New Year's Eve, Trellis Bay

December 31, 2006

New Year’s Eve, Trellis Bay, BVI

Glad we did this --- it was fun.  We ate dinner on the boat because De Loose Mongoose wasn’t answering VHF hails from anyone all day, and we really did not want to have dinner at The Last Resort or the Marina Cay restaurant.   Food on our boat is better than either of those places.   We didn’t know what to expect at Trellis Bay as we have never done this New Year’s Eve celebration there.   As it turned out, there was lots of food available there on the beach; and we wished that we hadn’t already eaten.  One guy was cooking barbeque chicken and ribs and it smelled wonderful.  Looked and smelled almost like the barbeque back in Texas.  (Judy would probably pay $30 for a barbeque sandwich from Strack’s these days, as well as their unique potato salad.)  We miss the foods from back home.

Around 8:30 p.m. we took the dinghy across the channel to Trellis Bay.  We were the only idiots who did this, but we felt perfectly safe because we have done this before.  Just had to deal with 3-ft waves across the 2 mile channel; we knew we would get wet doing this, and we did.  Tomorrow is laundry so it didn’t matter if we got salt water on our clothes, won’t have time for the salt to cause to mildew.  When we got back home we both stood at the bottom of the companionway, stripped off our wet clothes and threw them in a pile up in the cockpit.  Figuring that it might rain during the night and rinse out some of the salt water residue.

Bill had inquired at the Marina Cay fuel dock if the ferry would be operating to Trellis Bay for the evening but he never got a straight answer.  So we opted to take our dinghy instead of chancing getting stuck over there with no ferry to return to our boat.  Our daughter-in-law, Kristina, will remember this trip; it was her first experience with boating back in 1997.  She arrived at the airport late one night and Bill picked her up in a dinghy and brought her across the channel to the charter boat that we had anchored behind Marina Cay.   She was a real trouper and never said if she was scared by this channel trip or not.  It can be a little exciting to be out there in a little dinghy.

Anyone considering coming to this area for New Year’s Eve needs to remember that they must arrive a couple of days early.  Both anchorages were full to the brim by noon on December 30.  By afternoon on December 31 it was very difficult to find a spot to anchor.  There were at least 20 boats anchored outside of Trellis Bay, even inside the yellow buoy markers for the airport zone.  They were actually anchored out in the channel.  We would never have left our boat anchored out there.  Of course, many of these were charter boats and charter customers don’t have a vested interest in the safety of the boat like we owners do.

As you can see from the photos we have uploaded, the New Year’s Eve celebration on the beach at Trellis Bay has grown into a real island event.  There were several bands on the beach, ranging from pretty bad to very good.  Crowd ranged in age from infants to us old farts, most seemed to be fairly young—--early twenties.  Probably because so many young people come down to the BVI with their parents for Christmas vacation. 

One artist had constructed The Burning Man and mounted him atop the metal globe sculpture that is in the water off the beach in front of the Aragon Artist Studio in Trellis Bay.  There was a pyramid metal sculpture on the left side of the globe and a square sculpture on the right.  The plan was to set all three aflame at midnight, which did happen; but it looked for a few hours that the plan wasn’t going to come off perfectly.  The winds kicked up and blew The Burning Man into the water at the beach edge.  Eventually the artist responsible for the construction of this piece arrived.  He felt certain that he could salvage The Burning Man and get him remounted on the globe before midnight.  He asked several people who were standing around to help him pull The Burning Man out of the water; Bill helped drag it up onto the sand.   This Burning Man was at least 20 feet tall and constructed mostly out of palm fronds, and it was heavy once it had soaked up all that seawater.  But the artist did get everything fixed up and the three sculptures were set ablaze at midnight as planned, to the delight of the crowd.

It was a good time and we would do it again.  But next time we would arrive in Trellis Bay at least by morning of December 28 or 29 and grab a mooring ball.  Would have been really nice to be moored over there and certainly more convenient with a shorter dinghy ride to shore.