Anegada - Lost and Found

Time was, sailors were discouraged from going to Anegada. They were told it was miles out of their way… that there wasn’t much there anyway… and that any but the most experienced captain was bound to fetch up on a reef. Many companies actually forbade them, saying their insurance wouldn’t cover it. All that changed after Hurricane Irma swept through in 2017.

Anegada was just 15 miles out of the path of Irma - which had the strongest sustained winds ever recorded in a Caribbean hurricane - but this separation was enough to save the island from the worst of the destruction suffered by the other British Virgin Islands. So in the following season sailors started to visit - and they fell for the island that had been neglected for so long. It led to a revitalisation for Anegada, with new restaurants and bars opening. Now the island is firmly on the map.

Arrival in Anegada is usually via Setting Point in the south-west, the main anchorage for yachts and the ferry dock. Generally the bay is so quiet as to be soporific, though there is a definite ‘when the boat comes in’ moment. People seem to fold out of thin air when the ferry appears, and evaporate just as quickly, though they re-appear on weekend evenings. West of the point, the shore is a leisurely line of bars and restaurants and small hotels and cottages. Each has its waterfront space, with decks and docks jutting occasionally into the shallow water, and you can walk along it.

Anegada looks completely different from the other Virgin Islands. Where they are volcanic colossi, soaring from the water, on Anegada nowhere makes it above a princely 28 feet. The island is even named for it - the Spanish word anegada means ‘inundated’, or drowned, and quite a lot of it is under water, in salt ponds that make for good bird-watching. And unlike the other BVI it is made entirely of coral (its south-eastern tail is ten miles of reef where the Atlantic breakers roar, and on which many ships have been wrecked over the centuries). This coral base gives Anegada superb sand, of course. Blinding white sand lines pretty much the whole island and you will particularly see it piled up into dunes along the northern shoreline. The snorkelling is also good. You’ll see parrotfish, huge barracudas, conch, lobster and even stingrays.

Anegada is very undeveloped and in its doziness it has an appeal that most Caribbean islands have lost now. There was once a plan to put the international airport for the BVI there, with shuttles to run tourists to the other islands, but everyone’s pretty glad that didn’t happen (can you imagine a rough ferry ride after a 10 hour international journey…?). Instead the scene is set by the name of the main settlement. It is actually called The Settlement, as though there was nothing else. Certainly, after Setting Point, it is the island’s only other centre of gravity.

The trip there from the ferry dock passes through the island’s characteristic scrubland, interrupted by just a few brightly painted wooden homes behind white picket fences. Most are new, cinder block buildings dressed in bright tropical colours, but you will also see a few traditional wooden homes raised on stones against the termites. You pass a bird-watching platform overlooking a lagoon, where the island’s waders range (including some flamingos), and then, at a split in the road a small garden.

And eventually you reach the Settlement, a slightly denser concentration of new buildings. Here you will find the government building, the telecoms centre, a few shops and a couple of ‘sights’, an iguana sanctuary and a very nice small museum.

The Faulkner Museum is set in a pretty traditional Caribbean clapboard house, white with blue trim under a typical wriggly-tin double-pitched roof, two timber-framed units bolted onto one another, all put together with pegs rather than nails. It was the birthplace of Theodolph Faulkner, one of the BVI’s founding fathers and shows a typical home from the mid 1900s and the story of the nation’s political awakenings. You can see how life was lived - in the turned wood four poster bed, a rocking chair, coal pot, sewing machine, charcoal-filled iron, and coffee grinders and bottles. In the glass cabinet are the prized glassware and tea set. In the second room, the kitchen and children’s bedroom, the story is told of the separation from the colonial convenience of the Leeward Islands and then negotiation of a new status with the British.

The Iguana Sanctuary, or officially the Anegada Iguana Headstart Facility, is a stone’s throw across the way. The estimated 4-500 Anegada iguanas, a distinct sub-species of Caribbean iguana, are under threat from feral cats, so the facility protects young iguanas until they are old enough to survive in the wild and reproduce. Hatchlings are collected as they emerge from nests around the island and put into a series of cages – yearlings, 2-3 years old and finishing cages – before being released back into the wild.

But let’s face it, we’re really here for the relaxation, and the island has a number of beach bars dotted along its north coast. North of The Settlement you will find two. The Flash of Beauty, an outrageous pink and turquoise statement of a building, sits just behind the beach, with open sides to admit the breeze.  It serves salads, sandwiches and West Indian fare, crack conch, lobster fritters and seafood dishes, to the people who use its beach parasols down on their stretch of sand. It’s low key and friendly.

The Big Bamboo, a mile’s walk to the west on a fish-hook of a bay (Loblolly Bay), is a busier enterprise, but equally outrageously coloured in green and blue, and dressed in driftwood. The large open-sided dining area and gazebo are defended from the wind by an embrasure of sea grape trees. There are also beach chairs on the sand. They serve similar fare, including conch stew and shrimp, and the essential lobster.

The north coast doesn’t actually have a tarmac road yet, rather a sandy track behind the endless meandering of white sand. Eventually though (past the Anegada Beach Club, the island’s smartest hotel), you come to Cow Wreck Bar. This is another classic beach bar, set in a stand of palms just above the beach, an open-sided bar with a paved deck, painted bright yellow and green with a red roof. There are four cottages just down the beach.

It is generally quiet and I was alone when I was there, at the end of a day of exploration, but at the Cow Wreck bar I had one of those conversations that are a gem to a travel writer, with a woman who was born on Anegada. She had been away for her education and much of her life, but her love for her island was strong enough for her to return, for all its drawbacks (you have to be pretty self-contained to live somewhere with less than 300 year-round inhabitants).

I was on the trail of lobster at the time. Anegada is famous for it and the BVI makes money from their export. They even hold a festival in celebration of it. The woman talked of the days when lobsters were everywhere on Anegada - they would even crawl up onto the beach at night like some crustacean invasion. In her childhood however, when life in Anegada was extremely simple, lobsters were considered poor man’s food, only to be eaten when they could afford nothing else. Lobster meat is ‘heavy’, and too much on an empty stomach is uncomfortable, so they were avoided. Which is ironic, given that nowadays tourists come all the way to the island and spend a lot of money especially in order to eat Anegada lobster. It’s one of the island’s main draws.

From Cow Wreck Beach it’s a ride back to see the sunset at Setting Point. The name probably derives from some long-forgotten nautical term, but you still get a nice view of the sunset, over the sea for most of the year. And there you can hop from bar to restaurant to bar in your bare feet, enjoying the sundown on a deck before setting to on a plate of West Indian fish and salad.