Charting our own course on a sailing adventure in the British Virgin Islands

TORTOLA, British Virgin Islands - It was like something out of an action movie. Silently and with a sense of urgency I didn't yet understand, I jumped off a dinghy and swam through cold waves up to the beach, squeezed through narrow openings between granite boulders, waded across shallow pools, ducked into caves and gingerly descended a series of makeshift ladders, many of the driftwood steps lost to the surrounding sea a long time ago.

There, as the early morning sun streamed through openings in the cave, I listened to the rarest sound on the island of Virgin Gorda: silence. My two friends and I, along with our captain-turned-tour-guide, had achieved the impossible. We had "the Baths"