BVI - The Wreck of the Rhone

Sorry there have been so few posts this past week or two. We've had a great week with my dad -- we spent a night over in Little Harbour and had a great dinner at Harris', home of the potent Bushwhacker -- as the owner/bartender Cynthia was mixing the concoction I lost count of all the alcohol she was putting in: vodka, Bailey's, Amaretto, and a couple others I didn't keep track of. Somehow she managed to blend it with Coco Lopez so that you couldn't taste any booze at all, it just tasted like a milkshake. Deadly. I only drank two.

Later in the week we headed over to Norman's Island to the Bight, for dinner and drinks at the Willy T. The Willy T is a floating restaurant that is usually the scene of some really wild parties, judging from their photo albums. (When we chartered here a few years ago, there were people jumping buck naked off the top deck into the water). But we were there for a fully clothed and relatively tame night.

The highlight of the trip was definitely diving the wreck of the RMS Rhone. This mail steamer sank in a hurricane on October 29, 1867 as she was trying to ride out the storm. The hurricane struck the ship and forced it into the rocks just off Salt Island where it broke in two and rapidly sank to the bottom in about 20-80 feet of water. Our dive guide took us through a large open hatch into the belly of the bow of the ship, which was remarkably intact. You could see small air pockets shimmering above us like a river on the ceiling; these were other divers' air bubbles that had become trapped inside the wreckage. Swimming through the wreck was probably the coolest part, but there was such a huge variety of fish and colorful coral that I could've probably stayed in one spot and enjoyed it just as much. We did two dives to explore the deeper bow section first, and then the shallower stern section where we were able to swim between the blades of the massive 16-foot propeller resting on the bottom.

So now we are back in Trellis Bay, and for my dad's last night we stopped in at the Last Resort to see the band again (Yes, they recognized my dad from last week. No, he didn't have to do five shots this time.) We saw Dad off on his 7 am flight this morning and today we are just relaxing and straightening up the boat before moving on to the island of Virgin Gorda.