The wind held, we made excellent time, and after an hour of snorkeling the Baths, we hiked up to a tiny restaurant atop the island for lunch. The Baths—a series of naturally occurring tide pools, underwater tunnels, rock arches and scenic grottoes—line the white sandy beaches of southern Virgin Gorda, a little over a mile from Spanish Town, the island’s main hamlet. Columbus’ “Fat Virgin” was at one point the capital of the BVI, and American philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller even built a hotel and harbor on the island in the 1950s. Just as the Rockefellers were instrumental in establishing and maintaining national parks in the U.S., a number of spots in the BVI had also been designated as National Parks in an effort to preserve their natural beauty.
Trust me: natural beauty was something these islands had in spades. The Baths were like nothing I’d ever seen—an anomalous formation of huge boulders, creating beautiful pools where the ocean creeps in between the rocks. The enormous slabs of granite (some nearly as large as our 49-foot boat) point to Virgin Gorda’s volcanic past, where superheated magma cooled into giant molten slabs, which over the course of tens of thousands of years, eventually eroded into the labyrinth of geologic wonder that was now called the Baths.
Because dinghies aren’t permitted on the beach, we couldn’t motor in and haul the small raft onto the shore, like we’d done at Cooper yesterday. Luckily, we didn’t need much besides our snorkeling gear and money for lunch, so after securing the boat to a buoy, we plunged into the tiny waves lapping at the sides of the boat and swam in. We spent just over an hour exploring, and though the Baths were crowded, we made our way to Devil’s Bay, the next inlet south, and found ourselves amid far fewer humans and amongst a breathtaking mélange of varying kinds of ocean life: bristly sponges that resembled desert cacti; waving green sea fans; multi-colored jacks with black stripes along their dorsal ridges and brilliantly regal black-and-yellow angelfish drifting and darting along the coral ledges and caves.
I’d never seen anything quite like it, and although I stayed far closer to the shore than my father did, I couldn’t help but marvel at the unspoiled splendor. As the pristine white sand gave way to a mottled light brown that melted into borderless gradients of cyan and sapphire, nowhere did the aquatic life seem bothered by our intrusion; the fish and plants simply went about their daily activities as if we were merely other big mammals swimming overhead. There’s a life lesson in there somewhere, perhaps something about ecological symbiosis, or maybe just the permissive idea of going with the proverbial flow that nature accomplishes so well and humans emulate so poorly.
Note: here are some photos of The Baths at Virgin Gorda for reference.
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