse, though much of the coral had been destroyed by people that had either touched it with their hands or fins. It proved to be the perfect dive for both advanced and beginner divers.

Once we had seen our fair share of fish cruising around, we swam ashore, gathered every one and our gear and walked onto the trail heading toward the south end of the island. That, in my opinion, was the best part of the whole park. The trail was so diverse that it was almost like you were walking through different places in the Caribbean and the United States at the same time. Like Enchanted Rock in Texas, or trails on the north shore of St Martin, there are many granite boulders that lean against and on top of one another to make large caverns that often have small beaches inside that glow turquoise from the light outside. If you have ever read the book “The Hobbit” there are caverns that would make you think of Gollum’s creepy cave and areas that would make you think you were walking through a scene in a Star Wars movie on a rocky dessert planet with a couple of out of place palm trees here and there. The deserted area was limitless, but we had made a cab appointment for our return trip at four o’clock so we didn’t spend as much time there as I would have liked to. But we did get to hike the majority of the trail, even those side routes on the windward side not visited by many of the tourists.

We had a nice dinner that evening of salted baked pork chops, rosemary potatoes, bread, and baked carrots then hit the sack early. The next couple of days were spent maintaining the boat that was only interrupted by a small surf session on a shallow reef right outside the protected Spanish Town Harbor inlet. With our boat and a stunning sunset in the background, we joined a South African guy who was surfing while his girlfriend sat in their dinghy and read. When we showed up, he decided there wasn’t enough surf for the four of us and went back to his boat. The wave was one of the smallest I’ve ever surfed, yet one of the scariest. The south swell came out of deep water, then jacked up on a 1ft foot reef with plenty of large antler corals, one of which grabbed my dad by the neck after a nasty wipe out. By twilight, we had our fill of hairy two to three foot waves and paddled back to the dinghy then blasted back to our ship now rolling in the newly arrived swell.

The day before we set sail, the whole family took one more trip to The Baths, which I enjoyed just as much as the first. We took the dinghy over this time instead of taking a cab, so we had plenty of room for our underwater film and photo equipment Once we had gotten enough footage (and after two o’clock so Disney Land was once again closed), we swam ashore and took another hike around the trail.

Our final day in Virgin Gorda was spent preparing the boat for the short sail to Trellis Bay, Tortola, but during our weeklong stay, the boat spun a full 360 degrees and twisted the two anchor chains together, which made them very hard to pick up. It was perfectly fine with me because I didn’t want to leave, but the anchors eventually did come up to the hawser pipes, once I dove down in twenty-five feet of water to wrestle them free of each other. Then off we were, sailing in light trades toward our next adventure.