Great Harbour Peter Island BVIs

Leaving Lee Bay 

Diving on the RMS Rhone was great fun but by lunchtime we really needed to move on so that the buoy could be used by other visitors. We dropped off the buoy under sail at 1245 on Thursday 12 April and headed west.

We’d arranged to do a tour on stand-up paddleboards (SUP) and kayaks out of Trellis Bay on Beef Island the next day, so we didn’t want to go too far down the island chain as we would need to beat back to the east the following morning. Equally, we didn’t want to end up too close to Beef Island on Thursday night as we knew we would spend the next couple of days in and around that area. So, we’d picked Great Harbour on Peter Island for our night stop that night and, whilst the pilot book didn’t give it an outstanding write up, it certainly looked like a nice place.

Great Harbour, Peter Island

And so it turned out, though there were rather more yachts in the bay than we had expected. Great Harbour is, as the name suggests, a large and rather deep bay. Around its edge is a fairly narrow shelf on which it is possible to anchor (the pale blue and turquoise areas in the picture above) but you need to be careful as in some places the shelf is so narrow that if your boat swings on her anchor chain she may end up on the shore. The area in which we really wanted to drop our anchor, pictured above, was busy with other yachts but we found an area close by in slightly deeper water that worked out well for us for the night. Following a few busy days, we had a quiet and relaxing afternoon and then a film night on board with mountains of popcorn.

Great Harbour, Peter Island, BVIs