AFTER THE STORM
We’ve never seen so few boats at the Baths
At 0730 on the morning of December 6, three months to the day after Hurricane Irma’s eye tracked across the British Virgin Islands, I clambered up into the helm station of our Moorings 4500, stretched and looked across at the white sand beach of Great Harbour on Jost van Dyke. From a distance, we could see that the pretty yellow church had lost its roof. The bright stretch of white sand beach looked good, though undeniably different—the tall palm trees that used to shade the beach either gone, broken short or still lacking fronds stripped by the ferocious winds that also drove ashore the mountainous seas that had ravaged the beachfront.
We’d arrived the previous afternoon, and as we approached the dinghy dock at Foxy’s Tamarind Bar we were prepared for the worst. But Foxy’s looked oddly unscathed, and indeed it was, perhaps by virtue of its location in the corner of the bay—the sea had marched in, soaked everything it could reach and then retreated, leaving the wooden structure mostly intact, along with the flags, T-shirts and hundreds of other items left there by visiting sailors over the years. All the scene lacked was a few dozen raucous yachties propping up the bar.
Others hadn’t been so lucky. The main road along the beach front was still foot-deep in sand, and little was left of most of the small restaurants that served the sailing and tourist trade. Not that there was much of that; there were only three other boats on the mooring balls out in the harbour as we’d
