Like most of the other yachties bouncing around the world, we are peaceful people. We believe in things like tolerance for different cultures, avoiding aggression and violence, protecting the environment, kindness to animals, and lots of other stuff like that. But we have our limits, and right now we’re literally trying to crack a skull… a rat skull to be specific. Ever since we left Nelson’s Dockyard in Antigua we’ve been noticing evidence there’s a stowaway on board. First it was the little nibbles in the chocolate bar, then a mysterious partially finished Chips Ahoy cookie on the forward deck, then the rice like droppings in the engine room. Still we were tolerant, even somewhat amused by our little chocolate loving night-crawling friend who we named “Cheeky Little Bugger”.

But we reached our limits with Cheeky Little Bugger yesterday morning as we were about to pull out from the Nanny Cay marina on the south side of Tortola. We were getting the mainsail ready to be hoisted when we noticed big swiss cheese like holes in the sail canvas and little piles of shredded sail material nearby. Cheeky Little Bugger, no longer satisfied with our chocolate and cookies, has been eating our mainsail and spitting it out like chewing gum. Our response to this heinous act is probably obvious by now. We now have six new rat traps (the skull crushing type) set out in Cheeky’s favorite spots around the boat (the places he poops the most), baited with three of his favorite snacks: peanut butter, cookies, and Pringles. We haven’t killed him yet, but we’re confident we will tonight. Condolences to Cheeky’s family back in Antigua.

So with that problem coming to an end, we were free to go sailing today around our favorite part of the BVI, the Jost Van Dyke area. Too lazy to put up the mainsail this morning (which still needs patchwork thanks to Cheeky), we rolled out the jib, put on some Jimmy Buffett and just took it slow – the distances are short so there’s no good reason to go fast in the BVI. We rounded the west end of Tortola and headed up towards Sandy Cay, which is a picture perfect tiny tropical island that ended up being one of our highlights so far on this journey. Incredibly, we had the place almost totally to ourselves.

We’re now on the anchor in Jost Van Dyke sitting just a stone’s throw away from the very famous Foxy’s beach bar, known for being the inventor of the “Painkiller” drink, a BVI favorite (think of it as a pina colada, only a lot more powerful). We’ll enjoy at least two or three Painkillers tonight as we reflect on the good times we had with Cheeky over the past couple weeks, and look forward to the even better times we’ll have tomorrow morning when we wake up and find Cheeky dead in one of our traps.

Over the past couple of days we’ve learned there are countless reasons to love the British Virgin Islands. With over 450,000 registered offshore companies here (compared with just 25,000 human residents), the overwhelming #1 reason to love the BVI is for its usefulness in evading taxes in your home country – there are almost no taxes of any kind here, so parking a few million or billion in the BVI is a favorite hobby of the world’s elite…. try it out sometime!

For the rest of us, the BVI is about hopping around the spectacular islands in an environment so perfect that it feels like a movie set. Unlike most of the Caribbean, the islands in the BVI are small and bunched closely together, so you can hit a few different islands each day…. provided you have a sailboat of course. Many of the islands have nearby coral reefs, which means the underwater scenery here is incredible and makes us wish we had our diving certs, although basic snorkeling gear does the trick to.

Our entry into the BVI was through a very narrow reef opening on the east end of Virgin Gorda. With waves breaking on the reef on either side of us, and just a few inches beneath our keel, it was a sketchy moment that had us holding our breath. Since then we’ve been bouncing westward with the wind dutifully behind us. The good wind here isn’t good luck, it always blows from east to west in this part of the world. On the west end of Virgin Gorda we hit “the Baths”, which is a collection of massive granite boulders on the beach that look like a Martian land. It’s impossible to do this place justice without using photos. After waking up this morning, we headed over to Salt Island for a swim at the site of the famous Rhone Shipwreck, a 310 foot passenger ship that sank here during a surprise hurricane in 1865. We minimize risks like these on Tamarisk thanks partially to daily forecasts we download, but mainly because we don’t sail in any place during its hurricane season. The captain of the Rhone may think that’s all a very wimpy way to sail, but we’re not about to change our ways. Actually we’re not bothered at all being called wimps by people who died in a hurricane.

As always seems to be the case, our pace is very high as we blast through these incredible islands. The BVI deserves much more than the one week we’ve allocated for it, but these days it seems we’re saying that same thing about a lot of places. Luckily we’ll have plenty left to do in our retirement years…. provided we stick to our wimpy ways.