Tortola: Soper's Hole

After our remora experience we sailed for Tortola and Soper’s Hole. This is a very pretty anchorage with pink, green, yellow and purple buildings in the marina and some lovely houses nestling in the hills surrounding the bay. We moored easily, explored the marina and had an expensive, execrable and slow dinner.

When we returned to the boat, we were slightly concerned with its close proximity to our neighbours, but we were moored to an immovable buoy, so we just shortened our line to the buoy. We had a couple of anchor alarms – they tell you that the boat has moved more than you should expect – and we dismissed them as GPS errors. Finally, we believed our eyes rather than the buoy and decided it was wandering.

By this time it was dark, there was no possibility of anchoring because the harbour is too deep, and the harbour was full. We had to get underway to avoid collision, so we cast off and started to sweep the sea with our Big Bertha torches to detect unlit boats and a hopefully empty mooring buoy. There were no available buoys but plenty of tension. Finally the skipper made a decision to tie to an empty private buoy on the basis this was an emergency and we would leave first thing in the morning. In the event, the owner of the buoy didn’t materialise, the mooring was strongly anchored to the sea floor so we didn’t move and everything was OK.